the claims of algae biofuel companies get ahead of the science

Ditto the engineering side.  People with grand ideas really must be required to first do the whole nine yards on the laboratory scale, and then move to a small prototype, before going to full-scale. Get competent, independent reviews of results at each stage. Sadly, this logical development approach is generally ignored.

Giving big bucks to someone who hasn’t figured things 0ut fully on the laboratory scale is pure folly for something like this. Fund the university people, fine–that at least helps train some students. But please don’t be throwing my tax money away on full-scale installations using unproven approaches.

There are a number of other fundamental factors being missed here, besides requiring logical development steps. In addition to many problems noted in the Times article, algae (and the new darling, cyanobacteria) are mostly water, and the useful types of compounds (i.e., “oils” or fats) these bugs can produce are miscible with water within and without the cells that produce them. Separating useful compounds from that water requires no small effort, and will also result in wastes that must be dealt with. We’re talking about of a life-cycle analysis here, along with important thermodynamic considerations.

OK, enough said. So long as money is available for this sort of thing, there will be people with proposals at the ready for taking it. Just recognize that most research proposals and business plans for such approaches suffer from, for want of a better term, “puffery.” Puffery, as I understand it, is a legal term for such things as advertisements. There’s puffery and then there’s exaggeration on the way to outright lying. Those who don’t fully understand what they are talking about are not lying, are they? They’re just exaggerating.

One reason I’m dubious is that we’ve yet to see a proper demonstration of the feasibility of getting oil from algae. Given that sewage sludge is a much more complicated beast, I don’t see its promise as a source of energy.

We are told that a researcher at Temple University, who is a geologist, says that

cell membrane of these microorganisms is a major component of sewage sludge and is composed primarily of phospholipids. It is estimated at 24% to 25% of dry mass of the cell and yields about 7% oil from the dried secondary sludge. Other studies have demonstrated that up to 36.8 wt % of the dry sludge is comprised of fatty acids and steroids

As has been also noted, algae can have as much as 30 percent (some claim more) of its solid mass as oil.

But, again, oil from algae, despite big government bucks, has yet to be demonstrated as being feasible. Oil from algae has added complications, such as feeding enough carbon dioxide on a large enough scale to make algae grow quickly, as well as waste disposal issues (which may not be receiving enough attention). Oil from sludge will have waste products to deal with, as well.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We need to keep up the research on these things. But we ought not lose sight of the fact that research is often talked up a lot in order to help garner funding. And, more importantly, we need to be focusing on what we know can work in reducing our dependence on foreign oil: namely, building effective public transportation networks tied to appropriate land-use planning.

The algae industry is on a tear, crying crocodile tears about tax incentives. Thus we see them as having received big bucks already (as but one example: a $50 million grant plus about $50 million in loan guarantees for a facility, as described here), yet they are lobbying hard now for more in the form of preferred tax treatment (discussed here).

This is not an industry that should need huge amounts of government money, if it really has something viable. They could readily develop testing protocols for their approaches, and then prove them out in a logical sequence (lab, pilot, prototype, full-scale).  If results were good, people would be lining up to invest. Instead, this industry is attempting to grow and survive unnecessarily on government largess. That they justify government support as creating jobs only takes things so far. The money could produce jobs in other areas, such as public transportation.

There’s an important precedent for doing independent evaluations of such technologies. The Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation (SITE) program was established to evaluate hazardous waste treatment approaches. As noted on the SITE website:

The SITE program’s central objective has been to provide decision makers …  with credible performance data on innovative and enhanced commercially-ready environmental technologies. The SITE program has documented it progress and accomplishments annually in reports to Congress and other mechanisms.

What the SITE website may not explicitly state is that the program was created, in part, because people were coming out of the woodwork with claims for their approaches, going for big government Superfund bucks. It became apparent that it was absolutely necessary to independently evaluate those claims.

Another aspect of the SITE program merits mention: by its very existence, it screened out a lot of snake oil. A vendor would have to be pretty certain they had something real before they would enter into a SITE evaluation. So, those without that kind of certainty were likely to just stay home.

The SITE program is over, but its legacy remains. The need for applying the SITE approach to current claims for many energy technologies is clear. Congress should get off the dime, and allocate a certain fraction of  research funds to developing independent means for evaluating them, before they get further than the constraints of fundamental  science and engineering will allow.

says it is just months away from producing a jet fuel from algae for the same cost as its fossil-fuel equivalent.

This is astounding news, and I’d like to know what assumptions are operating here.

As I’ve discussed previously here, there’s  evidence that the cost of supplying carbon dioxide for the algae is not always figured into balance sheets for oil-from-algae schemes. My understanding is that atmospheric carbon dioxide alone does not provide a sufficient growth rate of algae, so it must be provided.

And an approach such as using “free” carbon dioxide from power plants to grow algae is only an idea…it’s never been attempted, to my knowledge, even on a pilot scale. Nevertheless, such approaches are often assumed to be feasible in cost estimates of this type.

With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up.

The ScienceDaily article summarizes some aspects of a paper by Clarens, et al., “Environmental Life Cycle Comparisonof Algae to Other Bioenergy Feedstocks,” published in the most recent edition of the journal, Environmental Science and Technology.

I’ve been reading the paper. The authors use a statistical approach to leverage available data, while providing information for sensitivity analyses. The results indicate that current algae production methods produce more carbon dioxide than they remove from the atmosphere, unlike switchgrass, corn and canola, all of which were found to be net consumers of carbon dioxide. Reasons for this result include energy requirements for providing carbon dioxide for the algae, and energy requirements for producing fertilizer to feed algae.

The authors show that some negative aspects of algae production can be overcome by 1. siting algae factories near fossil-fuel power plants, using their carbon dioxide as an input, and 2. by growing algae at sewage treatment plants, using nitrogen and phosphorous in wastewater, eliminating the need for adding fertilizer while providing water for the algae, as well. They also note that biomass production from algae is in its infancy such that

significant improvements in algae cultivation could increase the favorability of energy production from algae over the next several decades.

They are not in a rush, it seems, but the authors are relatively young.

The authors also point out that their analysis does not include energy requirements (and associated carbon dioxide outputs) for processes following biomass production, such as extraction of lipids from algae and subsequent conversion to a usable fuel. They focus here on biomass production and “preliminary transportation,” such that a full life cycle analysis will likely be the subject of another paper or two or three.