It\u2019s the world\u2019s favorite biobased feedstock, the crop of dreams, and you just can\u2019t find as much as you\u2019d think would be out there. Why, everyone asks?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s easy.<\/p>\n
With algae, the most pressing need relates to the toughest economic challenge.<\/p>\n
No US president has ever gone on television to talk about the pressing national security need to develop alternative sources of omega-3 fatty acids, livestock feed, or astaxanthin. But they do go routinely on television to talk about the need for alternatives to petroleum.<\/p>\n
For investors, there\u2019s not much appetite for technology risk in markets that are easily saturated and where the need is not urgent and obvious.<\/p>\n
For corn, things were more aligned at the outset. When Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to plant maize in 1621, the pressing urgent need was for food, which happens to be the easiest and cheapest thing you can make out of sweet corn. Following harvest of the ear, it\u2019s a case of shuck and cook and chew.<\/p>\n
So, corn had it easy \u2014 and everything that used corn has had the crop available, ever since.<\/p>\n
Over the years, more complex processing has emerged \u2014 now there\u2019s dextrose, corn oil, distiller\u2019s grains and ethanol just to name a few of the apps. All of which required complex thinking to develop and prove \u2014 but the corn was already there, because of the first big, easy app.<\/p>\n
Algae needs one too.<\/p>\n
Not just where it\u2019s easy to hit the economics, like $10,000 per ton markets for which the global demand can be measured in the dozens of tons. Not just where it\u2019s easy to find big volumes with tough economics, such as making money competing with $750 per ton petroleum.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to protein.<\/p>\n
Most algae strains \u2014 though far from all \u2014 have protein content in the 40-60% range. Which, at the end of the day, puts any algae farmer into the meal market. There\u2019s too much value there to be discarded. In fact, fishmeal is worth more than petroleum on a per-ton basis, by a considerable distance.<\/p>\n
So, fishmeal is a long ways from algae biofuels. But so are golf balls a long way from fuel, and that\u2019s a petroleum app just as much as diesel.<\/p>\n
Fishmeal is running around $1500-$1700 per ton. Algae enterprises that can realize $1500 per ton, averaged, for 60% of their crop \u2014 well, you start with great economics and a proven market. From there, if you have around 15 percent carbohydrate content and can sell algae based starches at around $900 per ton, and 25 percent oil content and can sell that for $770 per ton, you have dry algae biomass with revenues of $1227 per ton.<\/p>\n
Petroleum had one too. That was kerosene, which via the lamp oil market did more to get the petroleum business going than any other app. It\u2019s far less important today (excepting in the jet fuel arena), but it was completely vital when John D. Rockefeller was first putting his ideas together.<\/p>\n
For now, there\u2019s a shortage in fishmeal and no one is quite sure, given rising population and tougher ocean conditions, where all the food\u2019s coming from.<\/p>\n
There are alternatives in the algae world, for sure. Dozens of companies targeting only the nutraceutical markets. Companies such as Algenol with milking technologies \u2014 algae organisms that secrete fuels.<\/p>\n
For the majority, however, here\u2019s the question: Does the route to fuels pass through the livestock pen? It certainly did for ethanol. Those distillers grains add critically to the economics of first generation corn ethanol. Dakota Gold DDGS have immeasurably helped the economics of POET and its farmer partners in every year of their operation \u2014 and especially, when the fuel market economics go upside down to corn.<\/p>\n
LIFE cereal \u2013 it came down to the question \u201cWill Mikey Like it?\u201d<\/p>\n
For algae, it may well come down to whether Bossie the Cow likes it. We hope she does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s the world\u2019s favorite biobased feedstock, the crop of dreams, and you just can\u2019t find as much as you\u2019d think would be out there. Why, everyone asks? That\u2019s easy. With algae, the most pressing need relates to the toughest economic challenge. No US president has ever gone on television to talk about the pressing national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[1325,8163,2418],"class_list":["post-22768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-algenol","supplier-dakota-gold","supplier-poet-llc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22768"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=22768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}