{"id":28823,"date":"2015-09-25T07:28:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T05:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=28823"},"modified":"2015-09-24T09:59:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T07:59:12","slug":"algae-at-the-crossroads-tackling-big-markets-big-challenges-in-the-new-carbon-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/algae-at-the-crossroads-tackling-big-markets-big-challenges-in-the-new-carbon-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Algae at the Crossroads: Tackling big markets, big challenges in the new carbon economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next week in Washington DC, the Algae Biomass Summi<\/a>t is convening an opening morning session entitled \u201cClearing the Air: Carbon Utilization and the role of algae in creating a new carbon economy.\u201d Amongst the many sessions at the annual ABO Summit, which has become the largest annual gathering point for the global algae industry, it promises to be the least settled issue.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on the program scientists will chart progress in basic R&D, yield development, harvesting & dewatering, and high-value, small-market applications in health and pharmaceuticals, and the moderate-value, high volume markets in nutrition and animal feed, and we can expect stories of substantial progress in development and applications of great interest.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the carbon economy, as opposed to carbon niches, that\u2019s about\u00a0fuels.<\/p>\n

The Carbon Economy, the must-haves<\/h3>\n

The Carbon Economy, like the Glucose Economy and the Hydrogen Economy that came before it, faces a diverse set of competitor threats, technical readiness and scale-up challenges, existential questions about whether there even should be a price on CO2, regulatory quandaries over point sources of carbon.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the future of algae and cyanobacteria-based technologies \u2014 as we look at the really big markets in fuels \u2014 comes down to one factor that opens or shuts the door on the economics. That\u2019s the availability, price, and regulatory status of waste carbon in gas form.<\/p>\n

In the broader carbon economy there is solid, virgin carbon \u2014 typically locked up fats, sugars, cellulose,\u00a0hemicellulose and lignin. And there are solid waste carbons, too \u2014 typically available via cellulosic biomass found in agricultural, forest, animal and municipal waste. There are fuel-market plays in both of these sectors.<\/p>\n

The opportunities in waste\u00a0CO2<\/h3>\n

Given that merchant gaseous carbon dioxide (sold from $60 to $120 per metric ton) contains roughly 27% carbon, the merchant sources have raw carbon costs of $220 to $440 per ton \u2014 and with a gasoline price of roughly $440 per ton in today\u2019s market, these are non-starter economics for fuels.<\/p>\n

But gaseous waste carbon, there\u2019s opportunity there. In the case of carbon monoxide, it always has to be carefully handled and processed, and venting of CO2 without economic penalty will eventually become as rare as smoking in restaurants, and for many of the same reasons.\u00a0 Because of processing costs and disposal issues, industrial biotechnologies have an opportunity to be part of a solution, and an alternative to carbon capture and storage.<\/p>\n

The Chinese Brother Who Swallowed the Ocean: the futility of carbon capture and storage<\/h3>\n

We\u2019re not exactly sure the where and why of the popularity of carbon sequestration technology, which makes as much sense as the 5th Chinese Brother Who Swallowed the Ocean, so that his accompanying young friend could retrieve all the fish and treasures of the sea.<\/p>\n

The bottom line on carbon capture and storage is that it doesn\u2019t pay off under any scenario of interest. Bottom line, the US Department of Energy has written off carbon capture retrofit technology as completely unfeasible, and using CCS with a conventional coal-fired power plant is in the $0.10 \u2013 $0.16 range per kilowatt-hour over the life of the plant. By contrast, utility-scale solar costs have dropped to as low as 5 cents per Kwh, based on the 25-year PPA that Austin Energy signed with Sun Edison last year. And CCS costs are heading up and solar is heading down \u2014 both, rapidly.<\/p>\n

The reason? CCS adds 62-82 percent to the capital cost for a plant, or roughly $800-$1500 per kilowatt of installed capacity, according to this 2012 DOE review. We might add that these are highly optimized, at-scale, Nth plant costs.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the reality on the CCS side. The DOE\u2019s first-of-kind FutureGen project was adding roughly $6500 per KW when it was defunded earlier this year by DOE, after $200 million in expenditure, and it never raised any of the $650 million in private funding required.<\/p>\n

There will be better CCS projects coming along, but these are miles away from good economics. And, keep in mind, DOE thought projects like FutureGen were the potentially feasible ones \u2014 you can imagine what the economics look like on the retrofits.<\/p>\n

By contrast,\u00a0petroleum displacement fuels and waste carbon<\/h3>\n

By contrast, microbial fuels based on simply off taking the CO2 from an existing coal-fired or natgas-fired power plant has decent economics, right out of the gate. Both Joule and Algenol are talking about costs in the $1.50 per gallon range or less.<\/p>\n

How is the carbon being sequestered? Well, it\u2019s simple. The barrel of microbial fuel displaces the barrel of petroleum, and the petroleum is left in the ground. Cost of petroleum (carbon) sequestration? Zero.<\/p>\n

One of the things this set of technologies needs is a name, and they ought to be known as petroleum displacement to distinguish them from algae technologies focused on, say, nutritional supplements \u2014 both microbial in technology, but that\u2019s like saying that a Lexus is the same thing as a laptop because they are both substantially made by robots.<\/p>\n

At the same time, they need a new breath of support from regulators \u2014 who are decidedly iffy about the indirect sequestration of carbon (e.g. via petroleum displacement). We wonder why, since the concept of efficiency is well understood on the power side and the idea of the \u201cnegawatt\u201d, the watt you never use and thereby displace demand, is well-established and widely praised.<\/p>\n

Bottom line, it\u2019s incredible that in certain areas of the bioeconomy there are technology pathways that receive strong regulatory support even with marginal economics, because they have major implications for petroleum displacement and use waste resources instead of virgin carbon. For example, cellulosic fuels, or even watse-based biodiesel, the nations; most popular advanced biofuel. Those technologies deserve our support; they\u2019re good ideas.<\/p>\n

The petroleum displacers come to Washington<\/h3>\n

In Washington this week, we\u2019ll see if microbial fuels can position themselves a little higher on the Federal Love Schedule. Here are a set of technologies that don\u2019t need a hand-out, but a hand-up, through thoughtful policy that clears market access to gaseous waste carbon. Essentially, a level playing field.<\/p>\n

In DC, Paul Woods of Algenol, Tom Jensen of Joule Unlimited, Bjorn\u00a0Heijstra of LanzaTech, Mark Randall of T2Energy and David Hazlebeck of Global Algae Innovations will take on the task of making the case<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not much riding on it, excepting the future of an industry and perhaps the future of petroleum displacement. We\u2019ll be looking keenly forward to their thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next week in Washington DC, the Algae Biomass Summit is convening an opening morning session entitled \u201cClearing the Air: Carbon Utilization and the role of algae in creating a new carbon economy.\u201d Amongst the many sessions at the annual ABO Summit, which has become the largest annual gathering point for the global algae industry, it […]<\/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":[7190,5842],"supplier":[162,1325,10889,3938,2392,10890,10888,11236],"class_list":["post-28823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-algae","tag-biomass","supplier-algae-biomass-organization-abo","supplier-algenol","supplier-austin-energy","supplier-joule-unlimited","supplier-lanzatech","supplier-sunedison","supplier-t2energy","supplier-u-s-department-of-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28823","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=28823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28823"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=28823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}