There is the dream of algae. All that photosynthetic productivity, all those products that algae can make, all those crushing needs that our society has for more, more, more \u2014 fuels, feed, food, pharmaceuticals, nutritionals, and materials.<\/p>\n
The dream of algae is most intently dreamed in the world of energy, because the pangs of energy security or lack thereof are felt by so many societies that have CO2<\/sub> and water to spare, and disabled land to build upon. And where energy security is not a concern, there is the thump-thump-thump of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, and algae can provide fuels that have 70% lower greenhouse gas emissions. But even climate skeptics can get excited about bioeconomy jobs for rural economies, where the prospect of algae fuels brings with it the promise of economic growth and diversification for small towns.<\/p>\n We have dreamed the algae dream for so long that it feels strange to watch companies like LanzaTech, Joule Unlimited and Algenol all discussing groundbreaking a first commercial-scale plant in no more than 18 months, and in the case of LanzaTech, less than one month. All of them are chasing fuels and in the case of Joule and Algenol have been highly specific in discussing results that show them competitive with low-cost crude oil.<\/p>\n Algae purists might sniff and say \u201cthey\u2019re all cyanobacteria technologies, not true algae.\u201d<\/p>\n But I suppose that\u2019s like refusing help from Superman on the grounds that he\u2019s not a true-blue Earthling. Cyanobacteria are blue-green algae and commercial-scale from any of the three, much less all three soon, will be a welcome sign and a landmark event in the history of transportation that would just about rival the invention of the wheel.<\/p>\n But that is the dream of algae. Those companies have robust pilots and demonstrations running, but they are not yet at commercial scale with steady-state operations.\u00a0 And they represent a narrow slice of algae-based technologies. Others, like Solazyme have reached commercial-scale operations, are selling product every-day to blue-chip companies, but they have not reached fuel-grade economics.<\/p>\n In the path down the cost curve from perfume economics, to health-and-beauty economics, and on to everyday triglyceride oil economics for non-exotic products, and on to products such as foods, fish meal, animal feed and ultimately fuels, a large number of companies have paused somewhere around health-and-beauty \u2013 in Solazyme\u2019s case, a little further and into the world of commercial triglyceride oils for everyday applications like drilling fluids and foods. Many are still working at sky-high costs where only a handful of markets are open to them. But they\u2019ve found that algae competes well, there.<\/p>\n For a lack of capital, a need to do business soon with a winning first product, or simply a yield wall they have not been able to overcome, there\u2019s quite a pile-up of algae companies somewhere past perfumery and short of animal feed. Creating a log-jam in markets such as astaxanthin that at times feels as if the Rolling Stones have announced the opening of ticket sales for a last farewell to rock-and-roll tour and the whole world has turned out to get a seat.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, Now, NOW.\u201d You can hear the whump of the hand slap on the table as the venture-backers give their three-word summary. That is, the expected\u00a0timing for their companies to get out of the Land of Pre-Revenue and into the Land of Massive-profits-that-help-me-raise-my-next-LP-fund.<\/p>\n Some backers have different versions of the three-word directive.<\/p>\n Sometimes, it is \u201cnow or never\u201d, or, \u201cnow or else\u201d, or \u201cNow, pretty please\u201d or \u201cNow\u2019d be nice\u201d or \u201cNow, me hearties\u201d.<\/p>\n There are those who keep Government time measured in 4-year cycles, or public company time measured in quarters, or media time measured in 24-hour news-cycles.\u00a0And then there is this generation of algae companies who are measured these days in increments of Now, and their index is the Now Jones.<\/p>\n Ready or not, here they come. Some more ready than others.\u00a0Some did \u201caim, fire, ready\u201d in the past. Some of them tried \u201cfire!\u201d and there wasn\u2019t so much aim or ready.<\/p>\n Some just tried \u201cready, aim, ready, aim, ready, aim\u201d and never seem to \u201cfire\u201d. Except the occasional CEO.<\/p>\n Some of them have turned up with recently re-patched business plans and a \u201cDirective from the Board\u201d to sell something, baby. Some of them who aimed at the ultra-high end of the market from the very beginning, like Bentley or Lamborghini did.\u00a0Some of them are in pretty good shape, some look like the last rat on the last ship in the last hour before Judgment Day.\u00a0But most of them were in Washington\u00a0this week at the annual Algae Biomass Organization\u2019s annual get-together, which as close as you will come to a meeting of The Clan, or The Summit, or the Rat Pack of algae.<\/p>\n In one of the main plenary\u00a0sessions, Sapphire Energy CEO Jamie Levine lays it out as smoothly as Sinatra. \u201cThe most important question, as a business, venture-backed, expected to and needing to make returns and run as a business \u2014 what\u2019s the product? Who\u2019s the customer?\u201d<\/p>\n He was asked to give\u00a0advice to young entrepreneurs in the audience. He chuckled at himself. \u201cYou know we all talk our own book, and I\u2019m not a scientist, I\u2019m an MBA. But for me, it\u2019s know your product, know your customer.\u201d<\/p>\n Near to him, Algal Scientific CEO Geoff Horst was taking a similar line, though in his jeans-clad laid-backness he was more Dean Martin than Sinatra.<\/p>\n \u201cSeveral years ago, here at ABS, I was one of those young entrepreneurs, thinking about algae, wondering if this was the right platform for us. I remember that on this stage Vinod Khosla said, \u201cgo in the opposite direction\u201d. People always flock to the same target and they cause the price to drop.\u201d<\/p>\n Also on the panel, Heliae\u2019s corporate development chief, Len Smith agreed.<\/p>\n \u201cNovelty counts, and it takes time,\u201d he said. And Horst added, suddenly,\u00a0\u201cAbove all, don\u2019t run out of money!\u201d<\/p>\n But run out of time, or money, or something else, many of them did. Aurora Algae ran out of dough\u00a0not too long ago. Others have hightailed it out of the dream of algae and into the business of algae. Most of them are talking up omega-3s, or omega-6s, even omega-7s.<\/p>\n I found myself surprised that no-one is making omega-13s. That was the technology that saved the crew of the NSEA Protector in the motion picture\u00a0Galaxy Quest<\/em> when the Hollywood cast of a Star-Trek-like television show find themselves caught up in real spaceflight and a real Trek-like galaxy-threatening conflict.<\/p>\n When things become all too real and there feels like there\u2019s no way out, they take a flyer on a technology they\u2019re not quite sure of, and Tim Allen playing Jason Nesmith playing Captain Peter Quincy Taggert shouts, \u201cActivate the Omega 13!\u201d And all turns out well.<\/p>\n In our case here on the actual Planet Earth, things have become all too real and just about everywhere at the Algae Summit you can hear them shout:<\/p>\n \u201cActivate the Omega-3!\u201d (or \u201cActivate the Omega-7!\u201d, and in at least one attractive business case, \u201cActivate the Thermoplastic!\u201d although it sounds less zippy).<\/p>\n Sapphire is typical. They are Sapphire Energy for now, but the name is clearly going to have to change. They\u2019re now aimed squarely at \u201ccommencing omega 3\/7 oil sales in 2017 from our Columbus, New Mexico plant, and then omega-3 EPAs, which are sustainable and non-fish in origin.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor now, we are focused on health & nutrition,\u201d said Levine, \u201cand later as we move down the cost curve there are opportunities with high-value protein, aquaculture feeds, and animal feed. And we\u2019ll keep an eye on fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n Moderator Steve Mayfield commented positively on Sapphire\u2019s evolution.\u00a0\u201cWhy algae for nutrition? You shouldn\u2019t do things just because you can, you should do things because they are unique or uniquely advantaged and useful. Algae has unique capabilities, it is programmable, edible and scalable. You can\u2019t say that of any other platform in nutrition.\u201d<\/p>\n Heliae\u2019s Len Smith agreed, though for Heliae there was less confidence about hitting the cost curve improvements needed to compete with soymeal, or even fish meal, any time soon.<\/p>\n \u201cOur foundational investors, \u201c said Smith, \u201cthe Mars family and the Salim Group, set a goal in pursuing this technology \u201cto care for the earth in a forward looking manner.\u201d Over the past year we\u2019ve had to ask who we are and what we are trying to do and we have recommitted, after management changes and a significant restructuring, we\u2019re entirely-re-focused on our original mission, to\u00a0make affordable quality general nutrition at global scale.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, Smith tossed out that rarest of elements in an industry conference setting. Real talk about a real problem.<\/p>\n \u201cThis sector has challenges, cultivation, contamination, expensive processing, nascent science, and regulatory roadblocks. We are behind yeast and e.coli by decades and thousands of years behind farming. But not everything is bleak. We believe our mixotrophic technology has real potential, we have exceeded our nameplate capacity repeatedly over the past year, and we are selling product to commercial customers, But we all still need radical breakthroughs, and to compete with the price of soy or of fishmeal there is a long way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n Over on the end of the panel, Geoff Horst raised himself out his Dean Martinesque bemusement with it all to disagree about how hard it all really was.<\/p>\n Algal Scientific? Focused on fermentation, they are already in commercial production, producing AlgaMune.<\/p>\n \u201cThere have been significant reports of overuse of antibiotics and increasing levels of resistance to them,\u2019 Horst said, \u201cand its been reported that there have been as many as 23,000 deaths related to resistance to antibiotics, and and additional $20B-$30 billion in health care costs. To some extent, the spread of antibiotics has been related to growth promotion in the animal industries, and they\u2019ve been banned in the EU for growth promotion, but not in the US. We\u2019ve been targeting, with AlgaMune, an orally-taken product, made via algae fermentation, that tricks the system to think it is under attack and to increase the response, such as T Cells and B Cells. We chose algae because we thought we could use this platform to do better than yeast or e.coli, and we\u2019re getting pretty good at fermentation now.\u201d<\/p>\n At the center of the panel, Matrix Genetics CEO, Margaret McCormick, as close to a leader of the \u201cGMO and proud of it\u201d section of the algae community as you\u2019re likely to find, then threw down the gauntlet after touting a recent success.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a significant first this year, said McCormick, \u201cWe were the first to develop synthetic biology and genetic engineering\u00a0 for spirulina, using programing to improve it. We think that our technology has significant applications in medical apps, including oral vaccines and other therapeutics, in the food and beverage industries, personal care, and animal feed, in addition to fuels. The easiest thing in spirulina to go after was the blue pigment, and there\u2019s a significant market there and we have been able to produce with our engineered microorganism a higher purity and a brighter blue, and our work we thing will produce a 9X increase in the value to manufacturers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are a technology industry,\u201d she said.\u00a0And then she got. Into. It.<\/p>\n Oh. My. The. Crowd. Fell. Into. A. Hush.\u00a0The GMO thing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to stop kowtowing to fear-mongerers,\u201d she said of the GMO debate. \u201cEvery time we step back to avoid a confrontation we step back for technology industries and science around the globe. We have to ask people, why are you going back to discredited studies that have been driven out of the scientific community? GM\u2019s are regulated, we have to prove they are safe, which is more than you can say for a lot of products.\u201d<\/p>\n She wasn\u2019t having any of that \u201c we just make what our customers want\u201d chat. None of that \u201cif you want non-GMO, here\u2019s the price and we\u2019ll make it for you\u201d.\u00a0 None of that at all.<\/p>\n She took square aim at what some have noted as a big global game being played with definitions and regulations around the globe.\u201c100% of French cheese is GMO,,\u201d said McCormick. \u201cit is not an issue for regulators because the Europeans redefined the threshold for presence of genetical modification in order to be \u201cGMO\u201d and re-set the threshold above that for French cheese. We need educational strategies and marketing strategies on the GMO issue. It\u2019s something beyond what a small company can do, perhaps it\u2019s something for the Algae Foundation, because it begins with K-12 and colleges embracing technology and science. If I hear another soccer mom on the dangers of GMOs, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019ll do. I mean, Whole Foods is laughing all the way to the bank. \u201cOrganic\u201d designation is not is not a safety tool, it is a marketing tool.\u201d<\/p>\n Mayfield chimed in. \u201cI mean, it is almost a joke,\u201d he said, \u201cwith 23,000 people dying because of rising antibiotic resistance, to use one example, and not a person worldwide has become demonstrably sick because of GMO, that we are even talking about this.\u201d<\/p>\n Heliae corporate development head Len Smith took a practical line, noting that \u201cWe are going to need a better patent system, because the current system is simply not rewarding non-GMO organisms compared to GMO.\u201d<\/p>\n Algal Scientific CEO Geoff Horst agreed with McCormick that definitions were slippery. Asked about how he skirts around drug regulations with his AlgaMune product, which competes with antibiotics, he noted that effective counsel is essential. \u201cWhat we report ar the results of studies,\u201d and we say that \u201csuch and such a study shows that with the use of AlgaMune you get this result.\u201d We steer away from making durg claims, and from saying that AlgaMune is the direct cause.<\/p>\n But Horst was not taking much interest in the GMO debate, as a whole. \u201cWe don\u2019t care about GMO at the end of the day. In fact, it\u2019s a pain for us, actually, we have been sourcing non-GMO sugar out of China because you can hardly find it anywhere else. We\u2019re a business, making a product for customers, and if the customer wants a non-GMO product, he can have one.\u201d<\/p>\n Which reminds one that we are in an era of business, and that for many the Dream of Algae has given away to something else. Give the customer what he or she wants, the way he wants it, when she wants it, at a price he or she can afford.<\/p>\n Do customers know what they want, really?\u00a0As Henry Ford said, \u201cI never asked my customers what they wanted because if I had, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse.\u201d<\/p>\n Steve Jobs liked that one. Back in a different day, the time of iMacs and iPhones and the birth of the web and the end of the Cold War, and a feeling that technology was good and that the West was generally a better place to be, from the blue jeans all the way to the dot coms.<\/p>\n In about two years we\u2019ll know a lot more, when the big dreamers like Joule and Algenol and LanzaTech have completed their Roads\u00a0to Awesome and they are\u00a0either really Awesome, or they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n If \u201cnot Awesome\u201d, we may find three more companies talking up nutraceuticals. Myself, I like the Awesome\u00a0option one heck of a lot more. And we\u2019re in the final months away from knowing how Awesome it will be, the Dream of Algae. Or, er, blue-green algae.<\/p>\n Even as we\u00a0celebrate and wish well all of those in the Business of Algae, who have found a new lease on life in activating the Omega-13.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is the dream of algae. All that photosynthetic productivity, all those products that algae can make, all those crushing needs that our society has for more, more, more \u2014 fuels, feed, food, pharmaceuticals, nutritionals, and materials. The dream of algae is most intently dreamed in the world of energy, because the pangs of energy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"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":[4149,1325,3941,4986,3938,2392,502,12050],"class_list":["post-29098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-algal-scientific-corporation","supplier-algenol","supplier-aurora-algae","supplier-heliae","supplier-joule-unlimited","supplier-lanzatech","supplier-sapphire-energy","supplier-terravia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29098","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\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29098"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=29098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Long and Winding Road down the Cost Curve<\/h4>\n
The Three-Word Directive<\/h4>\n
Ready, aim, fire or the popular\u00a0alternatives<\/h4>\n
Follow the money or lack thereof<\/h4>\n
The Shift towards things that make money in the here and now<\/h4>\n
It\u2019s really controversial and it rhymes with No, and Dough<\/h4>\n
Those dang customers and their pesky insistence on getting what they like<\/h4>\n