Algae: The Cornerstone Feedstock
If only there were enough algae to meet the demand. Algae is highly productive, soaks up toxins and CO2, and can be grown without impacting food or fresh water supplies. And it exactly replaces petroleum…
Algae Business: Can AB32 Help Save the Amazon?
With global warming accords in disarray, the European Union (EU), individual nations, and now California are taking decisive action. Even the most local of initiatives, however, impacts the rest of the world…
Algae Business—EU Aviation Standards: Algae Oil’s Threshold Market
This New Year, the rubber of the Kyoto Protocol hits the hard tarmac of the European Union’s airport runways. More than half the cost of the multi-billion dollar…
Algae Business: Hydrotreating Algae for Jet Fuel
Way back on June 20, John Daly of OilPrice.com wrote an insightful overview of why so many players in the multi-sector air industry—airlines, airplane producers, national airlines, and militaries…
Algae Business: It’s Time to Set Uniform Algae Feedstock Standards
As algae oil gears up to industrial scale production, we must develop uniform standards. Producers, refiners, distributors and the public face the same issues as late nineteenth century petroleum oil…
Algae Business: Algae Oil in China
Recently, Australia’s largest ethanol producer, Manildra, diversified its biofuel portfolio by entering into algae production. In cooperation with Atlanta-based Algae Tec, Manildra will build a demonstration facility near Manildra’s ethanol production plant in…
Algae Business: The Economics of Power Plant CO2 Capture
In April, I wrote that CO2 capture is algae’s “killer app”—the deployment that addresses four environmental problems at once. Now the killer app can look forward to its first large-scale customers…
Algae Business: Small Scale Algae—An Alternate Vision
Most algae production is industrial in scale. Take MBD Energy’s carbon capture project, designed to attack the vast CO2 emissions of Australia’s brown coal power plants. Each power plant emits ten million tons…
Algae Business: Algae—Food or Chemical Grade?
There’s a big question planners should be asking themselves when they put together an algae production plan: are we trying to meet food-grade requirements for our algae…
Algae’s Killer App
Where in the world is the best place for a new algae facility? If you answered, “wherever there’s abundant sunlight for photosynthesis” you’re on the right track. Beyond that, I’d like to offer what I think is an even better answer—one that underpins…
