The Buzz

Seambiotic’s Algae Plant in China to Open September 2011

July 18, 2011, by Jonathan Williams
AlgaeIndustryMagazine.com

n December 2009, Seambiotic announced that they would be building an algae production plant that will use flue gas in China. Though originally scheduled to be operational in 2010, the plant will open in September 2011, Chief Science Advisor of Seambiotic, Dr. Ami Ben-Amotz, told the crowd at the 1st International Conference on Algal Biomass, Biofuels, and Bioproducts, this week in St. Louis.

Without going into many specifics, Ben-Amotz explained that the choice to build the plant in China was for several reasons. First, finding additional land on the coast of Israel would have been prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the alterations needed at a power plant to pump the flue gas into the algae ponds were such that most operators would not want to have to deal with the complexity. Lastly, the cost of the materials, land, and labor in China made perfect sense to build the plant there.

Ben-Amotz showed the audience several pictures of the new production plant, from the early stages of its development to what it looks like now, with the raceway ponds nearly completed. According to Ben-Amotz, the finished plant will be approximately 10 hectares in size, making it the largest plant of its kind in the world. He believes that this plant will be able to produce algae biomass to convert into fuel at prices competitive with traditional fuel by 2012.

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