Managing Carbon Dioxide Utilization for Algae R&D

The spotlight was co-hosted by Christy Sterner, Bioenergy Technologies Office, DOE, and Amishi Kumar, Office of Fossil Energy, DOE

The session started with Christy and Amishi giving an overview of their DOE programs.

Let’s jump into one of the speakers, David Hazlebeck’s talk in more detail. David is the CEO of Global Algae Innovations. The title of his presentation:

In Davids presentation he covered algae solutions to global dilemmas. With a focus on carbon dioxide mitigation, deforestation, and the water food energy nexus.

Let’s first begin with an into to what Global Algae Innovations does. Their vision:

Their target is global impact. Because of this they’re looking at algae for commodities – feed, food, fuel, and polymers. To achieve their goals they require order of magnitude reduction in cost, and more reductions in energy use. For the past 6.5 years their focus has been on research and development on radical advances through the entire process to achieve these challenging cost and energy use targets. In the past year they have achieved their final breakthroughs needed for economic viability for commodities. Impressive right? We’ll now they’re working on a 20X scale up from their 8-acre farm to a 160-acre farm – wow!

Why is algae the solution to so many global dilemmas? It offers huge gains in productivity for agriculture. Comparing it to other crops such as soybean, canola, corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, etc., algae comes our far ahead for protein yield, as well as oil yield. That’s a very exciting potential for the young industry if you think how we are really just getting started on breeding and other techniques.

In order for algae production to happen world-wide, we need direct air caption. This will allow large, commercial and industry scale algae production facilities to not have to be located next to a CO2 source.

By moving to large scale algae production for feed and fuel we’ll be able to greatly reduce the CO2 emissions. As an example, using algae in animal feed we’re able to mitigate green house gas emissions by 60% and reduce deforestation.

Algae for animal feed is pivotal for achieving our climate change goals.

Managing Carbon Dioxide Utilization for Algae R&D Session Speakers included:

Michael Burkart, California Center for Algae Biotechnology at UCSD
Opportunities, Challenges, and Examples for Carbon Dioxide Utilization

Michelle Krynock, NETL LCA Team
Understanding the Environmental Potential of CO2 Utilization Technologies through the Assessment of Algae-to-Biofuels Pathways

Bruce Rittman, Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Biodesign Institute
Highly Efficient CO2 Delivery from Industrial Sources

David Hazlebeck, Global Algae Innovations
Algae Solutions to Global Dilemmas

Jason Quinn, Colorado State University
Economic and Life-cycle Potential of Microalgae Derived Bioplastics with Fuel Co-products