Close ...isn't there yet, which means your fishtank is not a gold mine.
You can grow algae with carbon dioxide and sunlight, but that doesn't mean it's free.
Although many believe that algae will become one of the chief feedstocks for diesel and even hydrocarbon-like fuels, growing large amounts of algae and then converting the single-celled creatures remains expensive, said experts at the National Biodiesel Conference taking place in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Algae biofuel startup Solix, for instance, can produce biofuel from algae right now, but it costs about $32.81 a gallon, said Bryan Wilson, a co-founder of the company and a professor at Colorado State University. The production cost is high because of the energy required to circulate gases and other materials inside the photo bioreactors where the algae grow. It also takes energy to dry out the biomass, and Solix uses far less water than other companies (see Cutting the Cost of Making Algae by 90%).
By exploiting waste heat at adjacent utilities (one of our favorite forms of energy around here), the price can probably be brought down to $5.50 a gallon (see Will Waste Heat Be Bigger Than Solar?). By selling the proteins and other byproducts from the algae for pet food, the price can be brought to $3.50 a gallon in the near term.
But that's still the equivalent of $150 a barrel of oil. "We we're excited in July [when oil was approaching that level]," he joked. "But we knew it wasn't sustainable."
It's only in phase II of Solix's business plan that it will be able to drop production costs to $3.30 to $1.57 a gallon, or around $60 to $80 a barrel. Solix has set a goal of cutting the cost of making algae by 90 percent.
Is algae a good feedstock? Yes, he insisted. Ultimately, algae could yield 5,000 to 10,000 gallons an acre, far higher than other feedstocks. Soy is only good for around 40 to 50 gallons an acre. Touted plants like jatropha might only produce 175 gallons an acre, he said.
"Algae is by far the best organism on the planet for converting fixed carbon into oil," he said. "But economically, others are more efficient at taking sunlight and carbon dioxide and turning it into oil."
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