The Green Technocrat

On Thursday the Carbon Trust, a UK based company whose mission is to “accelerate the move to a low carbon economy by working with organizations to reduce carbon emissions and develop commercial low carbon technologies”, announced that they were launching the world’s largest publicly algae-biofuel R&D project.

The Carbon Trust estimates that large scale production of algae-biofuel could replace over 18 billion gallons of fossil derived fuels by 2030.  According to their calculations this would reduce emissions by 160 million tonnes of CO2 annually, and would have a market value of over £15 billion ($25 billion).

Phase One of the program began last Thursday, and entails launching a massive effort to recruit biofuel experts to begin exploring how to produce the fuel cost effectively on a large scale.  The Carbon Trust press release laid out the two phase plan as this:

“Phase One will provide grant funding for research across areas including selection of suitable microalgae algae strains for open pond production, maximising algae oil content and biomass yield, maximising solar conversion efficiency, sustained algae cultivation, and design and engineering of mass-culture systems.  Phase Two is expected to see the construction of an open pond test and demonstration plant. This plant will provide the vital facilities necessary to continue the research conducted in Phase One and demonstrate production at commercial scale in a manner that can be replicated. To avoid any unnecessary delays in eventual commercialisation the plant is likely to be constructed overseas. This is because the majority of commercial production of algae biofuels is likely to take place in tropical and sub-tropical climates that have plentiful sunlight and temperatures that do not drop too low or vary too much.

If the program is successful, the algae derived fuels would deliver between 6 and 10 times more energy per hectare than conventional cropland biofuels, and would reduce carbon emissions by up to 80% relative to fossil fuels. Since algae can be grown on non-arable land using seawater or wastewater using algae as a biofuel feedstock would avoid many of the negative environmental, ecological and social impacts associated with first generation biofuels.

Via: Carbon Trust