Solazyme - 1 million barrels of algae fuel

Solazyme, a San Francisco company making algae-based biofuel has announced a timeline: they are ready to make one million barrels of fuel within three years. In three years time, they say, they will be producing fuel on the order of millions of barrels per year.

The basic idea with algae is that you think of an algal cell as a factory. Since 2008 genetics allow us to program that factory to make almost anything we want, why not program it to make fuel? Once the program is in, you simply let your algae grow in a pond - all they need is sunlight and sugar. The stuff doubles in size about every hour, and once you have enough, you simply squeeze out or extract the good stuff. Presto: biofuel.

So why is Solazyme differnet from all other algae start ups?

This MIT Technology review article points it out:

Unlike most people who grow algae out in ponds via sunlight, these guys are growing it in the dark, inside. They feed sugar to the algae, and the algae metabolize the sugar into fuel. This offers a number of advantages:
- The algae produces more oil in the dark (the factory doesn't have any photosynthesis to do, so more "workers" can work on turning sugar into fuel)
- When algae is growing on sugar (a concentrated energy source) rather than the sun (a relatively dilute energy source) they can grow in higher concentrations. Out in the pond, if they get too concentrated, they die. And that's bad.

[On that note - and this wasn't in the MIT article - it seems to me that a big issue algae fuel makers are having these days is how to control the growth of their algae. Again, too much is no good but not enough isn't good either. So it's a balancing game. It's hard to balance something that's growing as a function of sunlight - it's hard to control the sunlight. But if your algae is growing as a function of sugar concentration, that's very controllable.]

If Solazyme is successful, it will make a big statement. Right now people are skeptical about whether algae can start contributing serious amounts of fuel to the market. If one startup is already talking millions of barrels a year, I think it reduces such skepticism.

Courtesy of CNET, MIT Technology Review