In 2008, the Defense Department consumed roughly $18 billion worth of fuel, a major part of it spent on fueling USAF jets. The Pentagon has to worry about this massive spigot on two fronts – that this money is used to finance the very people the Pentagon is fighting, and the impact on the environment.
Algae growth tank
As a result, out of the $7.4b it got in the stimulus package, the Pentagon devoted $300m towards alternative fuel research. This money is apparently being well spent.
One of the experiments is a mobile biofuel generator known as a ‘Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery’ which converts paper, plastic and food slop into biofuel.
They also have a $6 million project being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to convert algae into jet propulsion fuel 8 (JP-8).
It seems this little algae project has come up with a breakthrough, with the Pentagon announcing that DARPA will be opening a largescale refining operation in 2011 for producing jet fuel from algae at costs competitive with fossil fuels.
Barbara McQuiston, special assistant for energy at DARPA, told the Guardian that the algae fuel projects, run by private firms SAIC and General Atomics, are expected to yield 1,000 gallons of oil per acre from the farm. The costs are projected at $2 per gallon, heading towards $1 per gallon.
Compared to other alternative fuels like ethanol, algae has the capacity to produce 30 times more energy per acre without having to devote land for cultivation, and fresh water, and without any loss of food products.
A couple of years back, a company called PetroSun made a big splash by opening a 1,100 acre algae farm near Harlingen, TX to produce 4.4m gallons of jet fuel. At that time, the company had plans to open more farms in other states and even outside the US, and claimed that given enough algae farms the size of Maryland, it could satisfy the entire fuel requirements of the US.
Late last year, the company put the plans on hold, blaming the global economic crisis for an inability to acquire the “capital required to retrofit the existing aquaculture farm ponds for commercial algae production.” They also changed their business model, and now say that while they will still be producing algal oil, the major source of revenue to the program will be the value of the co-products, including animal feed and fertilizer.
So while the Pentagon might be on to something to satisfy their own fuel needs, commercial production of jet fuel from algae isn’t exactly a hot market, as of now.
Meanwhile, Bristish Airways announced a partnership with the Solena Group, and aims to establish Europe’s first sustainable jet-fuel plant, which will use landfill waste to produce aviation fuel. BA says the plant is likely to be sited in east London, and will convert 500,000 tonnes of waste per year into 16 million gallons of jet fuel, starting in 2014.
Willie Walsh, British Airways’ chief executive, said in a statement that its all part of a plan to reduce their net carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050. The Pentagon, for its part, wants its entire fleet of USAF jet fighters and transport aircraft on a 50-50 mix of standard jet fuel and other sources like algae by next year.
Will the demand for algae jet fuel by big customers like the Pentagon and commercial air carriers make it profitable to run algae farms as a business venture?
Photo by Randy Montoya (courtesy Sandia)
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One Response
The US Government has spent over $2.5 billion dollars on algae research in the last 35 years and all we have to show for it are shelves full of useless patents. Algae have been researched at universities and in laboratories in the US for over 50 years, financed in significant part by government funds. One of the largest problems is that the research has been done in laboratories and at universities, using federal funds, and there is fear at that level that commercialization will ‘ruin it for them’. What it will ruin is the steady stream of ‘free’ money flowing from the DOE, NREL, the DOD, DARPA and other Washington-based agencies to University Row. It was most disconcerting to hear from more than one agency that the funds it awards are, by Congressional mandate, restricted to research. If we could invest one years’ worth of awards into commercialization instead of research, we could easily move this industry into commercialization. The research would be needed to improve technologies, but Microsoft and the American Petroleum Industry, among others, can confirm that this is a necessary component of any industry growth.
According to my sources. another large problem is, in order to be a grant award recipient, the algae technologies must be investigated and approved by NREL, and that NREL is not particularly supportive of the private initiative. NREL is the same government agency that ran out of money and stopped the otherwise successful Aquatic Species Program after 18 years of federal funding. After the Consortium grant announcement, sources at various government agencies, including NREL itself, shared the fact that grants would only be awarded to proposed groups that included government agencies in their consortia. The truth of that statement lies in the fact that one of the groups that recently received an award is led by NREL and the other by the David Danforth Plant Science Center, and includes two national laboratories (one of which is also a participant in the NREL award) and 11 universities. According to its website, “Scientists at the Danforth Center receive more than half of their funding from federal agencies via competitive grant programs, with the rest of the funding coming from private companies and foundations. In addition to the USDA and the NSF, other federal granting agencies that fund research at the Center include the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency…”. In the last 2 years, it has received grants from the Department of Transportation and the National Sciences Foundation relating to biofuels, in addition to housing one of the DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers.
Federal agencies are incapable of commercializing anything. The only ones that are even remotely designed to earn money are those that regulate the financial institutions, and we all know that the American banking system has failed us miserably. Until someone in Washington who has power and authority to stop this steady stream of funding to nowhere, listening as the algae researchers continue to claim that they are 3-5 years away from completing their research, it’s too expensive and they need more time and money, they will receive grant money from the DOE, NREL, DOD and DARPA. Nothing will ever get commercialized at the university level. Until there is an industry, there is no value to the results of the research. Until development of this industry is taken out of the hands of the research community, and put into the hands of the business, not corporate, community, this industry will never support reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
The question you need to be asking is ” Does the US really want to get off of foreign oil or do we want to continue to fund the algae researchers at the universities.” The problem is we can grow, harvest and extract algae today with all “off-the-shelf” proven technology. We no not need genetic modification at all when there are existing algae strains currently on the market with 30-60% oil content. Algae production requires far less land and water than any other terrestrial crop (see page 194 of the DOE’s National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap), which has the farmers in an uproar right now. The ethanol credits went away, allegedly shutting down an industry – can it really be that without the tax credit, years of time, effort and expense will be for naught, leaving us with unedible genetically modified corn fields? The DOE is still awarding grants for algae pond research when it was established years ago that all algae ponds get contaminated and will never produce enough algae to get us off of foreign oil. Stop wasting monies on research. We need algae production!