Making Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Gasoline - From Algae

A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to compose oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

Sapphire Energy claims its “green crude” is chemically identical to light sweet crude and compatible with America’s $1.5 trillion petroleum infrastructure, making it a direct replacement for oil. Although the algal fuels refined from it emit as much carbon dioxide as conventional fuels, the company says the emissions are offset by the photosynthetic process that uses sunlight, water and C02 to create algal crude.

“At the very worst, it’s carbon neutral,” says company CEO Jason Pyle, calling the fuels a “benchmark for an entire new industry” and “a paradigm change.” 

Energy experts and air quality regulators say they’ll withhold judgment on those claims until they’ve seen a production-to-combustion analysis of the fuel’s emissions. But they say Sapphire could be on to something.

Making fuel from algae is nothing new, and everyone from the smallest start-up to the biggest oil companies is trying to find the best way to do it. But most of the effort has been on replacing diesel fuel or kerosene. Sapphire wants to replace petroleum.

“We designed it to be a completely fungible product with crude oil,” Pyle says. He says the company has refined its algal crude into 91-octane gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene chemically identical to conventional fuels. He wouldn’t reveal how the process works or what

it costs but said it is competitive with deep-water oil drilling and extracting petroleum from tar sands.

Sapphire additionally avoids the food-for-fuel debate that has plagued crop-based biofuels considering it uses algae and works on non-arable land with non-potable water. Pyle wouldn’t say where Sapphire plans to build the demonstration plant it will have running later that year, but one report says the company is working in Oklahoma and may locate its facilities in the south and southwest. It hopes to have a full-scale plant up and running within five years, producing 10,000 barrels of green crude a day. The company has lined up more than $50 million in funding from investors like ARCH Venture Partners.

Ramping up to that level of production without killing the algae can be tricky, one expert said, and the environmental affect of green crude remain to be seen. Even whether it is carbon neutral, the algal fuels will emit pollutants that contribute to smog and ozone, says Don Anair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“You’re still going to get combustion emissions. You aren’t eliminating those with algal fuels,” he says, echoing a point the California Air Resources Board made to the Los Angeles Times. Still, Anair is cautiously optimistic.

“The fact that there is a lot of interest in finding a better way to fuel our transportation system is encouraging,” he says. “that is one avenue to pursue that has very good potential.”

Photo by Sapphire Energy.

Original post by Chuck Squatriglia