WHICH ALGAE FOR THE BEST BIOFUEL?

Pond Scum Gets Its Moment in the Limelight; An Algae Collection in Texas Is a Big Hit With the Biofuel Crowd
Russell Gold, April 10, 2009 (Wall Street Journal)

SUMMARY
The Culture Collection of Algae at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, is the biggest collection of algae in the world.

Director Jerry Brand manages samples of 3,000 varieties of algae. There may be ten times as many varieties around the world, nobody knows precisely.

Brand is a plant physiologist. He has been developing the collection for a decade. He is trying to identify the ideal strain of algae for biofuel production.

His quest was once of interest mainly to phycologists (students of pond scum). Now it engages the attention of more venture capitalists. His collection sells test tube samples for $75 and sends then off by overnight mail. He once sold mostly to health food specialists and high school students doing science projects. Now, half his requests come from biofuels entrepreneurs. A recent day found him shipping samples to the Indian Institute of Petroleum in the Himalayan foothills, China and South Dakota.

From algaebiofuel via YouTube

UT acquired the algae collection in 1976. It was started when scientist Ernst G. Pringsheim of Prague fled the Nazis with his algae collection in 1939. He took it first to Cambridge University and then Indiana University before ending up in Austin. Brand, who did a Ph.D. on photosynthesis in algae in the 1970s, became director of the collection in 1998.

It continues to expand by donations of individual samples or collections from scholars. In 2003, microbiooligist E. Imre Friedmann donated algae acquired on trips to Antarctica and to the Mongolian Gobi desert.

Brand's interest has recently become more than academic. He is a principal in Sunrise Ridge Algae, an algal biofuel startup.

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COMMENTARY
Algae convert solar energy into algal oils, hydrocarbons with the refinability of petorleum-based hydrocarbons. But while petroleum is the result of eons of pressure and heat deep below the earth’s surface, algae make oil as a matter of daily life.

The crucial point of interest about algal oils is that – unlike most plant-based biofuels – they can be refined into hydrocarbons as complex as jet fuel and plastics. This makes their marketability as potentially big as today's oil industry.

The infrastructure necessary to make algal oils a substantive replacement for petroleum oils would have to be enormous. But algal oil, unlike petroleum oil, is infinitely renewable. Investment would go into a potentially indefinitely serviceable infrastructure.

Algae also consumes carbon dioxide to grow and so would do double duty in the fight against global climate change. Finally, in its familiar guise as pond scum, algae has the ability to live off waste water and could, therefore, be used to recycle precious and ever-diminishing water supplies.

Algal oil biofuels producers are seeking the algae that grow the fastest and produce the most oil. Most do one or the other. Some do neither. Brand believes the search cannot be simplified so easily. Resistance to disease and unpredictable environmental shifts is also important.

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A very popular strain with biofuels investors: Neochloris oleoabundans. They know it grows fast and makes lots of oil. According to Brand, it comes from samples found in the 1950s in the sands of Saudi Arabia's Rub al Khali (Empty Quarter) by Srisumon Chantanachat, a Bangkok-born botanist whose University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation on it is now in the King Saud University library in Riyadh.

Wouldn't it be ironic if that turned out to be the strain that replaces oil?

Brand’s favorite strain: Dasycladales. He brought it to UT from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where it was used 50 years ago for breakthrough work on cellular genetics.

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QUOTES
- Jerry Brand, Director, Culture Collection of Algae/University of Texas, Austin: "We have more genetic diversity than in all the zoos and botanic gardens of the world put together…"
- Harrison Dillon, co-founder, algae-based diesel and jet fuel developer Solazyme Inc: "There's an enormous universe of algae out there and they have painstakingly collected and cataloged a pretty good chunk of that universe…"

From the Austin American Statesman

- Brand: "Algae have been on the back burner of most people's minds. It's pond scum. It's seaweed…Those of us who have studied algae for decades realize there is a tremendous genetic potential."
- Brand: "It is like saying I want a wheat [plant] with a high yield that grows fast…But you also have to pay attention to the wheat's disease resistance and whether it falls over when the wind blows."
- Brand, describing dasycladales: "You can see how beautiful these little guys are…"