In an interview with Bob Walsh, CEO of Aurora Biofuels, this GreenTech TV reporter was able to uncover the resources and technology required for algae biofuels to make it on a global scale.
Walsh spent over a quarter century working at Shell. Walsh explains, “My last job was in Europe where I was responsible for over 100 million gallons a day. I was in charge of everything from buying the crude that went into the refineries to what the refineries then made and then putting it in the gas station and the distributors.”
Walsh didn’t realize it at that time he was probably the biggest distributor of biofuels because his company was producing 5 million gallons of biofuels a day, by mandate. He has had a lot experience in the earlier generations of biofuels, such as ethanols and canola diesel, and was once the President of LS9, a company researching sugar based bacterial fermentation process.
Walsh’s goals for his company and algae biofuels is very practical. Explaining the process, Walsh states, “Regular petroleum is going to be here for a while. That is the reality. We use it and there are pluses and minuses. What drew me into algae is that it’s really feedstock play. In the case of algae, you’re actually taking the CO2 from an industrial source—a power plant, ammonia, aluminum, a smelter type plant—and combining with the algae and you’re trying to grow plants, water them, fertilize them, and harvest them and break those down into sugars that you can ferment, and extract either alcohol and other things.”
Algae is scalable solution. It doesn’t compete with crop lands or plants. With algae, Aurora Biofuels can use salt water and dry barren land. From an economic standpoint, no biofuel will be successful if it has to compete with food.
Algae are very productive. They double in growth every day. Aurora Biofuels uses open ponds, which are very low cost. The ponds are 12 inches deep but two inches deep in the pond, there’s no more light. Algae won’t grow without the light because it needs the CO2 and the photons from the light.
This is where Aurora Biofuels has made a competitive edge. Walsh explains, “[The company] has actually had a biotech improvement which doubles the productivity from the light so that it can absorb more light. This new strain is not transgenic, [but] a natural mutation. We’re doing [this process] at pilot scale right now, so we can make gallons of biodiesel a day.”
The strain that Walsh refers to is a key advantage of Aurora Biofuels. This strain is more efficient and productive when it comes to fast growth as well as producing oil. Many strains emphasize in one over the other, but Aurora Biofuel’s patent pending strain has reached an optimal balance.
Walsh explained that this was a difficult process. “What our team did was go out and taken water samples from all around the US. We would grow the bacteria in buckets and see certain species dominate the area. The amount of oil each algae produces varies significantly from speices to species. We have thousands of samples. We’re constantly looking at all these strains and quickly looking at what ones grow fast and what ones have a lot of oil. And you find that the lab has very different conditions than outdoors. You want to see if you can do the same thing outdoors, and not all the time can you do the same thing. You just find the ones that can grow well and produce a lot of oil outdoors and you use that.”
With 16 patents pending, 4 or 5 queued, Aurora Biofuels is taking the steps to compete with crude oil. Crude oil can only be replaced if the oil extracted from algae is not only more cost effective but produced efficiently and consistently. Aurora Biofuels is persistently working to become a mass producer of algae biofuels and make the necessary step of becoming a strong competitor against crude oil.