From ethanol to algae to poultry feed

By Erin Golden WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

This greenhouse in Shenandoah, Iowa, is among those being used by Green Plains Renewable Energy to grow algae from ethanol byproducts. The harvested algae are then being tested for use as the key ingredient in poultry feed.

They grow from the stuff left over from ethanol production: carbon dioxide, heat, water.

And as it turns out, the algae produced at Green Plains Renewable Energy's ethanol plant in Shenandoah, Iowa, might be the key ingredient for poultry feed — not to mention products ranging from biodiesel to the omega-3 supplements on drugstore shelves.

The BioProcess Algae project, a joint venture involving Omaha-based Green Plains and three other companies, began operating on a commercial scale this summer.

Since then, some of the algae harvested from greenhouses lined up across a half-acre area have been sent to agricultural scientists. The goal: Figuring out if they might make animal feed that's as good as or better than the kind made of more typical sources like corn, soybeans and sorghum.

This week, Green Plains announced that the first round of feed trials yielded positive results. Tests led by a University of Illinois professor, Carl Parsons, found that algae meal provided a higher concentration of protein and amino acids to chickens than similar amounts of meal made from corn or soybeans. Samples were also tested by scientists at the University of Missouri.

"It looks like it's got quite a bit of feeding value for poultry," Parsons said.

His group has been doing feed testing for 30 years, but this is the first time algae have come into the picture, Parsons said.

BioProcess Algae CEO Tim Burns said he believes the facility in Shenandoah is the only place where algae are being grown from ethanol byproducts, harvested on a commercial level and used in feed trials.

The algae-based feed will undergo more testing before it's ready to hit the market. But Burns said the results gathered so far are a good indicator of the product's potential for feed — and other products.

Leaders of the BioProcess project hope to dedicate some of the algae for the "neutraceutical" market, which includes cosmetics and supplements. In a couple of weeks, they plan to break ground on five more acres of algae-growing space. Each acre will produce between 40 and 60 tons of algae each year.

Burns says algae are a good replacement for fish meal and fish oil, which is prized for its omega-3 acids. Algae provide the same nutrients but cut out the middle fish, so to speak.

"They're currently grinding up fish, and you're getting fish oil in your omega-3s," Burns said. "Fish are eating the algae, and that's what you're getting."

The BioProcess Algae project is operated by Green Plains along with Clarcor, a Tennessee company that specializes in filtration equipment; a related filtration company, BioProcess H2O; and NTR, an Irish renewable energy group. The companies have not released the total cost of the effort, but they did receive grants totaling more than $4 million from the Iowa Power Board Fund.

The ethanol plant on the site produces 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year. With the right infrastructure, that output could produce about 50,000 tons of biomass for feed, neutraceuticals and fuel.

Original post available here.

Genetically Modified Algae Are Magnetic, For Ease of Manipulation

By Clay Dillow Posted 10.19.2011

Magnetic Algae The wild algae on the left settles to the bottom of the test tube. The magnetic algae on the right sticks to the wall thanks to the magnet. Los Alamos National Laboratory via PhysOrg

roving that there’s always a different way to approach a problem, researchers at Los Alamos National Lab have devised a pretty clever method of algae harvesting that could take a major chunk out of the cost of algae-based biofuel production. And all they had to do was create a magnetic organism.

Scientists at LANL have genetically engineered a new kind of algae that is magnetic, which could lead to new and simple ways of both extracting genetically engineered biofuel-producing algae from water and extracting the lipids that contain the hydrocarbons from the algae. This part of the process generally accounts for roughly a third of the total cost of algae-based biofuel production, but now could conceivably be performed with a simple permanent magnet. That’s a lot simpler and cheaper than complex separating machines and other mechanical means of dividing algae from solutions.

The team created their GM magnetic algae by lifting a gene from magnetotactic bacteria--those are bacteria that use the Earth’s magnetic field to get around--and dropping it into the algae. When expressed, the gene causes the production of magnetic nanoparticles in the algae just as it does in the bacteria. Those in turn can be used to manipulate the algae.

The result: an algae that can be separated from a solution with a magnet. Why didn’t we think of this sooner?

Original post available here.

SeQuential Pacific Biodiesel hits production milestone

By Bryan Sims | November 01, 2011

For three years running, SeQuential Pacific Biodiesel LLC, a joint venture between SeQuential Biofuels and Hawaii-based Pacific Biodiesel Inc., has been offering premium biodiesel from its plant in Salem, Ore., to loyal customers in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest region. The company’s community-scale model is paying off as the plant reached a milestone surpassing its 10 millionth gallon of biodiesel produced from used cooking oil.

The plant, which officially came online in the fall of 2008, launched with an annual capacity of 1 MMgy, but it has since ramped up production volume, said general manager Tyson Keever, adding that he expects his plant to hit about 5 million gallons this year alone.

“The Pacific Biodiesel model of community-scale I think has really been validated in what we’re doing here with vertical integration from [waste cooking oil] collection to production to retail,” Keever told Biodiesel Magazine.

Through its subsidiary Encore Oils, SeQuential Pacific collects used cooking oil from approximately 5,000 restaurants in Salem and neighboring sites in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. The oil is processed at its Salem production facility into biodiesel, which is then sold either directly to its customers or sold through terminals and distributors. Keever said his company is retailing B99 for about $3.99 per gallon right now.

“We try to have a strong relationship with the restaurants and focus on production that’s available from regional feedstock, and then try to have a strong relationship with the end-user as well,” Keever said.

He added that the company intends to secure additional contracts for used cooking oil from restaurants, along with potentially making efficiency upgrades to the Salem plant with help from Pacific Biodiesel, which is currently building a biodiesel plant on the Big Island of Hawaii expected to be operational by early next year.

“We’re hoping to be able to follow suit with some of that new technology soon thereafter,” Keever said.

Producers like SeQuential Pacific are benefitting from an in-state biodiesel mandate that went into effect in April when the 15 MMgy threshold was triggered requiring all diesel fuel sold in the state to contain a minimum of 5 percent biodiesel. Diesel fuels used in locomotives, marine engines and home heating applications are exempt from the mandate.

Original post available here.

Australian algae facility passes environmental permitting process

By Luke Geiver | October 19, 2011

Algae.Tec, an algae-to-fuels developer from Australia, has three years to prove out its enclosed modular algae growing systems after the Shoalhaven City Council of Australia approved the necessary permitting to Algae.Tec. The Environmental Planning and Assessment Act will give Algae.Tec the go-ahead to build a demonstration facility called Shoalhaven One near the Manildra Group’s ethanol facility south of Sydney. The permit is effective immediately, and after three years, Algae.Tec will have the option of expansion. The site near the ethanol facility will capture CO2 from the ethanol plant’s fermentors for use as a growth medium to feed the enclosed growth systems developed and constructed by Algae.Tec in an 18,200 square foot facility in Atlanta.

Roger Stroud, executive chairman for Algae.Tec, said that the system is one of the only advanced biofuels production approaches that utilizes such a system, and according to the company, the system “is less than one tenth the land footprint of pond growth options, while its enclosed module system is designed to produce algae biomass in virtually any environment on the planet.”

The permitting granted by Shoalhaven now means that the company can continue on its vision to supply the enclosed systems to places like China, or build a commercial facility in Perth. Each enclosed photobioreactor is housed in a used freight car optimized to house the system. The price for each unit is roughly $125,000. The demonstration facility will use the units built in Atlanta to test various industrial CO2 off-gases from the ethanol facility in addition to the ethanol fermentors, all according to Stroud, to help Algae.Tec test and verify the use of multiple input gas streams into the system.

The container systems utilize the CO2 piped into each container, as well as rotating parabolic light collectors that feed the captured light into a fiber optic system to help the algae grow in ideal conditions. Each module can produce roughly 250 dry tons of algae per year, and for a grouping of 500 units linked together, Peter Hatfull, managing director for the company, said that the cost would equal roughly $64 million. Stroud said that the fuel (biodiesel) produced from the algae grown near the Manildra site will be used by the armed forces.

Original post available here.

$2.2 million grant enables algae research

A recent $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is allowing Washington University to take part in a collaborative study on fuel-generating bacteria.

The goal of the project is to find ways to modify certain photosynthetic bacteria to generate clean energy more efficiently, Dr. Himadri B. Pakrasi, George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, said.

Pakrasi, the current director of the University’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy & Sustainability (I-CARES), is one of the principal researchers involved in the project.

“It turns out that we can modify the sugar generated by each of these cell factories to build chemical precursors that are key to the production of biofuels and many other [useful] chemicals,” he said.

Pakrasi said research on photosynthetic energy has been ongoing. It centers on the natural process of photosynthesis which is carried out by all plant cells and which uses water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to produce sugar without creating harmful waste products.

Specifically, researchers use cyanobacteria, a form of blue-green algae, because they can easily manipulate its genetic composition.

The three-year study, which began last month, is a collaborative effort with Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University. Pakrasi said that working with the other institutions will enable the project to achieve greater success.

“No individual research group has all the expertise needed to make success. It is the collective effort that produces the beautiful product,” Pakrasi said.

While photosynthetic energy is quickly garnering widespread attention, with many laboratories around the world performing similar research, the inefficiency of the processes involved has prevented its commercial use.

This particular research links together two modern approaches: systems and synthetic biology. The systems approach involves studying the cyanobacterium to understand its metabolism and the way it interacts with other things. The synthetic approach uses this information to combine the bacterium with new parts, such as genes or proteins, to make important molecules like polyethylene, which is important in the rubber industry.

Researchers involved expect the first paper of the project to be published early in the summer of 2012.

“This century should be totally dedicated toward solving [the] whole issue of energy,” Dr. Pakrasi said. “And…students should be passionate about it.”

Original post is available here: http://www.studlife.com/news/academics/2011/10/31/2-2-million-grant-enables-algae-research/