Profit margin: Algae-to-biofuel venture says it's solved industry-vexing puzzles
"Traveling Wave Tube" sounds like something you’d throw in the car for a trip to the beach, though it’s actually a breakthrough technology being used by Photon8 Inc., a Brownsville-based company whose goal is the commercially viable production of biofuel from algae.
Now the company hopes to get its message across to the industry at large and, especially, deep-pocketed government agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy.
Brad Bartilson, Photon8’s president and CEO, says the Traveling Wave Tube technology boosts algae growth by 500 percent, representing a major advance in the profitable conversion of algae to biofuel — "profitable" being the key word.
The company, which set up shop at the ITEC Center last August, is just one among several ventures laboring to develop algae-to-biofuel, though none is as focused on the bottom line as Photon8, he says. The problem with other similar ventures, he says, is that equipment capital costs are so high that commercial-scale production isn’t feasible.
He invented his own patent-pending "photo-bio reactor" in order to slash production costs. Now, Traveling Wave Tube promises to cut costs further by dispensing with limits normally imposed on algae-to-biofuel production during "degassing" and the addition of carbon to the algae. In a nutshell, algae "broth" is exposed to sunlight in order to produce oily "lipids" — the more the better. The lipids are harvested for biodiesel production.
Bartilson, who recently chaired the Algae World Summit in San Diego, Calif., May 17-18, says that in addition to boosting algae growth fivefold, Photon8 has discovered how to coax more lipids out of individual algae cells through genetic manipulation. He’s dubbed the genetically modified cells Photon8’s scientists have been working with the last several months "mutants of interest."
Typically, algae cells are artificially stressed — basically by starving them of nutrients — to pump up lipid production. It works, Bartilson says, but it takes a while, which limits how much biofuel can be produced in a given time period. Photon8’s team has figured out a short cut, Bartilson says.
"If you’re in production what you care about is how much oil (the cells) produce a day." he says. "Now we have confirmation that these cells are producing lipids at twice the rate of a wild cell."
Despite the breakthroughs, Bartilson finds himself struggling against a perception in the algae-biofuel industry that some problems are insurmountable — including the ones Photon8 claims to have surmounted.
"It’s so frustrating for me," he says. "I feel like were fighting town hall to some extent. Those that came out first are now being looked at as the ‘forefathers.’ The mantra from these folks is nobody has solved the confounding issues — (they say) we don’t have algae that can produce at the rate we need, and second there is no growth system that can have profitability. We have those, so we have to make believers."
