I joined Seambiotic five months ago, to move the company forward commercially from a research-centered existance. We have, for the past four years, been successfully growing algae using flue gas from a coal-fired power station on a 1,000m2 pilot site within the Israel Electric Corporation’s Ashkelon power plant.

 

In the past couple of weeks we have signed a joint venture with one of the fifth largest electric companies in China, China Guodian Corporation. We will build a 10 hectare plant (100,000m2) attached to the power station in Penglai [to be operational in 2010].

 

Biofuel is going to need very large amounts of land to make it economically viable, and it’s going to need enabling technologies, both in harvesting and in extraction, and in genetics. There’s a whole industry that needs to mature. Looking at the biofuel side, you need to have the right strain of algae that can grow as quickly as possible. Actually growing the algae is our core business.

 

10 hectares may sound like quite a lot, but for biofuels it’s nothing. However, it is an essential step in the process. In order to get to the levels of cultivation needed to make biodiesel and biofuel viable, you need to learn to grow that amount of algae.

 

A magnitude larger than the 100,000m2 that we are building at the moment. A couple of months ago at the biofuel summit in San Diego, people were talking about 1,000 or 10,000 hectares. That is when it becomes interesting on an economic level.

We’re going to need to go through the process of 10 hectares and 100 hectares, and then getting up to the thousand hectares, in around five years. It’s hard to say how fast we can start doing the work and finding the funding to grow that amount of algae. On the upstream, genetic element, there are a lot of ventures that are looking into that at the moment, and that may be a five-year process. Downstream [harvesting and extraction], it’s a matter of the investment people are willing to make. It will be a number of years before all of these different pieces come together.

 

Generally positively. There’s a dichotomy in trying to grow algae profitably in the near term and meeting the long-term goals of creating a biofuel industry. People still see algae biofuel as a young industry, very much rooted in technology and academic institutions. We’re one of the very few companies at the forefront of the commercial side, which is garnering a lot of interest. But we still need to reach the stage where they really understand that there is a commercially viable prospect around this area.

 

Yes. We’re looking to build a slightly smaller farm in Israel that we can use partly commercially, partly as a larger research facility. We’re putting a round of funding together [for this] that should be officialized in the new year.

 

It depends on a very large number of parameters. The first is the size of the power plant. The second is the size of the farm. We are doing lot of research to try to improve the productivity of our farms. There is a long way to go to significantly increase productivity in a number of different ways, from water depth to churning of the water to help the algae grow faster, to the concentration of CO2 that you can put into the water.

 

Every gram of algae needs two grams of CO2 to grow. That’s basic photosynthesis. We are looking at ways of increasing that. But then the question is, how much land do you need to grow one tonne of algae, and how many tonnes of CO2 are produced by your power plant? Once you put those two together, you can begin to see what sort of size of farm you need to take between 10 percent and 20 percent of the CO2 [from a power plant]. If we can get to that level, that will be of significant interest, but we are some way from getting there.

 

This is going to work when it is competitive. If it’s cheaper to buy one fuel than another, then people won’t buy. At the moment, it’s at least a factor of ten. For cultivation, we are trying to significantly reduce the prices. As you grow more algae, you grow it more efficiently, and you grow it using cheaper capital expenditures.

 

You need the technology to take water with algae at 0.1 percent concentration, take the algae out, and then take the oil out of the algae. The first barrier is in our hands: grow algae cheaply. That is a necessary part, but not the only part of cracking this problem.

 

If and when, and I hope it’s when, we crack the challenges, and the enabling technologies are in place, biodiesel becomes a very large proportion of [our business]. It is a mass market, which will dwarf anything else. Until we manage to crack those challenges, we are looking for other ways of growing our company, and becoming profitable, and being able to use some of those profits to invest into research and development on the biofuel and the carbon capture side.

 

Scale up. In order to be successful on the biofuel market, you need to know how to grow very large amounts of algae. The only way of learning how to do that is doing it. You need to do it on hectare after hectare of land. We are looking for other people to play their part, both upstream and downstream. If we can do our part, and everybody else can do their part, then there’s a very exciting prospect there for this industry.