[MUSIC]

My name is Robert McBride.

I'm the Associate Director of Cultivation at Sapphire Energy, and today I'm

going to talk a little bit about

production processes for producing biofuels from algae.

And I think a really good place to start this conversation is to

talk about the, the demand for the fuel that you would be producing, right?

And so what I'm showing you here is a graph of, global oil consumption.

This is on a daily basis, so this is, you now, a million barrels of oil a day,

so right now, in 2015, we're consuming somewhere between

80 and 90 million barrels of oil a day.

And the graph also shows how that projected demand is,

is going to increase as as you go through time, right.

So, the world population is increasing, the demand for energy's

increasing but it turns out that our supply isn't increasing, right.

So, as you go through time and population increases and your demand

for energy increases, there's going to be this projected gap, illustrated by the red

box over here, and a lot of people are spending a lot

of time really thinking about how that gap is going to be filled.

And I put this data up here because I want to illustrate that any solution to, to

mitigating the challenge that is expressed by this

gap needs to be a solution that's scalable, right?

You need to be making multi million barrels of oil a day,

and it needs to be, it needs to be low cost, right?

You're dealing, with oil.

It's a commodity.

And typically, with commodities, you've got huge

volumes, and margins are very thin, right?

So, you've got to be able to compete in a, in a very

low cost environment, that's scalable, to be

able to tackle this challenge, completely, right?

And so, a lot of people think algae has the ability to do this.

And you know, an important component in understanding how we could

take algae to the scale is to, is to take lessons from

other activities that we, as humans, have scaled to the level

that we think is necessary to be able to impact fuel, right.

And one of those is agriculture and when you think about agriculture, it's scale.

Only four traits are important.

productivity, crop protection, harvestability, and and product profile.

And so, what I'm going to do, for the remainder

of this talk is, is walk through how each one of

these are, being thought of, and, and being, you know, implemented

in the production of algae for the, for, for bio fuels.

So, whe, when we're talking about productivity there is,

there is a number of different ways that we

can actually produce algae to generate biomass and the,

they're primarily broken down into two broad areas, right.

You can either have reactors that are open to the environment and, and

these are, you know, most often ponds that are just generally classified as

open reactors and then you've got reactors that are not open to the

to the environment, right, and these

are closed bio reactors or, or photobioreactors.

And so, you know, just to walk you through what

types of reactors these look like, we've got some open ponds,

over here, and, and these, are reactors that tend to be

less expensive, and they tend to be, easier to scale, right?

And here are some examples.

There are some of the, ponds that are used

to produce, beta kerotine with Dunaliella in, in Australia.

This whole size is around 700 hectares.

The largest of these ponds is around, 200 hectares.

So, you know?

You can scale this.

It's a very, sort of low engineered pond, right?

It just essentially has four walls.

It's filled up.

It relies on wind for mixing.

So a very sort of, at one end a very you know, unengineered system.

And then we have an example, on the bottom here, of a shallow cascade.

And the way algae is mixed in this system is it's

collected at the bottom, pumped up to the top and then gravity

allows it to run down over this cascade and this is

an example of a shallow cascade used in Czechoslovakia, production of chlorella.

The top right here we have some examples of Oswald ponds, so these are traditional

raceway ponds, so they are a circle and the water goes around it in a raceway

configuration developed in the 50s by, by Oswald,

actually a guy here from California and we've

got an example of some ponds out in

Calipatria being used for the production of Spirulina.

And then on the bottom right we have another Oswald pond.

however, the moat, form of motivation on this Oswald pond is jets.

And these, Oswald ponds are motivated by paddle wheels.

So just different ways to motivate them.

And this is an example of Oswald ponds from Australia where, raw

algae has them, and using them to produce nano crops as biomass.

So, again, the key thing with Oswalds are

that they are less expensive, they're sort of one

of the cheaper ponds in terms of the cost

for production, but they tend to be less productive.

And I'll go into a little bit more detail about the

advantages and disadvantages of the different types of ponds in a second.

But just to give you a, a feel for what closed systems look like, so

these are some examples of some photobioreactors

that are used for the production of algae.

Flat-plate photobioreactors have large illuminated surfaces

and allow high density of growth.

Right, there's a lot of light, so you can get really dense cultures.

Tubular photobioreactors, tubes that are horizontal

to the light, but will, horizontal to

the light, one of the challenges there is that the scale-up potential is limited.

And then you have column photobioreactors.

One of the great things about column photobioreactors is you

get a lot of head and so you were really

efficient mass transfer rates for, you know, gas, and you've

got pretty good control over a lot of the growth conditions.

But just to summarize these two, you know, these two sort of

primary ways of growing algae and some of their advantages and disadvantages.

This is a good table that gives you a high level overview of that.

So, to recap.

Raceway ponds.

The advantages of them.

Relatively cheap and you got low energy inputs.

The disadvantages are that you tend to get lower productivity out of these systems.

You need a lot of land to grow them

on, because of productivity is a little bit lower.

They're open ponds.

Crop protection is a huge issue.

You have to be able to manage it for this to be an effective

strategy and you don't get great mixing

which impacts light and carbon dioxide utilization, right.

So, definitely, advantages in terms of scalability and

cost, but some challenges in terms of productivity.

And then, as far as the photobioreactors go,

the advantages are that they're, you know, you get

really high productivities, you get really good efficiencies

in terms of light utilization, and nutrient use efficiencies.

They're compact.

You can get a lot of biomass produced on a small area.

But the challenges are that they're really expensive, some of them do have issues

with the phenotypes of algae that will actually grow on the edge of the walls.

Contamination is not as bad as the open ponds, but it's still an issue.

And quite a lot of them have issues with temperature control, right?

So, pros and cons, depending on what it is that you're

trying to make and, and what the cost is of the

product that you're trying to make may determine what are these,

which of these systems you would be interested in, in using.

okay, so, that talks a little bit about productivity, right and about how to

actually produce it, so that's describing the

fields that you could use for using algae.

And now another a sort of a trait that we're interested in is crop protection.

And as I mentioned, if you're in an open pond,

that's a little bit of a different scenario than closed photobioreactors.

And I'm going to focus on open ponds for,

for this section of the crop protection discussion.

But as you could imagine, with open ponds,

everything and anything that comes in on the wind

can actually end up in the pond, and a fraction of what ends up in the pond

is actually going to impact the productivity of the

algae and it could just you know, it could

be anything from taking a fraction of the

productivity, to actually causing the productivity to stop, right?

And so, a critical element in being able to, grow algae outdoors, is

you've got to manage the pests that will end up in a pond.

And looking to agriculture, again, for some of the lessons of sort of,

you know, taking an integrated pest

management approach, it's a fairly straightforward process.

You need to understand, of the fraction of the contaminants that

are in the pond, what fraction of those contaminants actually impact productivity.

And the way you do that is,

taking advantage of you know, [UNKNOWN], so there's

a lot of lab work involved but you know, assuming you find some organisms that

impact productivity, you've got to be able to track them and, and, then you, once

you contract them in the ponds, they get to a level that you don't like.

Then you have to be able to deploy a strategy

to manage them, and that cycle just repeats through time.

Right?

And so what I have here is an example of a common pest that

we see in Sapphire Energy, out at

our production facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

It's it's a chytrid fungus, well, it's not actually

a chytrid, it's a basil fungus related to chytrid, and

just to give you a quick overview of how it

works, so this is the motile stage of the chytrid.

It floats around in your pond.

Comes in on the wind.

Floats around in your pond.

Attaches to algae cells and then starts to develop

and use the algae to produce a lot of progeny.

And and those progeny will then get

released and repeat the cycle over and over.

And on the right here, we have a

scanning electromicrograph illustrating the same the same principle.

And this is done in collaboration with Pete Lecter at the University of Alabama.

And it gives you a great idea about what the life history is

of one these pests, but anyways, ways you manage these pests, and particularly

this pest, is you deploy a chemical, and in our case its a

pesticide you track the pest using real

time tracking devices such as quantitative PCR.

Pests get to a certain level, you deploy a strategy and the

pest goes down and then, you know, maybe it will come back again.

Just to give you an example in, in

the worst case conditions, with the right meteorological

conditions you know, from detection to a pond

being completely dead can take around 48 hours.

So, this is a real issue for open ponds.

You've really got to be able to manage it.

Different strategies for managing it, other than chemicals.

There are mechanical mechanisms for managing crop protection such as pumps.

They tend to work well on larger grazing microorganisms such as such as rotifers.

The pumps will actually physically disrupt those organisms and then you

can deploy biological strategies which

will take advantage of trophic interactions.

For example, deploying rotifers intentionally.

Because they may preferentially feed on the enemy of your of your algae, right?

So the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

That's a strategy that you can employ, and

that has been employed at scale fairly effectively.

You've got the algae, you've grown it in these outdoor ponds,

you've got a lot of biomass, you've managed to keep it

from dying by crop protecting it well, and the next thing

you have to do is get that algae out of the water.

And this actually is a, is a fairly energy, energetically-intensive step.

And they're you can do this in, in a number of different ways.

And what I'm illustrating here is, four of the main

ways that people used to separate algae from the water.

You have a centrifuge, uses gravity.

You have filters which use a size differential.

You can use flocculation, which either involves just letting organisms settle

naturally, or putting a polymer into the the culture, which will make

them aggregate and then settle out, or you can use the dissolved

air flotation, which typically is used in conjunction with, with a polymer.

And again, as I mentioned this can be a single step process.

Or you can use these technologies in combination

with one another to actually get more concentration.

So, for example, you could harvest algae using dissolved air flotation,

and then take that product and concentrate it using a centrifuge.

And that way, you don't use the centrifuge as much,

because you're working on a much smaller amount of, of biomass,

concentrating down a smaller stream than you would if you

were just trying to use a centrifuge on an open pond.

So, you've got that biomass and the next step

is to take that biomass and convert it into energy.

And with algae biomass, there's actually a lot

of options out there that people have done

a lot of work on understanding how to

actually convert this this, this biomass to energy.

But essentially, it's broken down into two areas.

Thermochemical conversion and biochemical conversion,

and in thermochemical conversion there's gasification,

which will produce syngas, thermochemical

liquefaction, which will bio oil, pyrolysis.

Which produces bio syngas and charcoal, and then direct combustion

to produce heat, which will obviously be used to produce electricity.

And then, as far as biochemical conversion, anaerobic

[UNKNOWN] will produce methane and hydrogen you can

ferment it to get ethanol and you can

also photobiotically produce hydrogen and that's another strategy, so.

Lots of options for producing, energy from algae.

But the key thing with any of these strategies, is,

you want to make sure that, what you're doing makes sense, right?

And, and, what do I mean by make sense?

The barrel of oil or the barrel of energy that you are

producing from algae needs to, consume

less energy than it actually produces, right?

And so what we have, over here, is a graph

with a, an energy return on investment, and greenhouse gas emissions.

And I just want to orient you quickly.

If the number's one, what that means is that you're breaking even, right?

You're producing as much energy as you'll consume during the production process.

And so, typically, when you're making energy, what you want to be

doing is you want to be making more energy than you're consuming, right?

You want to be contributing to the system and not just breaking even.

And so this is a paper that was recently put out where we took data

from Sapphire took data from its pilot-scale

facility out in Las Cruces and Columbus, New

Mexico, and used that data to make

projections about what the earned return on inv,

on investment would be, energy return on investment

would be, when we had our full-scale operation.

And as you can see, we've got gasoline over here, right?

So gasoline has a, has a, has a high EROI.

Which means it's you know, gets a lot more energy out

of it than you put in to actually getting that gasoline.

Some other options, second generation biofuel options, don't have a

great EROI, but algae actually, with the data that we've generated

from our, from our, production side, shows that has a

really good EROI and also has relatively low greenhouse gas emissions.

So, when we get it to scale it's going to

be a great solution for you know, for that gap

that I talked about in the beginning of the presentation,

that energy gap that we got coming down the road.

Production Processes for Biofuels from Algae Part 1

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