Green Gold?
John FleckBeginning some time late this year, a site in the Deming-Columbus area will be home to a bold experiment aimed at developing the next generation of renewable fuels: algae.
The project, a federal-private partnership headed by California-based Sapphire Energy, is an attempt to demonstrate the viability of growing algae in ponds and squeezing out the fatty tissues to make a drop-in replacement for crude oil-based fossil fuels.
"We call it 'green crude,'" Sapphire vice president Tim Zenk told me in an interview.
There is a lot of enthusiasm in New Mexico right now about the promise of what Zenk and other algae biofuel developers hope to achieve. But algae-based fuel production has a long history, a review of which suggests caution is in order this time 'round.
The potential advantages are numerous. Algae can be grown with brackish water, takes up much less land per unit of fuel produced compared with corn ethanol, and can be grown in ponds built on land not now used for farming. That avoids one of the huge problems associated with biofuels - the problem of competition with the world's food supply.
But those who have worked in the field for decades say that there is, for now, a catch: no one knows yet how to algae cheaply enough to make it economically viable as a fuel source.
From the oil spikes of the 1970s to the mid-1990s, federal researchers, including some based in Roswell, worked on the algae problem. When that work was shut down, the researchers involved produced a "close-out report" that is a must-read for people interested in algae biofuels today. (pdf here)
Its basic conclusion was that algae was just not cost effective.
Researchers armed today with 21st century biotech tools think they have overcome many of the problems, but for now there is no way of knowing whether they've made sufficient progress, simply because no one has demonstrated the technology by producing commercial quantities, said John Benemann, who worked on the old algae program and is one of the world's leading experts in the field.
The bottom line, according to New Mexico State University economist Meghan Starbuck, is that we won't know the answer until someone builds a plant and starts making algae. "Until anybody actually commercializes it," Starbuck said, "there's just a lot of unknowns."
More in Sunday's Albuquerque Journal. (Picture of algae courtesy Sapphire Energy)
