By Katharine Fraser on September 25, 2009 4:13 PM

The idea of deriving biofuels from algae could be dismissed as weird science or wishful thinking. Yet now that the likes of ExxonMobil and Dow, giants of the refining and petrochemicals world, are getting involved along with other big business names, the slippery and currently evasive algae could gain traction as an energy source. Still, the proof will be in the ascension of a profitable, commercialized algae oil business.

Many "algaepreneurs" gathered at a National Algae Association meeting this month were joined by representatives of traditional energy companies, noted Barry Cohen, executive director of the trade group. The NAA coined the term algaepreneurs as an umbrella term for the various algae aspirants, including producers, equipment manufacturers, researchers, and so on.

The trade group is based in The Woodlands, Texas, a planned community in the middle of US Gulf Coast region, the heart of the country's refining and petrochemical sector. The proposed algae uses range from food -- for animal feedstocks and human nutritional supplements -- to ethanol and biodiesel. Another idea from an outfit called LiveFuels would place algae in the so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to eat nutrients runoff from American farms coming out of the Mississippi, and then harvest fish that would feed off the algae.

To Cohen, the primary driver is to use biofuels to supplant US petroleum imports. He says that algae is an ideal renewable resource because it can be harvested two to three times in 24 hours. "This is the fastest growing plant in the universe," he said in a September 24 interview.

Two men and a sledgehammer

At the NAA meeting, a presenter from Bayer MaterialScience was promoting the versatility of his company's Makrolon polycarbonate, which he suggested could be used in film form to maximize the effects of sunlight in a bioreactor for algae farming. The Makrolon presentation included a video of the plastic in a decidedly thicker form that can be used for security applications. In the demonstration, two men repeatedly fail to break through the material with a sledgehammer. In turns, they also tried weakening the material by heating it with a blow torch and cooling it with blasts of CO2 , but ultimately the sledgehammer only appeared at best to chip away at the surface.

This demonstration, which drew laughter among the algae enthusiasts and the curious in the audience, could currently stand as an inadvertent metaphor for the nascent, frustrated algae-to-biofuel industry, since no one has yet appeared on the scene with a way to economically produce commercial volumes of such fuel. Or, if anyone has cracked the code, they have not come out and announced it. Cohen says the know-how exists, but capital is required to fully industrialize the processes. "All this industry needs is the capital," he said.

'Fancy hobby' meets Dow

Paul Woods, CEO of Algenol Biofuels, said his company, which has a grant application pending with the US Department of Energy for a pilot on the Texas Gulf Coast, will move forward with or without outside funding. He has tried for more than 20 years to make ethanol using algae, saltwater and CO2 at the outset of the process, with byproducts that include fresh water and oxygen. The idea would not have taken hold in others' imagination but for concerns about global warming and greenhouse gases, he said in an interview earlier this summer.

"It was a fancy hobby" when he started playing around with the idea, and his "wife gave me the look a few times" over the years, Woods said. Now, his company has teamed with Dow, Georgia Tech and others, and applied for a $25 million grant to boost a pilot project that would be located at Dow's massive Freeport, Texas, facility. Even if Algenol fails to get a DOE grant, Woods said he would like to pursue the pilot with $25 million Algenol itself has committed to the project.

For Dow Chemical, the Algenol pilot would dovetail with its initiatives in alternative feedstocks and bio-based products, Steve Tuttle, its biosciences business director, said in an interview this summer. The project is pending while the partners await word on the DOE application, a Dow spokeswoman said September 25. Dow's contribution include its process engineering approach and research on films that could enhance sunlight within a bioreactor, according to Tuttle and his colleague, Mark Hofius, Dow's senior research and development leader.

One of the solutions they say they need to come up with is film technology that can set forth a "cost-effective" process for algae harvesting on an industrial scale. While the Algenol project would be for ethanol production, Dow is also interested in the related possibilities for ethylene production. The key objective with the algae-based ethanol pilot is to "create a low-cost environment for the biotechnology to work," Tuttle said.