CO2 and Commercial Algae Production
One of the big questions about President Obama’s recently announced intent to curb CO2 emissions is how industrial emitters will be required to make reductions. Carbon Capture and Sequestration methods are one way, but these are costly and have yet to be proven to work at scale.
The good news is that there’s another way. Instead of treating CO2 as waste – something to be discarded – we should be thinking of it as valuable.
The algae industry is poised to be a major consumer of waste CO2, providing a novel way for industrial emitters to not only reduce emissions, but create a new source of revenue.
This was the topic for ABO’s July 25 webinar: CO2 and Commercial Algae Production.
This recording of the webinar’s presentations begins with an update from Mike Evans at K&L Gates in Washington DC on the policy landscape for treating waste CO2 as an input, rather than as threat.
Doug Durst at Duke Energy then discusses a project his company is undertaking with the University of Kentucky to capture CO2 from power generation for use in algae cultivation.
Finally Tim Burns, President and CEO at BioProcess Algae discusses how his company is reusing CO2 from an ethanol plant to grow algae that is harvested to create animal feed and other food products in Shenandoah, Iowa.
Mary Rosenthal, ABO’s executive director, moderates a Q&A session following the presentations.
Saltwater Resources and Commercial Algae Production
This ABO-sponsored webinar, conducted on May 9, 2013, was the first in a series of live webinars that are designed to showcase the people, policies and technologies that are moving the algae industry forward. This preliminary webinar focused on the interplay of saline water availability and commercial algae production for biofuels and other products. Presenting on the topic were:
Mary Rosenthal, Executive Director of the Algae Biomass Organization
Dr. Stephen Mayfield, Director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at UC-San Diego
Dr. Mark Wigmosta, Chief Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Dr. Erik Venteris, Spatial Modeling Research Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The presentations were detailed explainations of the latest research on algae’s potential to thrive in salt water, and how the available salt water in the U.S. can support large-scale algae farming.
If you missed the webinar last week we have posted this recording of the event:
Powerpoint presentation links:
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