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Algae are widely investigated with biodiesel production. While numerous companies are working to break barriers associated with commercial-scale algal biodiesel production, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Genifuel Corp. have embraced algae, or aquatic biomass, for a different purpose—natural gas production.
The companies are working to perfect a catalytic gasification process, which U.S. DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) recently granted Genifuel an exclusive license for, and to develop a technique to efficiently grow and harvest aquatic biomass for use as a feedstock.
The companies think their process, which was originally developed as a technique to clean up industrial and food processing waste as an alternative to incineration, will be more efficient than other methods of gasifying biomass.
Now, it’s just a matter of maintaining funding while fine-tuning and scaling up the system to prove it can be commercially viable.
I work for a company that specializes in biomass gasification, so I thought this article was interesting. I know ethanol plants are looking at gasification as a way to improve the amount of energy they recover per bushel of corn. I also just attended an algal biodiesel presentation which was talking up the biomass yield that algae provides over other biomass. I wonder if gasification might speed algal biomass to the market.
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