Solazyme is most strikingly different from its competitors for the fact that its organisms produce not just transportation fuels, but also other consumer products-a way to diversify their business and leverage high-cost goods against the low price bar set for fuels.
Dillon started Solazyme with some colleagues in 2003 , and kept a culture collection of a couple hundred Chlamydomonas strains in his own low-tech facility. "We bought the growth media, sterilized it in my kitchen, and stored it in the garage," he remembers.
They tried to grow the algae in outdoor ponds, but quickly realized that the productivity of the algae was nowhere near high enough to yield appreciable amounts of fuel. So they switched to heterotrophic species of algae, which directly consume carbon-based compounds rather than passively absorbing carbon dioxide from surrounding media.
Dillon says that he expects Solazyme to be producing algal biofuel at "demonstration levels of tens to thousands of gallons" per day by 2009, and aims to be producing its fuel products at commercial levels by 2011. "The scalability is not something that frightens me too much," he says.
See more
Dillon started Solazyme with some colleagues in 2003 , and kept a culture collection of a couple hundred Chlamydomonas strains in his own low-tech facility. "We bought the growth media, sterilized it in my kitchen, and stored it in the garage," he remembers.
They tried to grow the algae in outdoor ponds, but quickly realized that the productivity of the algae was nowhere near high enough to yield appreciable amounts of fuel. So they switched to heterotrophic species of algae, which directly consume carbon-based compounds rather than passively absorbing carbon dioxide from surrounding media.
Dillon says that he expects Solazyme to be producing algal biofuel at "demonstration levels of tens to thousands of gallons" per day by 2009, and aims to be producing its fuel products at commercial levels by 2011. "The scalability is not something that frightens me too much," he says.
See more
By the way, have you subscribed to the Oilgae Blog?; How about joining the Oilgae mailing list?; and our forum to discuss on with others?
No comments:
Post a Comment