Nature website

When the UK's Carbon Trust last year set out to fund algal biofuels research, organizers quickly met with a mélange of overzealous claims coming from the industry. Companies were projecting biofuel yields ten times what is theoretically possible and proposing techniques that are not now and may never be economical. A year later, after wading through the claims and gathering opinions from a network of more than 300 experts, the agency announced on October 23 the creation of the Algae Biofuel Challenge, a £ 16 ($ 24) million fund that will support the development and large -scale production of algal oil.

The Carbon Trust's experience navigating algae excitement is one that funding groups and investors in the biofuels industry increasingly face. Encouraged by high oil prices and the push for alternative fuels and carbon trading, more than 100 such algae-to-fuel companies have popped up worldwide, mostly in the last couple of years, say industry experts. But, not a single commercial facility has been built, and an eagerness to be the first, plus the enticing investment along the way, has encouraged some entrepreneurs to overstate their capabilities. "Some of these operators and startup companies claim they can do anything under the sun," says Tasios Melis, an algae researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

Among startups in any nascent technology, there will be some winners and a lot of losers. But when fuel is the product, particularly apt is the old admonishment: buyer beware.

Nearly every week the industry sees another anecdotal example of algae fervor. Investors in August plunked more than $ 45 million into S. San Francisco-based Solazyme, an algal fuel company using 'synthetic biology'. The launch of a new startup, AXI, spun out of the University of Washington in Seattle, was also announced in August. In September, Sapphire Energy, a San Diego startup developing crude-like oil from algae, said it had raised more than $ 100 million. At its annual biotech meeting in October in Hanover, Germany, European Bioperspectives for the first time held algae sessions.

The draw is that algae have the potential to produce up to ten times more oil per acre than traditional biofuel crops such as oil palm (Table 1). They can survive where agricultural crops can't, such as in salt water and on marginal land. They thrive on a diet of waste carbon dioxide and the nutrients in agricultural run-off and municipal wastewater. They aren't needed for human food. And in addition to fuels, valuable co-products, such as biopolymers, proteins and animal feed can be made during the process.
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