Would like to hear from the bio chemical engineers in Assamnet.
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Central & Southern Asia Biofuels News
How Chennai Startup Is Using Seaweed to Drive India's Biofuel Thrust
by Hari Pulakkat, The Economic Times, India Knight Ridder/Tribune Business
News
July 29, 2011
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The breakthrough idea came after two years of work. Sea6 Energy founders were
convinced till then that microalgae held the secrets to a clean energy future.
So did thousands of other entrepreneurs, researchers and investors around the
world.
Algae could produce many times more oil per unit area than any plant in the
world. But two years into the project, and some serious calculations later,
four students and their professor at IIT Madras were convinced that microalgae
economics just wouldn't work for some time.
Renewable energy isn't anyway economical at the moment without subsidies, but
algal biofuels seemed hopelessly uneconomical. It was then that they thought of
macroalgae.
Macroalgae is a technical term for seaweed. It seemed an extremely attractive
proposition as an oil source even at first look. Seaweed grows in the shallow
ocean waters and doesn't need land.
Technology for its cultivation is well-established: it is being grown in the
Tamil Nadu coast as a raw material for some cosmetics. Seaweed does not need
external nutrients for growth: the sea is the ultimate nutrient reservoir. It
grows quickly, is cheap and easy to harvest.
Microalgae on the other hand needed fresh water, large nutrient inputs and
plenty of land. "We were preparing to abandon the project when we realised that
we were chasing the wrong idea," says Sea6 Energy chairman Shrikumar
Suryanarayan. Suryanarayan was for two decades the head of R&D at Biocon.
He had left his job there in 2008 and was teaching at IIT Madras when some
students sought his help to enter the prestigious iGEM competition at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. They were denied a visa
but still won a prize after making a video presentation.
Shrikumar then got them interested in biofuels. "We went to algal biofuel
conferences and realised that we were at the same level as others," says Sayash
Kumar, one of the students. Two years later, when they had finished their
master's degree and were beginning to disperse, somebody thought of seaweed.
Only three other organizations then worked on macroalgal biofuel: Bio
Architecture Labs based in San Franscisco, the Korean Institute of Industrial
Technology and the Philippines government. The microalgal biofuels landscape
was littered with startups, but with no commercial breakthrough in sight, many
of them were no longer able to raise money. Yet the sector has seen some of the
biggest investments in renewable energy.
Silicon-Valley-based Synthetic Genomics got $300 million from Exxon-Mobil, and
San -Diego-based Sapphire Energy has so far raised $100 million. Pike Research
has predicted the global biofuels market to reach $247 billion by the year
2020. It was a good business in the long term.
Sea6 Energy was formed in July 2010. Shrikumar and a few IIT alumni chipped in
with about Rs 1 crore to get the company going. Their first challenge was to
tackle the seaweed cultivation itself. Pepsi had got together people in coastal
Tamil Nadu to cultivate seaweed for its food products. The price of seaweed is
now Rs 20 a kg. To be viable as a biofuel input, its price has to come down to
Rs 5 a kg.
Since the entire cost of cultivation was in labor, mechanization was the only
way to bring it down. Farmers cultivate seaweed on floating bamboo rafts in
calm waters. Biofuel demands its cultivation on a very large scale, and in
rough waters around most of the country's shores.
So the first job of Sea6 Energy was to create a strong framework to anchor the
seaweed, which is heavier than water and sinks to the sea bottom. It was not a
trivial problem but not impossible either.
The sea is a hostile environment but marine engineers had been working with
several good materials. Sea6 realized that bamboo rafts break because they were
rigid structures. A mesh structure that can move at the vertices would absorb
the stress quite easily.
The company developed an offshore farming system, based on a marine plastics
polymer, within six months of incorporation. It has also filed a provisional
patent application. The founders are tackling the next steps, of finding a
biological method to break down the plant into sugars and then converting the
sugars into alcohol.
Unlike plants, seaweed contains no lignin and is easier to break down. Sea6
needs a microorganism that works in sea water. It has found a few. Converting
the sugars into alcohol or other fuels is the easiest task. "Once you have
sugars," says KB Ramachandran, professor of biotechnology at IIT Madras, who is
incubating the company now, "we can make any petrochemical product."
Microalgae work a bit differently as they produce oil directly. When compared
to plants and microalgae, the economics and technology are loaded heavily in
favor of seaweed. Sugarcane has the highest productivity among plants, but you
can get only 30 tonnes of it in a hectare. A similar area can produce 100
tonnes of seaweed. Simple calculations will show that you need an area roughly
the size of Punjab to produce all the oil that the country needs using seaweed.
"At the moment, from a technology point of view, seaweed is superior to
microalgae," says Syed Yazdani, synthetic biologist and scientist at the
International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) at
Delhi. Sea6 Energy would need Rs 50-60 crore over the next four years to
develop a farm of one sq km with a demonstration plant that produces ethanol
and other petrochemical products.
By then the rest of the world would have also made substantial progress,
judging from the increasing interest on seaweed. By then we should know whether
large-scale seaweed cultivation brings up unforeseen environmental problems.
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