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Exxon Takes Algae Fuel Back to the Drawing Board
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/515041/exxon-takes-algae-fuel-back-to-the-drawing-board/[font face=Serif]Kevin Bullis
May 20, 2013
[font size=5]Exxon Takes Algae Fuel Back to the Drawing Board[/font]
[font size=4]A $300 million project seems to have failed to produce a cheap way to make fuel from algae.[/font]
[font size=3]In 2009, ExxonMobil announced that it would pay Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics up to $300 million to develop algae-based fuels.
How did the project go? Not too well, to judge from that latest press release from Synthetic Genomics.
Algae is a promising source of biofuel because it naturally produces large amounts of oil and can be grown in brackish water that’s not useful for conventional farming. But algae-based fuels, so far, are too expensive to compete with fossil fuels (see “Big Oil Turns to Algae” and “Audi Backs a Biofuels Startup”).
The idea behind the Exxon-Synthetic Genomics project was to sort through large numbers of algae strains, looking for ones that might produce fuel economically—or that could be easily modified to so so with “conventional” approaches, such as making a few changes to algae’s genetic material. A year into the program, the companies announced that they had opened a big greenhouse for testing the algae at a relatively large scale.
…[/font][/font]
May 20, 2013
[font size=5]Exxon Takes Algae Fuel Back to the Drawing Board[/font]
[font size=4]A $300 million project seems to have failed to produce a cheap way to make fuel from algae.[/font]
[font size=3]In 2009, ExxonMobil announced that it would pay Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics up to $300 million to develop algae-based fuels.
How did the project go? Not too well, to judge from that latest press release from Synthetic Genomics.
Algae is a promising source of biofuel because it naturally produces large amounts of oil and can be grown in brackish water that’s not useful for conventional farming. But algae-based fuels, so far, are too expensive to compete with fossil fuels (see “Big Oil Turns to Algae” and “Audi Backs a Biofuels Startup”).
The idea behind the Exxon-Synthetic Genomics project was to sort through large numbers of algae strains, looking for ones that might produce fuel economically—or that could be easily modified to so so with “conventional” approaches, such as making a few changes to algae’s genetic material. A year into the program, the companies announced that they had opened a big greenhouse for testing the algae at a relatively large scale.
…[/font][/font]
