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March 7, 2009
Aurora Biofuels on Wednesday said that it has completed a successful trial of growing algae for biofuels and named former Royal Dutch Shell executive Robert Walsh CEO.
The company has been running a test at growing algae in two outdoor ponds--each about as big as an Olympic-size swimming pool--in Florida for the past year and a half.
Based on the results of that test, the company expects it can create a larger-scale demonstration facility that's 50 acres in size late next year, said Walsh who joined Aurora Biofuels from biofuel company LS9. The company raised $20 million last July to build that planned plant.
The biofuels industry has been hit particularly hard by the financial markets meltdown and recession. Several new technology companies are developing techniques for turning algae into fuel because it isn't food and can grow in a wide range of conditions.
The challenge, though, is making and harvesting algae at large scale at a price that's competitive with other feedstocks, such as palm oil or soybeans.
Aurora Biofuels is using a combination of biotechnology and engineering techniques to bring the cost down, said Walsh.
Although it is not genetically modifying algae, it is breeding salt water algae strains optimized for yielding large amounts of oil. It has also developed a method, derived from the waste water treatment industry, for harvesting the algae without having to fully dry it out, a method that is more energy efficient, Walsh said.
The drop in oil prices--now below $50 a barrel--has also made it more difficult for biofuels. Walsh said that the company expects that it can produce a commercially viable product with the price of oil at $50 a barrel and some regulations that put a price on carbon dioxide pollution.
"People will start putting a value on sequestering carbon dioxide and this will be a low-cost way to do that," he said. "It'll be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than compressing CO2 gas to 3,000 pounds (per square inch) and injecting it into old salt caverns."
The company expects to build and operate algae farms at the site of a large polluters, such as a utility or cement factory. The CO2 will be piped into the ponds to stimulate growth. Walsh projects that oil will be in the $60 to $100 per barrel range in the next five years once economies turn around.
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June 10, 2008
Alameda, Calif.-based Aurora Biofuels said it completed a second round of funding, raising $20 million.
The California biofuel company said it plans to use the funds to expand its field operations and to increase its efforts to optimize the production cycle of growing, harvesting and extracting microalgae to produce bio-oil.
Aurora, founded by a group of U.C. Berkeley students in 2006, said it has developed a way to create biodiesel fuel with yields that are 125 times higher and have 50 per cent lower costs than more common production methods.
A large part of that cost reduction comes from swapping out increasingly expensive soy oil, the biodiesel feedstock of choice, and substituting what is supposed to be much cheaper and plentiful algae.
Aurora CEO Matt Caspari has said that the company raised this latest round to scale up production of its algae systems. So far the company has been working in the labs and at pilot scale. Caspari says Aurora intends to be the lowest cost producers of algae for biofuels.
In algae production there s essentially two methods open and closed pond systems and each have their pros and cons. Aurora uses an open pond system to grow its algae, which is less expensive than the closed system, but keeping out weed organisms is difficult. Closed pond systems, on the other hand, work more like greenhouses. They are expensive to construct but it s much easier to regulate the growing conditions.
Aurora says it is actually ahead of schedule, but has said little about when it will reach commercialization. Meanwhile startups developing technology to convert plant waste and energy crops into ethanol are all racing to scale up well into the tens of millions of gallons per year range, which we ll hopefully start seeing moving into production by 2009. We re hoping to start seeing some aggressive timelines from the more than a dozen algae to biofuel companies out there.
Aurora's Series B was led by Oak Investment Partners, along with Noventi and Gabriel Venture Partners.
In the spring of 2006, Aurora won both first prize and the People's Choice Award in the eighth annual UC-Berkeley Business Plan Competition, at the Haas School of Business. In early 2007 the firm raised $3.2 million in its first venture financing round.
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