Glen Kertz, right, Chief Executive Officer of Valcent Products, Inc. and business partner Doug Frater, President and CEO of Global Green Solutions stand by their algae bioreactors. (Rudy Gutierrez/El Paso Times)

Kertz, a plant physiologist, developed a system using 10-foot-long water-filled plastic bags suspended in a greenhouse-like setting in the desert to grow algae, from which vegetable oil can be extracted to produce biodiesel.

"We expect to produce 100,000 gallons (of vegetable oil) per acre per year," which is a much higher yield than soybeans and other plants being used for biofuel, Kertz said Wednesday. He was showing off his patented Vertigro algae-growing system to news media, El Paso city officials and others at his company's 6.2-acre research facility in the Upper Valley.

"We think we can be cost-competitive with fossil fuels. That's our driving goal," he said.

Kertz, 54, is president and CEO of Valcent Products Inc., a publicly traded company, which he and investors formed about three years ago, and which now has most of its operations in the El Paso area.

It's developing the Vertigro system in a joint venture with Global Green Solutions, a 3-year-old publicly traded company with offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, the United States and Europe.

Kertz's algae-growing system "is so simple, it's ingenious," said Doug Frater, 55, president and CEO of Global Green, which has invested more than $3 million in the Vertigro test facility in Anthony, Texas, which includes a high-tech algae laboratory.

The companies are losing money as they develop the new technology. Valcent, which also is producing some consumer products, lost $10.9 million in its last fiscal year, according to its financial reports.

Global Green, which also has developed a system to turn biomass waste into steam and electricity, had a loss of $5.6 million in its last fiscal year, its financial reports show.

Kathyrn Dodson, director of the city Economic Development Department, who toured the Vertigro research facility Wednesday, said at least three other companies are working on biofuel projects in the El Paso area.

"It's so exciting that El Paso is a place where (companies are) experimenting with these technologies. It's an emerging industry cluster here, and we want to understand the market," Dodson said.

Mark Townsend Cox, CEO of the New Energy Fund, an $11 million New York-based fund which invests in companies developing renewable energy products, and Global Green consultant, said Global Green and Valcent appear to have one of the better algae-growing systems among 15 to 20 companies working on projects to use algae for biofuel production. Cox's fund also has stock in Global Green.

Kertz has figured out a solution to two problems with his closed-loop algae-growing system, Cox said: preventing water evaporation and stopping infiltration of foreign species of algae.

"They have a really smart design that I believe is scalable and (has) the ability to do it pretty rapidly," Cox said.

Michael Berry, a former college professor who publishes an e-mailed newsletter, Morning Notes, on "discovery opportunities" for investors, holds stock in Global Green and Valcent, and is a consultant for the companies. He said that he's been skeptical about the potential of algae as a biofuel source but that he's liked what he's seen at the Vertigro test site, which he's visited three times.

The problem with algae is that no one had "figured out how to do continuous harvesting. But I think these guys figured it out. If they have figured it out, it's going to be a big deal," said Berry, who is based in the New York area.

"I'm impressed and when they go to the pilot (project), it will be interesting to see if they deliver on what they say."

Construction on the pilot plant is expected to begin late this year on an acre at Valcent's research facility at 401Vinton Road in Anthony. It's expected to be producing vegetable oil from algae grown in 20,000 bioreactors, the big plastic bags, by the summer of next year, Global Green's Frater said.

The Vertigro system uses a canful of algae cells pumped into the plastic bags with water and carbon dioxide from the air and exposed to the sun. Algae can be harvested daily once the initial growing period of 25 to 30 days is completed, Kertz said. Valcent's algae lab determines exactly which algae meets its growing requirements.

Global Green and Valcent hope to be selling Vertigro systems by 2009 or 2010 to biofuel refineries in Europe, South Africa, and the United States, Frater said.

In July, the companies announced the forming of a joint venture with SGCEnergia, the biofuels division of the SGC Group in Portugal, to build a Vertigro pilot plant in Portugal. It also has a deal for a pilot project in South Africa with an undisclosed company, and is working a deal with a company in the United States, Frater said.

A Vertigro plant of the size needed to supply a large biofuel refinery would require about 200 to 300 acres and "probably cost about $800,000 per acre" to build and operate, Frater said. That means a full-scale plant would cost about $160 million to $240 million.

The Vertigro system is expected to be able to produce algae oil for about $1.70 a gallon versus about $2.63 a gallon for soybean oil, Frater said. Those numbers are without government subsidies or tax credits, he said.

Kertz said he's been developing his vertical growing system for 12 years. He did much of his development work at a lab he operated in Orange, Texas, where he lived until he moved to El Paso about three years ago.

He moved here because Valent Products began manufacturing one of its products in Juárez, and Kertz also saw that the El Paso climate was perfect for the Vertigro system, he said.

Valcent, which employs about 20 full-time employees and about 30 contracted employees at two El Paso offices, also produces the Novatique Skin Cleanser device through a contracted Juárez factory. It also is planning to sell a Tomorrow Garden indoor herb garden kit.

Vic Kolenc may be reached at vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; 546-6421.

More information: www.valcent.net; www.globalgreensolutionsinc.com

A picture is worth a thousand words, and the picture included with this article just solved a problem for me.  Every since I realized the “algae biotape” of Diversified Energy’s algae producing Simgae system is nothing more than poly tubing I have been looking for a better way to bubble in CO2.

Poly tubing is the generic name for polyethylene plastic bags sold to manufacturers in a several hundred to a few thousand foot long spool, the bags are cut and heat sealed as desired.  Poly tubing of 10 mil thickness makes a nice transparent hose at approximately 10 cents per foot.  Poly tubing is available up to 48 inches wide in rolls of 400-600 feet for that width.  Using poly tubing is the cheapest way to make a photobioreactor I have found yet.

I figured I would use the 6 inch width poly tubing as a long hose, or lay the 4 foot width poly tubing out on my field to culture algae in bulk.  Short sections could be elevated vertically, but eventually water pressure will be too great for the bag to handle if it gets too high.  Since CO2 absorption efficiency increases with the height of the column, and since I don’t want to spend more money on bubblers, the taller the column can be the better.

It looks to me like they are using the 48 inch wide poly tubing that has been melt sealed in a alternating right-left serpentine pattern making a tube only a few inches in diameter.  As long as this bag is supported on the sides, as it looks like in the picture, a very tall vertical system could be supported.

The claim of 100,000 gallons an acre is not so far fetched if they are not counting the surface area of the photobioreactor, but of the facility itself.  From the picture it looks like they are using 4 foot wide bags raised up approximately 10-12 feet, spaced 2 feet apart.  That’s a lot of surface area condensed into a vertical space.  They can likely cram ten acres worth of photobioreactor surface area into an acre of land.  I wonder how much sunlight those reactors actually get crammed so tightly together.

If the way I described is not how Kertz et. al. are doing things, so be it, but I will certainly be experimenting with this design in my own system as it may just be a significant improvement over what I have now.

Hey Megaloma, welcome to the forum...

megalomania:

They can likely cram ten acres worth of photobioreactor surface area into an acre of land.  .

I can dig the center of the earth and cram a billion acres worth of surface area...but the sun only comes from 1 way. So in response to your first statement comes the real answer to the question you should be proposing...   

megalomania:

  I wonder how much sunlight those reactors actually get crammed so tightly together   

...the answer is 1 acre worth of light. Cant get more than 1 acre of light from the sun per acre. I dont care how high or low you build...

Yes you can use lights or maybe fiber optics but as I have pointed out in the past...If you have to pay for the light...ur gonna go broke fast.

EDIT; ok ofcourse if you build high enough, like thru the stratosphere, you can actually collect more light...but unless you are willing to do the Cost Analysis on a PBR 20miles in the air...we can hopefully forego that conversation.

Couldn't you use large mirrors to increase the amount of sunlight available, and adjust the angle?  Not free, of course.

froggy:

Hey Megaloma, welcome to the forum...

megalomania:

They can likely cram ten acres worth of photobioreactor surface area into an acre of land.  .

 

I can dig the center of the earth and cram a billion acres worth of surface area...but the sun only comes from 1 way. So in response to your first statement comes the real answer to the question you should be proposing...   

megalomania:

  I wonder how much sunlight those reactors actually get crammed so tightly together   

...the answer is 1 acre worth of light. Cant get more than 1 acre of light from the sun per acre. I dont care how high or low you build...

Yes you can use lights or maybe fiber optics but as I have pointed out in the past...If you have to pay for the light...ur gonna go broke fast.

 

EDIT; ok ofcourse if you build high enough, like thru the stratosphere, you can actually collect more light...but unless you are willing to do the Cost Analysis on a PBR 20miles in the air...we can hopefully forego that conversation.

 

surely you are only thinking in 1 dimension it is much more than 1 acre of light it is 1 acre x 1 acre x the height of your reactor ?

Pom 

pom:

 surely you are only thinking in 1 dimension it is much more than 1 acre of light it is 1 acre x 1 acre x the height of your reactor ?

Pom, meet shadow. Shadow, meet Pom.

froggy:

pom:

 surely you are only thinking in 1 dimension it is much more than 1 acre of light it is 1 acre x 1 acre x the height of your reactor ?

Pom, meet shadow. Shadow, meet Pom.

 

Wouldnt be 100% shadow on the internal bags and would be zero shadow on the external bags. So height is a factor you are missing.

Froggy, meet smartass, smartass, meet Froggy.

 Pom

What about the acre next door?

This is a very easy mind experiment. Walk around a tall building all day and measure the lumens...

pom:

   

Wouldnt be 100% shadow on the internal bags and would be zero shadow on the external bags. So height is a factor you are missing.

Actually...this is wrong. If you build upright...there WOULD be shadows on the internal bags and shadows on the external bags...depending on the direction of the light.

In the morning...the west side of the bags would be shadowed by the eastern light and at high noon, both sidewalls wouldnt get any light. And in the afternoon, the east wall would be shadowed. And the wall to the north would always be shadowed (unless ur an aussie the its the S wall that would always be shadowed).

Side note... WOHOO...1000th post!

and you would both still be wrong ;)

I didn't say the light levels permeating the center and bottom bags would be high but there WOULD be light hence proving you wrong.

Its not that complicated really the higher you go the more surface area in contact with the light. 

cheers

pom

 

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this forum and very impressed at the knowledge here that you bring to the subject. 

I've been doing some research on algal feedstocks, the Valcent solution and some others.  Maybe it was already discussed and I missed it, but there's a potential explanation to the numbers that Valcent is claiming. 

The traditional view of photosynthetic efficiency from a physics standpoint is static; meaning in a stationary environment, there's only so much solar radiation that will hit a cell in a given moment.  And you can only convert 8-15% of that light into usable energy.  No argument there.

By changing the physical model to both vertical and dynamic, you're not exposing a single cell to a given amount of solar energy, since you now have trillions of cells being exposed to the same amount of light that's hitting that surface area. This is due to how much air is being pumped into the water that is holding the algae cells, how it moves vertically and horizontally thru the reactor pockets, and by expanding the solar surface area available to the cells, due to the vertical stacking arrangement of the reactors.  This changes the physics considerably.  So, they're able to absorb more of the solar energy over that of a static photosynthesis process. 

Moreover, algae is able to use energy at many different levels and will absorb energy at a much wider range to sustain itself when compared to many other plants.  So that's part of Valcent's secret sauce, in that they are able to take advantage of the plant's capabilities and capture many more photons in a given surface area than alternative methodologies. 

There's an inportant bit of information missing here. How long must a cell of algae be exposed, to sunlight,  to create another cell?, Further, How long of an exposure at what intensity of photons will cause lipids to accumulate to its max potential? How much sunlight is too much and how much is too little to encourage population growth. I acre of light may be wasted if it only takes a couple of minutes to create a cell and several more minutes to cause max lipid accumulation. Or, is a daily minimum of photons and a daily maximum over several light/dark cycles what is needed to get to max population growth and lipid density? Without these answers wheels are spinning in mud. And less we forget which species reacts to which environment. Lots and lots of needed information before an accurate estimate of lipid production can be made. Very exciting.

What if you greatly increased the light using OLED technology now becoming commercially available?

Hello Notbraveheart, welcome to the forum.

You mean Organic LED's?

Ofcourse we all know on this site that to burn energy to produce light to produce algae to produce energy is a thermodynamic loser, right? I can go thru the numbers but I dont think I should have to again.

Without attempting to sound like a pure pedant, you could always move the bag.

Naturally, the energy required to do so would have to come from somewhere, mine's an offering, not a suggestion. I'm not qualified in what energy it would take to move several tonnes of liquid in conjunction with the sun.

Mælinar:

Without attempting to sound like a pure pedant, you could always move the bag.

One reason to 'move the bag' would be to have a charge period and a dark period, cycling thru at an optimal time. Making up numbers, you would have 1 set of bags exposed for 10 sec's then cycle the them behind (dark) another set of bags for 10 seconds. By moving the bag like this, you would be 2x your yield. It seems that this might be one way Valcent thinks they are solving this.

But alas... the devil is in the details, specially

Mælinar:

what energy it would take to move several tonnes of liquid in conjunction with the sun.

I think the 'air lift reactor' solves this whole issue pretty well.

Hi Bioelektrik, welcome to the forum. Thanks for the comments, very interesting.

bioelektrik:

  By changing the physical model to both vertical and dynamic, you're not exposing a single cell to a given amount of solar energy, since you now have trillions of cells being exposed to the same amount of light that's hitting that surface area. This is due to how much air is being pumped into the water that is holding the algae cells, how it moves vertically and horizontally thru the reactor pockets, and by expanding the solar surface area available to the cells, due to the vertical stacking arrangement of the reactors.  This changes the physics considerably.  So, they're able to absorb more of the solar energy over that of a static photosynthesis process. 

Moreover, algae is able to use energy at many different levels and will absorb energy at a much wider range to sustain itself when compared to many other plants.  So that's part of Valcent's secret sauce, in that they are able to take advantage of the plant's capabilities and capture many more photons in a given surface area than alternative methodologies. 

Lets say you have pure H2O and algae floating around in that water. When the photon comes in, It will pass thru the H2O and eventually will hit an algal chlorophyll. If there is nothing else for that photon to hit, it WILL eventually hit an algae.

This means that if you were able to look at the bottom of a PBR, if its solar optimized, it will be completely dark because algae would have sucked them all up.

But it seems that what bioelek is saying is that by increasing the frequency of exposures, one can more efficiently harvest the amount of light over stagnet algae. Why? because once the algae is photo charged, any additional photon that hits it is a waste to that algae until it cycles that charge.  By increasing the frequency of light exposures, one can increase the amont of usable photons. Its the same reason for the air lift reactor. Somewhat replicating the concept of the flashing light, this 'Intermittence thru turbulence' Kok 1953, also works outside in open ponds.

Ofc this doesnt change the PAR value that Mike Briggs calc'ed his now famous article. This doesnt change the top end number he came up with of ~ 20000gal/ac/yr. And it still doesnt change the fact that 100000gal/ac/yr claimed by this company is still well out of reality.

I Googled for Mike Briggs article.
Hope someone can help me find it so's I don't have to read a 1,100,000 hits to get it.
Or if it's on-site smowhere - point me please.

Pete Peterson:

  I Googled for Mike Briggs article. 

Sorry, I should have linked it. Here it is.