Energy Production Industry

When combined with the IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) technology, recently developed to facilitate use of abundant coal resources, ALGACORE can help to generate energy at a highly competitive cost and with much less environmental impact. In addition to contributing energy of its own, ALGACORE reliably sequesters the greenhouse gas CO2 by converting it into a form (ultimately as acetate) that is a valuable product with multiple uses rather than an environmental threat. Unlike IGCC by itself, the combination of ALGACORE and IGCC is a net consumer rather than producer of CO2, while also producing additional energy and saleable by-products. Thus, ALGACORE gives us the exciting promise of an economically and environmentally sound transition from fossil fuel to renewable, biomass energy.

This combined ALGACORE and IGCC process can also be fed with agricultural field waste and with energy crops, such as soil-enriching switch grass. By progressively supplanting conventional fossil fuel combustion with this ALGACORE-IGCC combination, global warming and its consequences are not only stoppable but largely reversible. Rather than releasing the CO2 stored millions of years ago, as is done with the burning of fossil fuels, CO2 is actually taken from the air and turned into economically important products.

ALGACORE is uniquely able to do all of this because it has at its heart an extremely efficient photo-bioreactor and micro-algae production process. ALGACORE can reliably produce biomass at densities exceeding 75,000 ppm (dry weight) at a total biomass growth rate exceeding 3 doublings per day, at a depth in excess of 1 meter. This is substantially in excess of other algae-based systems. Unlike non-algae proposed bio-fuel processes, this high biomass volume from a small footprint means that it is possible to produce substantial bio-fuel without using unsustainable acreage and water resources or degrading the soil needed for food production. With lower costs from operation, physical plant, energy and manpower than any conventional system on the market, ALGACORE can provide a revolution in the way we meet our current environmental crisis!