Ohio project grows algae for energy

Akron Beacon Journal

GREEN

The crop, unaffected by the drought, grows strikingly green in the middle of Wayne County.

It isn’t corn. It isn’t soybeans. It is algae.

A sickly greenish hue dominates the water in four man-made ponds at Cedar Lane Farms, east of Wooster, where algae are being grown as part of a pilot project with West Virginia-based Touchstone Research Laboratory Ltd. The goal is to grow enough algae to produce oils for renewable biofuels and other products. It is a new and potentially lucrative Ohio farm crop.

Other partners include the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va., the Ohio Department of Development’s Coal Development Office, Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, GZA GeoEnvionmental Inc. of Cincinnati and Texas-based OpenAlgae LLC.

The project has received nearly $6.8 million in a federal stimulus money. The state of Ohio and the partners have contributed nearly $1.7 million. Touchstone Research last week hosted a coming-out party to celebrate the beginning of the project’s next phase: a demonstration-scale operation.

Philip Lane, Touchstone’s director of business development and the program manager, said the algae will be harvested several times a week when concentrations get high enough. Leftover material can be used as fertilizer or soil additives, although to date, nothing has been shipped from the farm.

Algae are about 40 percent oil, or lipids, and 60 percent biomass, said OARDC researcher Yebo Li, who has been working on the project. He said an acre of algae can produce the same amount of oil as 10 acres of soybeans.

Two additional key elements that Touchstone is doing, Lane said, are capturing and using carbon dioxide gas from a coal-fired boiler at Cedar Lane Farms’ greenhouses to provide food for the algae, and testing a proprietary chemical that keeps other plants and animals out of the water, helps maintain a more-constant temperature in the ponds and keeps water from evaporating.