An Algal Biofuel Obituary

The Greentech Media story provided a pretty good overview of all the things that had gone wrong. But then last week I received a damning email from The National Algae Association (NAA) that highlighted the waste of taxpayer dollars.

Quoting from the email:

On information and belief, many of these hyped technologies have not been able to be proven outside the lab in demo and pilot scale projects, and it is known that others won’t scale.

In private industry, you do not have the benefit of researching anything for 75 years at a cost of $2.5 billion but the DOE has allowed this to happen and to use US taxpayer funds to foot the bill.

Opinions from everyone except grant recipients are that the program has been a waste of time and taxpayer money and that there was a decade or more of pay-to-play.”

The email provided specific examples, such as:

After a $50 million award was made, a company approached the USDA, requesting another $40 million to research the contamination issues they were experiencing from the raceway ponds that the entire industry knew experienced contamination. The USDA declined the company’s request because it felt the company should have addressed their contamination issues prior to accepting the $50 million funding from the DOE, and that the DOE knew that contamination was an inherent problem with raceway ponds. The USDA was not going to help fix a problem that the DOE knew about when it made the $50 million award. That company is no longer in existence, its assets were either liquidated or buried, and their officers were not held accountable for anything.”

The email finally highlighted what I think was the biggest reason for the failures:

The huge learning curve between what takes place in a lab and commercial production is something with which researchers have no experience.”

That’s only half of the problem, though. Naive researchers asked for money for technologies that will never be commercially viable. But then someone within the government should have done a better job of due diligence before dispensing tax dollars for these technologies.

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Author: Robert Rapier

Robert Rapier is a seasoned chemical engineer with three decades of international experience in the energy sector. He holds undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics, and a master’s in chemical engineering. Robert has worked extensively in oil refining, production, synthetic fuels, biomass energy, and alcohol production, earning several patents along the way. As Editor-in-Chief of Shale Magazine and a prolific author for Investing Daily, he shares his expertise through various newsletters and his latest book, American Energy: A History of Power, Progress, and Change. Robert's insights have been featured on 60 Minutes, The History Channel, CNBC, and PBS, among others. His articles have appeared in top publications like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and The Economist. For nearly a decade, he has covered the energy sector for Forbes. View all posts by Robert Rapier