Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [73]
Loving critics of the field like John Benemann, who worked on the Aquatic Species Program, say there are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical of algal biofuel’s potential for large-scale oil production. The main problem is that nobody has been able to make fuel from algae for a cost anywhere close to cheap, let alone competitive with current oil stocks.28 Some researchers question whether any kind of energy-conversion process based on photosynthesis will ever play a major role in our transportation energy system. Though most researchers disagree, one life-cycle analysis found that we would have to put more energy into algal biofuels than we could get out, a notion that, as noted, has also dogged ethanol.29 Despite all the new companies in the space, none could be said to have succeeded. The prominent startup GreenFuel, which grew out of Harvard and MIT research, went bust in May 2009 after blowing through $70 million.30
The point is that we don’t know how well algal biofuel production might work when all the science and engineering work gets done. Although eighteen years of small amounts of funding yielded a lot of knowledge, it did not create anything resembling a commercial product or process. “The cultivation of microalgae for production of biofuels generally, and algal oils specifically, is not a near-term commercial prospect,” Benemann maintained. “Larger-scale algal biofuels production still requires considerable, long-term R&D.”31
Only $25 million was invested over the life of the Aquatic Species Program, which is just 5.5 percent of the total money the Department of Energy dedicated to biofuels over that time.32 Adjusted for inflation, the program’s total budget in today’s dollars was less than $100 million. To put this tiny number in oil industry context, Exxon Mobil made $142 million in profit each day of 2008. Johansen, the phycologist who collected algae for the program, said,
They came up with this idea and in four years, they almost demonstrated the technological feasibility, and then the funding fell out. The maximum of funding was about $4 million a year. When I left, it was $800,000 a year. Now, there is all this biofuel work going on, and they are all going back to that public domain research. It kind of drives me crazy.
The neglect of the Aquatic Species Program and subsequent resurgence of algal biofuel interest is one of many examples that show how the lack of coherent, consistent energy policy has left the world’s most oil-dependent nation scrambling in times of crisis. Johansen even went so far as to say that “if the Reagan and Bush administrations had not ended” the growth of the algal biofuels program, the United States would already have commercial algal biofuels.
Even under far less optimistic scenarios, if the Aquatic Species Program had been fully funded from its start until now, there is no question that we would know a lot more about the potential—and limitations—of algal biofuels. The point is that we do R&D as much to find what doesn’t work as to discover what does.
Instead, however, we are left with some lessons learned, a partially missing library of microorganisms, and a lot of questions that investors and entrepreneurs want answered before the next oil price spike, whenever that may be.
IV.
Lessons from the Great Energy Rethink
chapter 16
What Happens When an Energy System Breaks
THE 1970S WERE A FULCRUM on which American society turned from one vision of the future to another. The long postwar boom gave way to energy shocks, polluted cities, and an unpopular war. The economy was stagnant; trust in government collapsed. The great protest movements and social achievements