in algae biofuels research. “It was very clear to some of us in the room that there was just a tremendous amount of work going on here,” Bicker says.
Algae research is still at a relatively early stage, says Tony Haymet, director of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and vice chairman of Cleantech San Diego’s board. But Haymet says he’s encouraged by San Diego’s “critical mass of companies, General Atomics included.” One of the major questions for the center to explore, Haymet says, is whether algae-to-biofuels technology is better suited for “distributed, small-scale production, or whether it’s going to be a big industrial refining operation like you see in the Gulf of Mexico.”
UCSD’s Kay says the primary goal of SD-CAB is to create a national facility to develop the kind of innovative solutions needed to make algae biofuels production commercially viable. Cost estimates for producing a barrel of algae-based “green crude” currently vary from $80 to $500 “depending on which type of algae you grow at what particular site and at what time of year,” Kay said.
“The key element for the center is that we happen to have some of the leading scientists who are contributing to the understanding of how algae can be used to make biofuels,” Kay told me. Aside from Kay, that list includes Stephen Mayfield, a cell biologist and associate dean at The Scripps Research Institute, and Greg Mitchell, a biologist who, like Haymet, is at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Haymet says one other advantage he sees in the collaborative effort is that it won’t require billions of dollars in funding like a superconducting supercollider. “There’s just a lot of entrepreneurs and scientists involved.”
