San Diego Just Beginning to Assess Needs of Emerging Algae Industry

Today is Algae Day plus 10 in San Diego. With all the enthusiasm expressed during the back-to-back events of April 28, I half-expected things would be greener by now.

But now the real work begins. The effort is to make San Diego—home of many biologists, entrepreneurs, and lots of sun—nationally recognized as a “big green cluster” of the latest green industry, algae biofuels. The latest local push made for a wall-to-wall green carpet of news coverage—from the Biocom breakfast panel discussion on algae-based biofuels to the midday UC San Diego news conference announcing the formation of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology (SD-CAB), to a three-hour Regional Algae Stakeholders’ Meeting in the afternoon. And then there were other events, such as the workshop organized by Prize Capital, to establish a $10 million prize competition for breakthroughs in algae biofuels.

Just two days ago, (Algae Day plus 8), Rick Halperin of San Diego’s regional algae initiative reprised many of the same events for can only be described as “Algae Day—The Sequel” in Imperial County. But now that the vision has been articulated to make San Diego a center of excellence in algal biotechnology—and a cleaner and greener industrial power in renewable energy—what happens next?

“The immediate outcome is that we’re well-prepared to respond to what the Department of Energy announced this week,” Steve Kay, UCSD’s dean of biological sciences and SD-CAB’s founding director told me yesterday.

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the DOE plans to invest close to $787 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka “the stimulus”) in advanced biofuel research, development, and test projects. The Department of Energy indicated that $480 million will go for 10 to 20 awards for pilot plants to validate integrated biorefinery technologies for producing advanced biofuels.

With U.S. capital markets still smoldering from the financial meltdown, the Department of Energy noted in its press release the $480 million is intended to enable private financing of commercial-scale replications of biorefineries—essentially removing the biggest financial risks by proving the technologies. The Department of Energy has designated

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.