‘Restraint’ an Unspoken Watchword of Algae Biomass Sessions

President Obama within a few hours of his scheduled introductory keynote address at the biomass summit, so he had to bail out of the algae conference.

Venter’s talk had attracted widespread interest because of the deal that Synthetic Genomics announced in July with the largest U.S. oil company. ExxonMobil said it plans to invest $600 million or more in the development of renewable, algae-derived biofuels, including at least $300 million through a development agreement with Synthetic Genomics. But Venter’s pinch-hitter, Paul Roessler, did not break any new ground about the deal.

Roessler, who oversees Synthetic Genomics’ biofuels and biochemicals production efforts, gave a good overview of Venter’s career and the scientific breakthroughs that led Venter and others from sequencing genomes to combining genes from different organisms—creating synthetic chromosomes. Using such techniques, Roessler says Synthetic Genomics has been working to essentially re-design the cellular machinery of algae to maximize the production of natural fats and oils—and to minimize or eliminate the factors that limit production. “We’ve been doing some work that gets past some of the cost issues associated with algae biofuels production,” Roessler says.

In one key development, Roessler says Synthetic Genomics has successfully re-engineered algae’s cellular machinery to secrete the fats and oils that are naturally produced. This enables the company to avoid the cost of harvesting and processing algae to recover the fats and oils normally stored within algae’s cellular walls. “We are able to collect the secreted oils,” Roessler says, “but I’m not going to go into that.”

Roessler also initially declined to comment when someone asked how many barrels of green crude Synthetic Genomics has been able to produce with its methods. But then he reversed himself, saying the company had previously disclosed in a press release that by some estimates algae could yield more than 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre of production per year.

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.