NRC teams with Pond Technologies and St. Mary's Cement for pilot-scale algae production

Scaled down with quicker turnaround

The National Research Council's flagship algae carbon conversion (ACC) program has unveiled its first major initiative with the announcement of a pilot project to convert the CO2 emissions from the St Mary's Cement plant in St Mary's ON into algal biomass that could potentially be used in a wide range of products and processes. The pilot is deploying unique biophotoreactor and control systems designed and built by Pond Technologies Inc, an aggressive Markham ON-based start-up that has already collaborated with St Mary's Cement, US Steel Canada Ltd and Union Gas.

The $4.3-million pilot is six months into its planned 18-month duration and is already achieving promising results that could validate the technology and systems for deployment in other industry sectors, including the oil sands. There's been an explosion of interest and R&D into the commercial production of algae for its potential to produce biofuels, biomaterials, animal and fish feed and health products, with several different technological approaches being tested at pilot scale.

"Not many projects are as focused as this project is ... This is a marriage of the biological question with an engineering solution at industrially relevant scale and with industry interest," says Dr Stephen O'Leary, director of the NRC Algal Carbon Conversion Flagship Program. "We're pulling something out of the lab and taking it to scale."

As the centrepiece of its $55-million, five-year ACC flagship program, NRC has established a field laboratory at the St Mary's pilot and has two technicians on site to collect algae strains resident in the area. They are then sent to the NRC's Ketch Harbour facility near Halifax for isolation and screening to identify the best candidates for production by a team of 20 researchers and technicians. The flagship program also has 16 ongoing R&D projects, many of which contribute directly or indirectly to the pilot.

NRC will also conduct real-site testing using flu gas from the cement plant and biomass collected at the site in its various R&D projects. The intent is to test the biomass for biosoil amendment to isolate compounds used in fertilizers and to produce biofuels, bioplastics and possibly animal feed and aquaculture.

Pond Technologies is a nine-year-old start-up with a proprietary technology platform that employs photosynthesis and light-emitting diode (LED) illumination to grow algae using recycled CO2 and incorporating the emissions into algal biomass.

It was Pond Technologies (previously known as Pond Biofuels) that directed NRC to St Mary's Cement as the pilot's industrial host and partner, having previously conducted a $4-million pilot at St Mary's deploying an earlier iteration of its technology platform. Company founder and CEO Steven Martin says working with NRC has been a highlight of his career.

"They're the most competent people I've ever met, really good ... They're by far the fastest reacting partner on the project," says Martin. "NRC has a huge library of algae strains ... We provide the platform to optimize the growth process. The whole company is behind this ... They're happy with the tools Pond has built and the ball is in their court to figure out how best to use it. I have no doubt the pilot will be successful.

"We meet weekly with the NRC and they're learning how to deal with the abundance of light we have provided ... The end point is validation. Innovation is never in a straight line, there are all sorts of details," he says. "The solution is the one that raises the best financing so that we can build up a huge order book and have the luxury of choosing our next project."

Initial Alberta pilot delayed

Pond suggested the St Mary's facility to the ACC flagship after its first choice for a pilot facility in Alberta was temporarily set aside and restructured into a two-phase project when projected costs rose above the pilot's $19-million budget (half NRC, half industrial partners) and due to "the partners' evolving business needs".

The Alberta pilot near Bonnyville was announced in 2013 as a three-year collaboration with Pond and Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNRL) using a 100,000-litre bioreactor (R$, May 23/13). After a year and $2.4 million in engineering, prep work and equipment purchases, the decision was made to suspend the pilot and develop a two-phase approach while launching a smaller-scale initiative in Ontario. The Ontario pilot uses a different type of technology, and replaces an oil sands producers with a cement manufacturer as the industrial host. The NTC's unused portion allocated to the Bonnyville pilot has been deferred for future use.

CNRL will participate in the St Mary's pilot as an observer (as St Mary's did for the Alberta pilot).

"The Alberta pilot was too expensive at the scale we wanted to deploy. St Mary's is about one-quarter the size of the Alberta project so we'll be able to deploy more quickly and efficiently," says O'Leary. "We anticipate moving to phase two in Alberta with a larger pilot once we answer some proof-of-concept questions at St Mary's.

A number of options for Alberta are being considered. One is to launch another oil sands pilot in collaboration with CNRL and Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) - an industry consortium of oil sands producers. Or it could participate in a demonstration facility COSIA has built as part of the Carbon X Prize it is sponsoring in conjuction with NRG, a large New Jersey-based energy company.

(Pond is competing in the XPrize competition and has moved into the second of three rounds with $20 million in prizes to be announced in 2020).

Profit and pollution abatement

For its part, St Mary's Cement - a subsidiary of São Paulo-based Votorantim Cimentos, the world's eighth largest cement producer - has been looking at ACC since 2010 as a potential end-of-pipe solution to generate value from its pollution stream. Cement production accounts for 5% of global CO2 emissions and adopting ACC technology is seen as a way to reduce pollution and generate profits from its waste stream.

"We're looking at ways to add value to our pollution stream and reduce as well," says Martin Vroegh, director of environmental affairs for Votorantim Cimentos North America. "ACC could be part of cement manufacturing for the future."

Vroegh says St Mary's has a good relationship with both Pond and NRC despite the starkly different size and cultures of the collaborating organizations.

"Pond is a start-up, we're large industry and the NRC is government-owned and there are strengths and weaknessess and bureaucracies," he says. "It's great working with really smart people and aligning the bureaucracies."

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