Verpond: ABOUT

The genesis of Verpond was a new idea of how to produce algal biomass in quantities and at low prices previously unobtainable. Algae have been touted as an alternative source of biomass for fertilizer, food, fuel, and other biobased products for decades because of their rapid growth rates compared to conventional agricultural products. However, this has failed to materialize because of the incompatibility of conventional algae production systems with large scale operations and their inherently high costs.

Pictured below are conventional raceway ponds. Each pond is expensive to construct and uses large amounts of valuable water and power. The largest ponds are limited to approximately 2 - 3 acres, because larger systems are unable to provide adequate mixing against any prevailing winds. As a result, conventional production of algal biomass is limited in scale and more expensive than comparable biomass grown using conventional agricultural techniques.

One of the greatest challenges facing biofuels development is the scale of demand. Our calculations indicate that even all of the world's agricultural output converted to biofuels could replace only about one third of the energy derived from current world fossil fuel usage, assuming no energy conversion losses.¹ As a result, in order to have a meaningful impact, any proposed biomass production process should be large in comparison to total current world agricultural production without interfering with it. Furthermore, in terms of cost, feedstocks need to generate biofuels that are price competitive with fossil fuels. We estimate that feedstocks for biofuels need to sell for less than $76/wet ton in order to make conversion to biofuels price competitive with fossil fuels. For comparison, the lowest estimates for growing algae using conventional techniques are about $230/wet ton, so an approximately 66% reduction needs to be achieved.

Verpond has invented a new algae cultivation system called OAACS™ that significantly increases the possible scale of production while reducing costs and use of scarce resources. The increase in scale is achieved by working with the wind instead of against it. Instead of using a racetrack geometry, Verpond's system is unidirectional, aligned with the wind, and calculations indicate that the wind provides enough mixing and mass transfer with the surrounding environment so that external supplies of concentrated carbon dioxide are unnecessary. Economic projections indicate that the resultant algal biomass can be profitably sold at or below the target of $76/wet ton. This will enable production of biofuels that are price competitive with fossil fuels and other bioproducts like fertilizers and aquaculture feeds that are competitive with conventional supplies.

Verpond was awarded an NSF SBIR Phase I grant and is working with several academic and non-profit collaborators to demonstrate proof of concept for its designs. Initial work was focused on finite element analyses of the cultivation system and scaled down continuous production of biomass. Current and future activities involve development of improved cultivation system infrastructure components, scale model wave tank testing of the system, construction of a research and development cultivation system, and continuous growth of algae at increasingly larger scales until full scale commercial production is achieved.

¹2020 World oil consumption is estimated at approximately 100 million barrels per day (U.S. Energy Information Administration, www.eia.gov). In comparison, world production of all agricultural commodities in 2018 was about 9 billion metric tons per year (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, http://faostat.fao.org). Using conversion factors used by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html), the 100 million barrels of oil/day converts to 220 billion GJ/yr (100,000,000 barrels oil/day * 6.1 GJ/barrel oil * 365 days/yr), while 9 billion metric tons per year of agricultural products converts to only 130 billion GJ/yr (9,000,000,000 metric tons ag commodities/yr * 2.2/2 tons/metric ton * 13.5 GJ/ton (average value in range of 10-17 GJ/ton agricultural residue). Since other fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas combined provide roughly equal energy as oil, total fossil fuel energy usage is approximately 440 billion GJ/yr.

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