DOE awards $15M to ASU-led Algae Testbed Public-Private Partnership; data for scale-up of algal fuels

14 September 2012

The US Department of Energy will award $15 million to the Arizona State University-led Algae Testbed Public-Private Partnership (ATP³) for its Advancements in Sustainable Algal Production opportunity.

The ATP³ partnership is led by the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation (AzCATI) housed at ASU’s Polytechnic campus with support from national labs and academic and industrial partners, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Sandia National Laboratories, Cellana LLC, Touchstone Research Laboratory, SRS Energy, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, and Commercial Algae Management.

This is a critical step for DOE’s support of the growing algal biofuel industry. The productivity data generated by the ATP3 testbeds will flow into techno-economic and lifecycle assessment models and provide a basis for tracking progress toward goals in production economics and sustainability. By making high quality testbed capabilities available to researchers and technology developers, they will allow rapid testing of novel concepts at scale and greatly accelerate commercialization.

—Philip Pienkos, principal manager of the applied biology group at NREL and director of integration for ATP³

ATP³ will function as a testing facility for the algal research community supporting the operation of existing outdoor algae cultivation systems and allowing researchers access to real-world conditions for algal biomass production for biofuel. Testbed facilities for the partnership are physically located in Arizona, Hawaii, California, Ohio and Georgia.

DOE’s investment from its Biomass Program in ATP³ means companies and research institutes will now have access to facilities and data from long-term algal cultivation trials for use in establishing a realistic and coherent state of technology for algal biofuels.

This multi-regional testbed will address a major gap currently hindering the scale-up of algal biofuels. This partnership will provide validated data on algal growth and biofuel production across multiple sites in the USA, and will provide essential data related to the scale-up and commercialization of algal biofuels.

—Blake Simmons, the biomass program manager for Sandia