Algae-to-oil group receives order for Australia power station project
OriginOil, the developer of a breakthrough technology to extract oil from algae, said it received a firm order for a large-scale algae extraction system from MBD Energy, a leading solutions provider for industrial CO2 waste management.
MBD will install the system at the first of three commercial 'CO2 to energy' power station projects in Australia, the company said.
The order follows recent collaborative trials of OriginOil's equipment focused on optimizing capacity to handle large volumes of algae continuously, the company said.
The new system on order is one of the largest next-generation extraction systems of its kind in the world. The equipment is expected to process up to 1100 liters/minute (300 gal/minute) of algae culture continuously, enough to process the daily harvest at MBD's upcoming one hectare site at Queensland's Tarong power station.
"This milestone places OriginOil at the forefront, globally, of delivering high scale, energy-efficient dewatering and extraction of algae, one of the most critical issues facing algae production today," said Riggs Eckelberry, OriginOil CEO.
"Our work with MBD has also proven our ability to help collaboratively integrate other vendors in the process to ensure an end to end solution for our industry."
With this firm new equipment order, OriginOil will approach its forecast of $1mn in booked sales for products and services in 2011, it said. Specific figures were not disclosed.
"We are currently installing the first hectare of our project at Tarong Power Station in Queensland and OriginOil's equipment will help us efficiently harvest and process the very large volumes of algae biomass we expect to produce, beginning later this year," said Andrew Lawson, MBD's managing director.
MBD Energy previously committed to a mobile OriginOil extraction unit to support the building stage of the one hectare proof of concept phase at Tarong Power Station, one of Australia's three largest coal-fired power plants.
Once the large-scale system is in place, the mobile unit will be deployed at the next power station pilot site, and so on, officials said.
According to MBD Energy, the one hectare facility will use the power station's CO2-laden flue-gas to feed a bio-CCS (bio-based carbon capture and storage) algal synthesizer.
It will serve as proof of concept for a larger, second stage facility of up to 80 hectares (197 acres) before being progressively expanded to a much larger third stage facility, officials said.
Comments