Over the course of three years, researchers from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering will gather data from this testbed in a collective effort to advance our understanding of algal biofuels. “This work fits Georgia Tech’s research plan for sustainable energy,” said Dr. Yongsheng Chen, an associate professor of environmental engineering and a PI on this project.
“At Georgia Tech we will focus on finding a sustainable solution to the nation’s dependence on fossil fuel. We can contribute to the development of innovative technology toward industrialization of biofuel. We can also study the growth of the raw materials for biofuel, in this case, algae. As a result, we will gain crucial knowledge for tearing down the first barrier in the industrialization of biofuel. ”
In addition to the Georgia Tech testbed, labs will be hosted by other grant partners, located in Arizona, Hawaii, California, and Ohio. “This is a critical step for DOE’s support of the growing algal biofuel industry,” said Philip Pienkos, director of the ATP-3. “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.”
The ATP3 facilities will function as a testing lab 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. “This multi-regional testbed will address a major gap currently hindering the scale-up of algal biofuels,” said Blake Simmons, the biomass program manager for Sandia, one of grant partners. “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.”
Research partners will undertake objective testing and evaluation of algae systems and technologies, especially the comparison of the performance of systems under different climatic and operational conditions at large scale. “These data are critically important to support techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) activities that guide research and development towards the transformative goal of cost-competitive algal biofuels by 2022,” said Simmons. ASU officials have praised the effort, stating that it will “integrate and harmonize results from practical, realistic and objective experimental design and execution of long term cultivation trials with TEA, LCA, and computational models. “
The ATP3 partnership is led by the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation (AzCATI) and is housed at ASU’s Polytechnic campus. Partners in the ATP-3 project include 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.
