Algae products on display at ASU Polytechnic’s laboratory.

Algae in Arizona
Brad Biddle and Eric Johnson drive around Phoenix in vehicles that smell like French fries. They’re not making a fast food documentary. They’re filling up with biodiesel made from local restaurants’ used frying oil. They’re so passionate about local, alternative fuel that they started the nonprofit Desert Biofuels Initiative to help kick-start the biofuel industry in the Valley.

“Arizona currently sends $4 billion out of the region to pay for fuel,” Biddle says. To promote keeping some of that money in the region, they held conferences, corralling the state’s biofuel businesses, many of which work with algae.

There’s Gilbert-based Diversified Energy, a renewable energy company developing economic algae cultivation; Scottsdale-based PetroSun, a diversified energy company whose algae farms were featured in the recent documentary Fuel; Gila Bend-based Desert Sweet Biofuels, a shrimp farm experimenting with algae; Scottsdale-based Energy Derived, which makes solar drying technology for algae; Overgaard-based nutraceuticals startup Algae Biosciences; and Arizona BioIndustry Association (AZBio), a trade organization that represents all aspects of the biosciences and has a strong interest in algae.

Then there’s Scottsdale-based Heliae, working with ASU to create an algae jet fuel business. And academic programs like ASU LightWorks, the multidisciplinary solar and biofuels effort that earned the DOE’s $6 million grant, and the University of Arizona, which received about $3 million from another DOE grant last January.

But not everything has been rosy for this bloom of algae businesses.

Some companies are merely dabbling in algae, many are struggling to survive, and others have gone under. Grants have been lost and hopes dashed by the recession. However, the consensus among those that survive is not that the algae industry has gone stagnant but that the weeding out of unsound business models and white elephant programs is just Darwinian economics at work.

Still, nobody thinks the algae industry is booming in Arizona, but everyone involved thinks it should be. “I think everybody thinks the same as I do – that we could become the main hotspot of algae research,” says Robert Green, president and CEO of AZBio.

Last March, AZBio launched the Arizona Algae Workgroup, a collaborative effort Green says has been so successful that industry specialists in California and the government of Chile want to be part of it. They’re working hard to prepare for the Algae Biomass Summit, which will be held in Phoenix September 28-30. More than 800 leaders in the algae industry from around the world will be attending the conference at the JW Marriott.

“The eyes of the world algae industry will be on Phoenix for those few days in September,” Green says. “It’s the perfect platform to show who we are and what we’re accomplishing.”

“We really have the opportunity to be algae central here, given all the natural resources and research resources,” Biddle says. “The way that the semiconductor transformed Silicon Valley, I think that algae could transform another region, and I really think it should be us.”

Algae will not be the knight in scummy armor that single-handedly solves the energy crisis. Experts agree that an assembly of strategies – algae, solar, wind, electric, waste oil biodiesel, increased efficiency, etc. – must inherit the Earth when King Petroleum kicks the bucket. Numerous variables make it impossible to calculate a time range, but in overly simplistic terms, 1.3 trillion barrels of proven crude oil reserves divided by the 85 million we use per day equals 42 years. As crude resources dwindle, forces of supply, demand and scarcity will trigger an energy crisis of epic proportions.

And in the time it took to read this article, the population used up another 1 million barrels of oil.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.