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Forget Tequila, Mexico aims to be the top Bio-fuel producer with algae oil in the next five years. OriginOil, a Los Angeles, California, company has been contracted by the Mexican government to produce 1 percent of the nation's jet fuel using algae. By the end of the decade, the project aims to produce 20 times that amount, and propel Mexico to the front of bio fuel producing nations.

OriginOil’s patent-pending, breakthrough technology can help provide the world with an endless supply of cost-competitive and environmentally-friendly oil to displace petroleum.

OriginOil is proving its next-generation technology to greatly enhance algae biomass harvesting and oil extraction. This allows scalable industrialization to make algae a high-yield, cost-competitive replacement for petroleum.

By focusing on the “midstream”, OriginOil is addressing the most important bottleneck in commercial algae production.

Technology Challenges

There are three primary challenges to cost-effective algae production:

   1. Algae grow suspended in large volumes of water. Using conventional methods, a mature algae culture must be concentrated before oil can be extracted from each cell. This de-watering stage is energy-intensive, and typically requires chemical additives and expensive capital equipment.
   2. Algae are protected by a tough cell wall. That wall must be cracked – an energy-intensive process – to extract the oil. The challenge is to maximize oil yield by ‘cracking’ as many of the algae cells as possible with the smallest amount of energy.
   3. Algae production is an energy-intensive process. In order to achieve economic viability, it is critical that energy is recovered in every possible way. In addition to oil and biomass, algae produce valuable gases, including hydrogen. These must be harvested to achieve the best possible energy balance.

OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL) has agreed to participate in a pilot scale algae project to be funded by the Mexican government. The project will demonstrate industrial algae production, paving the way for substantial investment by the Mexican government in large-scale jet fuels production. Mexico’s ‘Manhattan Project’ is directed towards producing 1% of the nation’s jet fuel from algae in less than five years. The CEO of OriginOil has intended to produce twenty times that amount, propelling Mexico to the front rank of bio-fuel producing nations. The project operator, Genesis Ventures of Ensenada, Baja California, has received a first Economy Ministry grant through The National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) for its first site. Genesis will develop the site as a model for numerous additional projects to be co-located with large CO2 sources.  A fortnight ago OriginOil had announced it had received the first commercial order to deploy its algae oil extraction system in an industrial setting for MBDEnergy.
OriginOil technology also plans to support a pilot Bio-CCS for MBDEnergy.

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