Cement Energy and Environment

BRINGING A SEA CHANGE IN FUEL FOR THE FIITUPE How a Chennai startup is using macroalgae, commonly called seaweed, to drive India's biofuel thrust Haripulakkat Bangalore The breakthrough idea came after two years of work. Sea6 Energy founders were convinced till then that microalgae held the secrets to a clean energy future. So did thousands of other entrepreneurs, researchers and investors around the world. Algae could produce many times more oil per unit area than any plant in the world . But two years into the project, and some serious calculations later, four students and their professor at liT Madras were convinced that microalgae economics just wouldn't work for some time. Renewable Energy isn't anyway economical at the moment without subsid ies, but algal bio– fuels seemed hopelessly uneconomical. It was then that they thought of macroalgae. Macroalgae is a technical term of seaweed. It seemed an extremely attractive proposition as an oil source even at first look. Seaweed grows in the shallow ocean waters and doesn't need land. Technology for its cultivation is well– established: it is being grown in the Tamil Nadu coast as a raw material for some cosmetics. Seaweed does not need external nutrients for growth: the sea is the ultimate nutrient FUTURISTIC TECHOLOGY reservoir. It grows quickly, is cheap and easy to harvest. Microalgae on the other hand needed fresh water, large nutrient inputs and plenty of land. "We were preparing to abandon the project when we realized that we were chasing the wrong idea," says Sea6 Energy Chairman Shrikumar Suryanarayan. Suryanarayan was for two decades the head of R&D at Biocon. He had left his job there in 2008 and was teaching at liT Madras when some students sought his help to enter the prestigious iGEM competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. They were denied a visa but still won a prize after making a video presentation. Shrikumar then got them interested in bio-fuels. "We went to algal biofuel conferences and realized that we were at the same level as others," says Sayash Kumar, one of the students. Two years later, when they had finished their master's degree and were beginning to disperse, somebody thought of seaweed. Only three other organizations then worked on macroalgal biofuel : Bio Architecture Labs based in San Franscisco, the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology and the Philippines government. The microalgal biofuels landscape was littered with startups, but with no commercial breakthrough in sight many of them were no longer able to raise money. Yet the sector has seen some of the biggest investments in renewable energy . Sillicon-Valley-based Synthetic Genomics got $300 million from Exxon-Mobil , and San-Diego-based Sapphire Energy has so far raised $1 00 million. Pike Research has predicted the global biofuels market to reach $247 billion by the year 2020. It was a good business in the long term. Sea6 Energy was formed in July 2010. Shrikumar and a few liT alumni Chipped in with about Rs 1 crore to get the company going. Their first challenge was to tackle the seaweed cultivation itself. Pepsi had got together people in coastal Tamil Nadu to cultivate seaweed for its food products. The price of seaweed is now Rs. 20 a kg. to be viable as a biofuel input, its price has to come down toRs 5 a kg . Since the entire cost of cultivation was in labour, mechanization was the only way to bring it down. Farmers cultivate seaweed on floating bamboo rafts in calm waters. Biofuel demands its cultivation on a very large scale, and in rough waters around most of the country's shores. So the first job Sea6 Energy was to create a strong framework to anchor the seaweed, which is heavier than water and sinks to the sea bottom. It was not a trivial problem but not impossible either.