Canada’s first algal biorefinery demonstration project, a collaborative research effort between the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Algal Carbon Conversion (ACC) program, Pond Technologies and Votorantim Cimentos’ St Marys Cement, is “revolutionizing” how industrial carbon emissions are managed, the NRC said in an information bulletin November 3.
The project uses a 25,000 litre photobioreactor within a pilot scale algal biorefinery to recycle carbon dioxide and other airborne industrial pollutants from a St Marys Cement plant in Ontario into algal biomass that can be further converted into sustainable products, including renewable biofuels and biomaterials. The process being deployed by NRC experts and its partners is designed to rapidly recycle carbon dioxide (CO2) and other airborne industrial emissions into biomass through photosynthesis.
In 2013, the National Research Council of Canada, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Pond Technologies announced a multi-million dollar investment to build and operate a demonstration-scale algal biorefinery facility in Alberta. While the project’s initial engineering phase was completed, the deployment strategy was restructured into a two-phased approach due to the partners’ evolving business needs. In the first stage, already underway, St Marys Cement, Pond Technologies, and NRC will deploy ACC technology at the pilot biorefinery in Ontario. CNRL will participate as an observer and will share in the learning from the activities at the St. Mary’s Cement plant and further participate in the planning and development of a later stage two deployment, anticipated for an oil sands operation.
As part of Canada’s commitment to the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), the Government of Canada joined a global effort to accelerate clean energy innovation, Mission Innovation, in November 2015 and committed to double funding for clean energy and clean technology research and development by 2020.
See also: “Algae to produce biofuels from CO2,” and “Algae may hold the answer to fuel and carbon problems of the future,” from previous editions of IPPSO FACTO.