CO2 giant partners with Sapphire to develop open pond system

What happens when an industry leader that employs roughly 48,000 people and earned nearly $18 billion in the gases and engineering sector in 2010 partners with a young, innovative algae company? We’re about to find out. Sapphire Energy has signed with the Linde Group in an effort to collaborate on a commercial-scale system that could deliver CO₂ to open-pond algae systems like those currently being used by Sapphire.

Linde is currently the leading supplier of CO₂ in the U.S., providing CO₂ for processes like dry-cleaning to cooling food products. The goal of the project is cut the costs of delivering anthropogenic CO₂ to the open ponds, and before the multiyear agreement is able to develop a commercial-scale system, Linde will provide CO₂ at Sapphire’s Columbus, N.M., demonstration facility.

In the Netherlands, Linde has already created a CO₂ delivery system that supplies 550 greenhouses with CO₂ through a 100 kilometer pipeline from a nearby refinery. “Producing fuel by algae using CO₂ from large emitters like power stations and chemical plants is a very promising way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Aldo Belloni, a member of the executive board of Linde AG.  

According to Linde, a single commercial algae-fuel facility will require roughly 10,000 metric tons of CO₂ per day. With the need for fuel dependency becoming clearer, according to Cynthia Warner, president of Sapphire Energy, “we need great partners who can supply sufficient and low-cost access to CO₂.” Linde, Warner believes, has a great understanding of efficiently managing the distribution process of CO₂, adding that with this collaboration, Sapphire is moving “closer to delivering a domestically produced, cost-efficient source of algae-based green crude.”

The partnership between Sapphire Energy with a billion dollar company isn’t the first for the algae developer. In March, Sapphire also partnered with Monsanto to develop algal genes that might apply to Monsanto’s work in agriculture.