Blue-green algae turns dirty water into clean energy

Waltham Technologies is one of 20 companies the Cleantech Group spotted in the past week looking to raise money. Find out more in the Pitch o’ the week.

Massachusetts-based Waltham Technologies thinks it has the potential to break into the California wine industry, cleaning its waste water and producing biodiesel with a special breed of blue-green algae.

The bacteria doesn’t need acres of land, sunlight or ponds often required to grow green plant-like algae. In fact, Waltham's technology requires somewhat of the opposite to work its magic—dirty water and just a small amount of light.

The company’s CEO Una Ryan told the Cleantech Group she’s built a clean water and a clean energy company she thinks has the potential to take waste water from wineries and breweries and turn it into a valuable opportunity.

The company is seeking $500,000 to $600,000 to fund its initial two years of development, after which it expects to become profitable. The company is currently doing lab testing and analysis.

Ryan’s roots are in biotechnology but have translated easily into the cleantech sector, she said. Ryan was formerly the CEO of Avant Immunotherapeutics, which became Celldex Therapeutics. Her track record includes raising more than $200 million in capital and four merger and acquisition transactions, as well as helping develop blockbuster vaccines such as Rotarix for diarrhea. In this case, Ryan's company is engineering bacteria for clean water and oil instead of engineering it for vaccines. 

With her newest venture, Waltham takes bacteria and bioengineers it, she said, chaining the organism’s required production of Vitamin B12 to the production of new genes.

“Our cyanobacteria love beer, and they grow very fast,” she said.

The aquatic bacteria—called “cyanobacteria” and often known as blue-green algae—is then used to decontaminate waste water. Since blue-green algae can’t live without Vitamin B12, the introduced genes force the organisms to rapidly digest contaminants in the water. Waltham has filed for worldwide patents on the Vitamin B12 process.

“Blue-green algae has to make Vitamin B12,” she said. “It’s not just nice to have; it’s essential.”

The algae eat carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the dirty water, without special equipment or microbial tanks. They leave behind waste byproducts that can later be converted into biodiesel fuel and other potential sources of energy.

“We would want to keep the same footprint companies have already built into the process,” she said.

The company thinks it could make enough biodiesel for a brewery or winery to run its process as well as some of its vehicles, depending on how much biochemical oxygen demand it has in its water.

The soda industry could also benefit from Waltham’s technology, she said, as soda uses diet sweeteners, which are pollutants and have to be cleaned from waste water. Ryan said they plan to test their technology come September at Portsmith, N.H.-based Smuttynose Brewing. Ryan said the company's target market, to start, is going to be craft and regional breweries, generating 15,000 to 2 million barrels per year.

The company’s business model would operate under an annual contract, where Waltham would clean a brewery’s waste water for 50 percent of its annual cost, “so they see the benefit quickly,” Ryan said. Customers would receive the algae in the mail.

The company eventually plans to deploy its technology in developing countries as well.

She said Waltham decided to first deploy its technology in the beverage industry because it continually faces high costs to clean its waste water and is willing to pay for better options as long as they don’t require a lot of energy.

Ryan wasn’t aware of other companies pursuing blue-green algae, although many such as Solazyme and Algenol Biofuels are working in the green algae space. Last month, Midland, Mich.-based Dow Chemical Company and Algenol Biofuels said they are teaming up to build a pilot, algae-based integrated biorefinery to convert carbon dioxide into ethanol (see Dow, Algenol to build pilot algae-based biorefinery). Algenol said it has a seawater-based way to inexpensively generate up to a billion gallons of algal ethanol per year in bioreactors (see Turning algae into ethanol, and gold).

Solazyme, which has a process using fermentation to speed the growth of algae in the dark, said it plans to build a plant capable of producing about 100 million gallons of algae-based diesel per year .