Algae carbon capture was once a red-hot investment category — until prohibitively high production costs drove many companies away. Now an Australian startup has developed a technology to mass-produce algae at low cost, reopening the door for algae-based carbon reduction applications.
Algae fix carbon 10 to 50 times faster than land plants. Image credit: Garvit/ Unsplash
The lush green alga may well be tomorrow's star player in the fight against global warming. For the past 10 years, using microalgae to sequester carbon has been regarded as "one of the most important and effective carbon sequestration methods in the world." The reason is its extraordinary carbon-capture capacity: algae fix carbon 10 to 50 times faster than land plants, and some microalgae capture CO₂ up to 400 times more efficiently than trees.
According to calculations by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, cultivating 1 kg of algal biomass removes 1.83 kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Algae reproduce rapidly and can be processed into fuel, fertiliser, food, animal feed, and even cosmetics, giving them an exceptionally broad range of applications. They can also be grown in bioreactors (systems that cultivate algae in a controlled environment) or ponds on non-arable land, meaning they do not compete with food crops — factors that once made them a favourite of major venture-capital funds, the petroleum industry, and government agencies alike. To advance carbon-capture technology, the U.S. Department of Energy invested US$8 million in algae technology development projects in 2021, and multinational oil company ExxonMobil even pledged US$600 million to algae research.
Unfortunately, high production and infrastructure costs made it difficult to sustain that wave of enthusiasm. Persistently falling global oil prices also made algae-based fuels uncompetitive, triggering a wave of closures among algae biofuel companies — and in 2023, even ExxonMobil announced it was abandoning the effort.
A Plant-Based Meat Company Becomes a Key Player in Algae Mass Production
Fortunately, many organisations still believe in algae's potential. Sydney-based Australian startup Algenie developed a new spiral photobioreactor in 2024, claiming it can harvest 100 tonnes of algae per year in a space the size of a shipping container. The helical structure dramatically improves light utilisation efficiency, boosting productivity while lowering material and maintenance costs — reducing the cost of production to one-tenth of previous levels, bringing the per-kilogram cost of algae down to just US$1.
"Algae hold tremendous potential for addressing climate change and transforming multiple industries, but until now, achieving scalable and economical production has remained out of reach," said Algenie CEO Nick Hazell. "Our spiral design and technology represent a genuine breakthrough — one that allows algae to compete economically with conventional fossil-fuel-derived products, and even replace them."
Algenie was founded from an experiment Hazell conducted while serving as CEO of plant-based meat company v2food. At the time, he was looking for a way to add a blood-like colour to plant-based meat and discovered that algal protein pigments were an ideal ingredient — yet the cost of commercially available algae was so high as to be nearly impractical.
"So we faced a choice: abandon algae cultivation, or dive deep into understanding how algae cultivation works in order to produce an economically viable option," Hazell said. He began searching for ways to mass-produce algae at low cost, collaborating with the University of Technology Sydney to test the most productive algae strains.
The new spiral photobioreactor developed by Australian startup Algenie has dramatically reduced algae production costs. Image credit: Algenie
An Innovative Design Poised to Disrupt the Oil Industry
After many rounds of trial and error, Hazell's persistence paid off. He developed a new photobioreactor in which algae flow along helical channels, with advanced LED lighting providing optimal illumination to promote rapid growth. This patented design allows certain algae strains to double in population every two to three hours under ideal conditions. Algenie states this is sufficient to produce 10,000 tonnes of algae per hectare per year — a biomass yield efficiency per unit of land 3,000 times greater than that of conventional soybean or maize crops.
Unlike other algae companies that focus on biofuels, high-value health products, bioplastics, textiles, or food additives, Algenie positions itself as a "platform" — licensing its technology and co-investing with partners for large-scale production. "We want to be an enabler for multiple industries and companies," said Hazell, who believes the technology opens up limitless possibilities.
If algae can be produced stably and at low cost — absorbing large quantities of CO₂ during growth and gradually displacing some petroleum-derived products — emission pressures could ease along with it. Whether this is sufficient to transform the existing energy structure still needs time to prove, but it at least invites us to imagine: beyond simply using less energy and cutting carbon, could we also source raw materials in a different way — one where economic development and environmental burden no longer have to be a binary choice?
References
- AGFunderNews, Algenie unveils tech to unlock algae's potential in feed, bioplastics
- Business News Australia, Biotech Algenie raises $1.1m to create clean plastics
- Lewis & Clark Law School, Liquid Trees: Carbon Capture and Sequestration Via Mass Algae Farming and Marine Spatial Planning
- Algenie, Algenie
- Green queen, How Algenie is Turning Algae Into 'Carbon-Positive' Plastic & Biofuels
※ This article is reprinted from the Delta Electronics Foundation Low-Carbon Life Blog: 〈一公頃年產一萬噸？藻類量產技術如何改寫減碳市場〉, co-produced with BlueTrend.
