A California-based producer of renewable oil from algae production products is getting ready to ship a system that uses a single step to get the oil out of the green pond scum to one of its customers down under.

OriginOil, Inc. has notified Australian MBD Energy Limited that it is ready to ship a Single-Step Extraction™ System (seen in the video below), a cheaper method of algae-oil extraction that eliminates the use of petrochemicals or alcohol solvents and is the second product to be delivered in its multi-phase commercialization agreement:

OriginOil Extracts Oil from Algae Timelapse from OriginOil on Vimeo.

“We believe OriginOil’s concentration and extraction technology holds promise of reducing costs and energy requirements in the algae harvesting process,” said Andrew Lawson, Managing Director at MBD Energy Ltd. “We look forward to now using the equipment we’ve purchased from OriginOil to finalize preparations for our 1 hectare Bio CCS algal synthesizer test facility we’re about to construct at Tarong Power Station in Queensland. If performance tests go to plan we expect to later expand the 1 hectare synthesizer to 80 hectares at which point we hope to produce approximately 10,000 tonnes of oil per year.”

OriginOil’s unit is the second product to be shipped in the test phase of a multi-phase commercialization program under which OriginOil has agreed to supply MBD Energy with progressively larger installations of its algae-to-oil technology as the scale of MBD’s algal synthesizer projects grows. The two products are supplied under a 1 year lease-to-own program. Subject to achieving success in the initial test phase, MBD will purchase significantly larger systems to serve its power station projects in Australia, beginning with the 1 hectare algal synthesizer test plant at Tarong Power Station in South Eastern Queensland, and potentially expanding to full production at all three of MBD’s power station project sites in Australia.

MBD Energy officials say that each of its power station projects can grow 80 hectare commercial pilot plants for algae, each capable of producing about 3 million gallons of oil that can be used for renewable energy and plastics, as well as producing 25,000 tonnes of animal feed each year. Furthermore, the plants could eventually be expanded to 1,500 hectares each, feeding the the algae with the power station’s flue-gas emissions.