Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures, said “we just don’t believe the economics.” Although the venture capital firm invests heavily in bio-energy technology, “we just haven’t gotten very comfortable that algae is going to come down the cost curve.”
BP also doesn’t like photosynthetic algae. “We don’t think that [technology] will ever reach the kind of cost or supply that we think people are prepared to pay,” said David Eyton, the head of research and technology at BP. His statement was a direct challenge to a main BP competitor, Exxon-Mobil, which recently announced an investment of $600 million in photosynthetic algae.
via Technology Review: Blogs: Emerging Technologies Conference: The Big Losers in Energy.
