Name: Can algae bioreactors replace oil? Sydney firm makes the case
Uploaded: 2025-11-25T15:20:23.842Z
Duration: 3 min 14 s
Description: Nick Hazell is backing the smallest organisms - algae - to build a cleaner economy. His Sydney startup, Algenie, touts a helical photobioreactor and AI‑powered strain optimization to grow algae cheaply at industrial scale, supplying plastics, food, and biofuels and, he says, eventually enabling gigatonne‑level carbon removal.

Nick Hazell is backing the smallest organisms - algae - to build a cleaner economy. His Sydney startup, Algenie, touts a helical photobioreactor and AI‑powered strain optimization to grow algae cheaply at industrial scale, supplying plastics, food, and biofuels and, he says, eventually enabling gigatonne‑level carbon removal.

Council of the City of Sydney

Sydney entrepreneur Nick Hazel and his startup, Algenie, have developed a helical photobioreactor designed to grow algae rapidly and economically. The technology aims to replace crude oil as the base material for products in the plastics, food, and biofuel sectors, offering a potential solution for large-scale CO2 removal.

The system uses coiled tubes with LED lighting to maximize algae growth and is manufactured using cost-effective methods. Experts note that while only a handful of algae-based products are currently profitable, the scalability and low land requirements of this approach could help transform industrial chemistry and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Can algae bioreactors replace oil? Sydney firm makes the case

This entrepreneur is betting on one of the tiniest living things on earth to help build a cleaner future. Algae. Nick Hazel says his Sydney-based startup, Algenie, has invented a new kind of algae-growing machine called a helical photobioreactor. He says it's cheap to build, easy to scale up, and could one day help remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air. That's by replacing crude oil as the basic source for many products in the plastics, food, and biofuel sectors. Algae is the reason we have a livable planet in the first place. Most of the oxygen that we breathe is coming from algae. Everyone talks about the forest, but it's algae that's actually doing the heavy lifting. Today, industrial society is based on taking fossil fuel and turning it into the chemistry that is our everyday life, our plastics, our polymers, all the things we use every day, but ultimately ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. What we need is a way to change the way we make our stuff that takes CO2 from the atmosphere and embeds it into the stuff that we use, but it needs to be done economically. Algenie's machine looks like a long coiled tube. Thin LED lights shine up from the bottom, so every bit of algae gets plenty of light. That makes them grow super fast, doubling in size in just a few hours. The company found a way to create these perfect spiral tubes using the same techniques that make plastic pipes and gutters. When you put the two together, really, really productive algae, very low-cost helix, some LEDs which are cheap and getting cheaper every day, powered by renewable energy, which is cheap and getting cheaper every day, you have a production system which can get down to a cost which can start to compete with crude oil. And that's the game changer. Having identified 20 industries that could benefit, Hazel says the startup's job is to supply low-cost algae to replace petrochemical feedstocks. Mathieu Pernice, a professor from the University of Technology Sydney, says the team there keeps more than 150 different algae on their shelves. What you see is that at the moment, right now, it's an emerging biotech where we tap only into 10 spaces maximum, at the moment are commercially profitable. One of them here is Hematococcus, that is producing a pigment, astaxanthin, that is really used for nutraceutical but also aquaculture. Your salmon is pink because of astaxanthin. So there is a market for this high-margin product already of algae. What we can do with algae is really tap into the world diversity of algae and the world chemistry and really make that at scale to make a difference with the gigaton of CO2 sequestered. Unlike regular farming, growing algae uses almost no land. If that means it could also replace plant products like sugar in some processes, that might allow land to be returned to nature. Hazel describes his vision for the future. It looks like millions and millions of photobioreactors coupled to cheap renewable energy around the world, making the industrial chemistry and the things that us humans like to have. That's what success looks like.

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