Here’s an article on producing biofuels from Algae from Technology Review.
It’s an interesting concept. Presumably, so says the article, you could produce oils from algae and refine it in our current refineries:
Algae makes oil naturally. Raw algae can be processed to make biocrude, the renewable equivalent of petroleum, and refined to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemical feedstocks for plastics and drugs. Indeed, it can be processed at existing oil refineries to make just about anything that can be made from crude oil.
The question is how scalable this can be. Growing crops has its own scale flaws, albeit very well understood. But how well can they be grown and can they produce the volume that our refineries need to run to scale.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this type of research.
Doug
