Whats happening in the biodiesel from algae sector?
Several people have sent in questions regarding making biodiesel from algae. Now that biodiesel is gaining in popularity and the price for common feedstocks is going up people are looking to Mother Nature’s premier oil producing organism, algae, for help. The promise of algae is tremendous with potential oil yields 200 times that of soy beans—currently the most popular biodiesel feedstock in the US. Most of the energy in the fossil fuels we use today comes from ancient algae that stored the sun’s energy in hydrocarbon bonds. Now scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to take that ancient process, speed it up by a couple of million years and market it on an industrial scale. Why go to all that trouble? Well, the list of reasons algae makes an appealing oil crop goes on and on. They can be grown using marginal land, in some cases harvest time comes every four hours, while the byproduct starch can be made into ethanol. There have been successful projects using the CO2 from smokestacks to
