February 6th, 2007

From pond scum to jet fuel

Posted by Alex Payson at 11:12 am

You know that pond behind your house all covered in green slime? How about if we started harvesting oil from all that algae? And in the process we removed carbon dioxide and excess nitrogen from waste water and power plants?

Sounds a little too good to be true, but that is the goal of several new biofuel companies. With high oil prices and improved biotechnology, oil from algae is looking more realistic every year. Some studies claim that per acre, algae could produce from 10-1000 times as much liquid fuel as other biofuel sources such as corn, soy, or sunflower.

It turns out that algae naturally produce oil, and that most of the world’s current oil deposits may have been produced by algae over many million years.

Read the complete article here, and maybe we can all appreciate those green, swampy areas a bit more now.

Posted in General news