Great biofuel from algae

Hundreds of companies and laboratories around the world are racing aggressively to find an economic way to process ' green fuel ' from algae. The biofuel industry is working on a very exciting obstacle course.

Currently algae emerge as the most promising material for the production of new generation fuel as 'biofuel ', because it does not encroach on food sources such as ethanol, without land disputes with agricultural crops, Very fast growing and high processing capacity into oil.

(Artwork: Reuters)

A leader in this area poses a question, so is biofuels from algae a big ' green oil industry ' or a 'big agriculture' industry?

Steve Mayfield, head of a Center that has just established a research on algae biotechnology at the University of California, in San Diego, thinks it's more like agriculture.

During a conference on algae biomass meeting in San Diego, he said: ' We have no intention of planting it in the laboratory . but will grow on a vast sea surface .' Remember that Shell is working on a large algae cultivation project, in parallel with the search for processing technology. They will build a 1,000-hectare area (sea surface) to assess the economy before deploying on a commercial scale with 20,000 hectares.

Mayfield also assists in the establishment of a private company Sapphire Energy, $ 100 million from venture capital. The company is looking for a gene technology to create algae that can be grown and harvested on a large scale.

' What we need to do is to tame algae from a plant species that grows wild in nature into a plant. We are taking wild algae lines and asking biologists to do something they have never done like this and if they can solve it, its meaning is enormous . ' He also pointed out which genetic changes can produce high yields for this promising plant.