Algae For Fuel: Is It Possible?

About 4 years ago inventor Jim Sears from Colorado came up with the idea of extracting biofuels from algae. He knew, this being a new technology and a new industry, that he had a long way to go and a lot of people to convince. Algae, which can provide a 100 times more oil per acre than conventional crops, is very hard to grow in ponds due to the uncontrolled temperature that our environment supplies. Under controlled temperatures the algae doubles overnight, making it the fastest growing plant on the planet.

With half a million dollars from a friend of the Colorado State University, they started Solix Biofuels. Soon they had a patent pending on Photo Bioreactor Technology, the technology used in growing the algae under perfect growing conditions. Solix is in the process of building a 305 ft by 50 ft reactor which will be able to produce 10,000 gallons of oil per acre, per annum. Carbon dioxide is what algae needs as fuel to grow. In other words, carbon dioxide is its main diet. The plan is to have the bioreactors close enough to power plants and other carbon dioxide emitting processes to work symbiotically with them, thus creating a win-win solution for fuel generation. When and if this plan goes into effect, it will only use 1% of farm land being used to grow our crops in comparison to the massive amount of acreage that would be needed for ethanol produced from corn. Half of algae’s body weight is oil, whereas the oil palm tree, the largest oil producing plant, at present is at 20% body weight is oil. Soy produces 50 gallons of oil per annum, Canola 150 gallons, Palm 650 gallons, Algae 10,000 gallons. Anyone looking at these statistics can see that algae will be a big part of what we are going to be putting in our gas tanks in the foreseeable future.