Scientists Manufacture Biofuel from Algae in Minutes

Warner Todd Huston
Breitbart
January 8, 2014

algae-biofuel

Engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announced that they have created a process that takes an enriched stew of algae and turns it into crude oil which, in turn, can be made into a usable bio-fuel. The development was announced in a recent issue of the journal Algal Research.

Genifuel Corp., a biofuels company from Utah, has licensed the technology and is attempting to utilize the process on a larger, industrial scale.

In a press release, PNNL described, “In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.”

The press release also noted that “conventional refining” is then capable of taking the man-made crude oil and turning it into usable biofuels. PNNL notes that the man-made crude can be made into “aviation fuel, gasoline, or diesel fuel.”

PNNL also feels that its process has eliminated the high cost of other algae-based biofuels processes.

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