Geek Oil: Scientists Manufacture Biofuel from Algae in Minutes
A new scientific discovery that takes algae and turns it into crude oil in minutes rather than millions of years could be the end of constant worries over “peak oil.”
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.”