will we ever see algae oil/gas?

[lapfog_1]

2. so having studied doing an algae oil farm 10 years ago

The following problems need to be solved:

1. Open air "raceway" ponds are subject to invasive species contamination. You see, there are only some algae that creates significant amount of oil, unfortunately, other species will invade your open air ponds and out compete your selected species for resource.

2. harvesting the algae requires some energy... you need to effective separate the algae from the water*. Filters are not that good because they clog up, so far one of the popular methods is a centrifuge (think large washing machine on spin).

3. splitting out the oil from the algae... more energy... more scale issues... and the algae cells have to be broken to retrieve the oil. The good news is that if you only centrifuge to concentrate the algae and not dry it completely... if you can then break the cell walls, getting oil from the remaining water in a gravity column (settling column) is pretty easy. So far, the difficulty is breaking the cell walls.

4. Acreage needed to produce a great deal of oil... it's very large... like significant portion of the western US large

5. At the end, you still need to process it to bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is not a good fit for the current fleet of cars... could be used in trucking and farm equipment... but there are emission drawbacks to this as well (N2O)

I haven't checked back with the industry to see if any or most of these problems have been solved in more than 5 years now, but some of them seemed pretty difficult.