Algae is basically a plant, primarily aquatic, and unicellular organism. It follows a breatharian lifestyle i.e., living on air and sunlight. Certain strains of alga store oils in them which can be converted to biofuel for our use, in a world where diesel and petrol is scarce.
Algae can take up all the carbon dioxide from the air, and provide us with the same amount of carbon. Most convenient though, would be how flexible algae is. It can be grown literally anywhere. From your fish tank to the sewage treatment plants, it’s everywhere!
We are aiming to commercialize in the near future,” says Naoto Mukunoki, a spokesperson for Euglena. “The fuel derived from euglena is very light, and doesn’t harden in the sky’s low temperature. This is the same characteristic of kerosene, or existing jet fuel.”
One problem scientists face at the moment, is that all types of algae do not store oils in them. So they strongest strain, producing the most amount of oil has to be isolated and cultivated at a huge scale. Other than this, the cost of conversion of oil to fuel is very high, and adds to the cost of getting access to the unique alga in the first place.
Alison Goss Eng is a program manager at the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office specifies their goal to get algae fuel costs to around $3 a gallon. “[It’s] something that we think would be competitive with gasoline,” she says. “In the next couple of decades, we could get algae-based fuels to that level. A lot of that has to do with getting the algae to be really productive. We need to get yields up really high.”
The year 2011 saw the United Airlines make history with the first algae-powered passenger flight from Chicago to Houston. Japan is not left behind and a company called Euglena Co. has partnered with Isuzu Motors to produce a fleet of eco-friendly buses that run on microalgae. Plans to fuel a commercial flight of their own using only algae biofuel by the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo are also bubbling.
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Author:Technology Blog
