May
4
Algae Straight to Crude Oil
May 4, 2010 | 6 Comments
University of Michigan professors are heating and squishing algae in a pressure-cooker that fast-forwards the crude oil making process from millennia to just minutes. It doesn’t have to be algae it could be any wet biomass. Phillip Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the U-M Department of Chemical Engineering is principal investigator on the [...]
Feb
22
DARPA Cracks the Oil Out of Algae
February 22, 2010 | 7 Comments
Late last week saw Suzanne Goldenberg return from her visit with the new special assistant for energy at DARPA, Barbara McQuiston with news DARPA has solved the algae oil production problem. If you saw the original piece at The Guardian, my contact at Darpa is saying it’s accurate other than the timeline. DARPA expects to [...]
Nov
23
Algae That Produces Hydrogen Gas
November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Barry Bruce, a professor of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology leads a team at UT Knoxville that has found the inner machinery of photosynthesis can be isolated from certain algae and, when coupled with a platinum catalyst, is able to produce a steady supply of hydrogen when exposed to light. So far researchers have [...]
Nov
17
On the Hunt for Cheaper Algae
November 17, 2009 | 3 Comments
A major potential from algae is they could change the energy source of fuels from the ancient fossil fuels to current account renewable fuels. That goal has two Kansas State University engineers assessing systematic production methods that could make the costs of algae oil production more reasonable. Algae production presents major obstacles to scaling at [...]
Oct
13
Get Your Algae Production Going for a $10 Million Prize
October 13, 2009 | 2 Comments
Del Mar-based Prize Capital announced at last week’s Algae Biomass Summit, a meeting in San Diego of experts in using algae for fuel, food, purifying water and other purposes a $10 Million algae fuel prize. They deserve a major publicity push – so here it goes. Lee Stein, Prize Capital’s founder said the goal is [...]
Jul
23
A Peek Inside the ExxonMobil/Craig Venter Algae Project
July 23, 2009 | 2 Comments
I nudged the wonderful Jane Van Ryan at the API last week shortly after the press release came out about ExxonMobil and Craig Venter’s SGI setting out with $600 million to try to get algae sourced oils into the market. Even at ExxonMobil, $600 million is a sizeable amount of money, with a certain amount [...]
Jul
14
Exxon Commits $600 Million to Algae
July 14, 2009 | 5 Comments
Business Wire and the Wall Street Journal are reporting and commenting on Exxon committing $600 million to Craig Ventor’s Synthetic Genomics to brew fuel from algae. Its a watershed mark for alternative fuels and could mark a coming of age for alternative fuels. Exxon is known in the industry as the top engineering skilled company [...]
Apr
13
A Major Algae Breakthrough for Fuels and Food
April 13, 2009 | 1 Comment
Martin Spalding, professor and chair of the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology at Iowa State University has identified one of the key proteins in the algae responsible for concentrating and moving that CO2 into cells. “This is a real breakthrough. No one had previously identified any of the proteins that are involved in [...]
