Big Blockbuster Breakthrough in Algae Oil!

Image SourceBrian Westenhaus presents news of a potentially huge breakthrough in biofuels, reducing the cost of the critical step of harvesting and de-watering to under $0.20 per gallon of oil !

Ross Youngs, CEO of Univenture, the parent corporation of AlgaeVenture Systems said, “For nearly 40 years, it has been widely accepted that if the cost of removing, harvesting and dewatering algae could be reduced to $50 a ton, algae could become a significant source of fuel. Today we have demonstrated a truly disruptive technology that reduces that cost by more than 99 percent – from $875 per ton to $1.92 per ton. We believe that this breakthrough moves algae back into the spotlight as an economically viable, plentiful source of fuel in the future.”

If this works, scales up and is low cost to buy and install, “disruptive” might be a vast understatement. As the following chart form AlgaeVentures shows, and its loaded to their favor but not by far, the cost to gather, separate out the water and dry down algae so the oil can be harvested is a huge capital and ongoing expense. _NewEnergyandFuel

We are talking cheap fuels, cheap chemicals, cheap animal feed, cheap wastewater treatment, and cheap CO2 recycling.

If you combine the technique to produce 100,000 gallons of algae oil per acre with this cheap technique of pre-processing algae for oil extraction, you might begin to boot peak oil doomers back to the asylums where they rightly belong.

Taken from a post at Al Fin