{"id":8527,"date":"2013-12-19T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T19:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/?p=8527"},"modified":"2013-12-19T12:00:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T19:00:43","slug":"algae-to-crude-while-you-wait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/algae-to-crude-while-you-wait\/","title":{"rendered":"Algae to Crude While You Wait"},"content":{"rendered":"

Engineers at the Department of Energy’s\u00a0Pacific Northwest National Laboratory<\/a> in Richland, Washington have beat nature by millions of years in turning algal glop into crude oil, \u00a0cooking a \u201ca verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup\u201d into oil, water, and a nutritious batch of byproducts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Algae<\/a>

Algae produces the hydro-thermally produced products on the right<\/p><\/div>\n

Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow leading PNNL team’s research says, “It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher.\u00a0 In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.”<\/p>\n

\u201cFaster\u201d means an hour or less, researchers having combined several chemical steps normally associated with bio-fuel production into one continuous process.\u00a0 Wet materials in this process reduce costly and time-consuming steps normally required to dry the algae.\u00a0 This simplification, among other steps, makes the process commercially viable.<\/p>\n

Elliot notes that, “Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel.\u00a0 We believe that the process we’ve created will help make algae biofuels much more economical.”<\/p>\n