Milking Algae for Oil

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Global Bioenergy Industry News

Thursday, June 18, 2009

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Milking Algae for Oil

GLOBAL - Scientists in Canada and India are proposing to milk oil from the tiny, single-cell algae known as diatoms.

Their report appears online in the American Chemical Society's bi-monthly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

T. V. Ramachandra, Durga Madhab Mahapatra and Karthick B from the Centre for Ecological Sciences/Centre for Sustainable Technologies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Richard Gordon from the Department of Radiology, University of Manitoba say that in the face of increasing CO₂ emissions from conventional energy (gasoline), and the anticipated scarcity of crude oil, a worldwide effort is underway for cost-effective renewable alternative energy sources.

They say: "Geologists claim that much crude oil comes from diatoms. Diatoms do indeed make oil and agriculturists claim that diatoms could make 10-200 times as much oil per hectare as oil seeds.

"Therefore, sustainable energy could be made from diatoms.

"We propose ways of harvesting oil from diatoms, using biochemical engineering and also a new solar panel approach that utilises genomically modifiable aspects of diatom biology, offering the prospect of “milking” diatoms for sustainable energy by altering them to actively secrete oil products.
"Secretion by and milking of diatoms may provide a way around the puzzle of how to make algae that both grow quickly and have a very high oil content," the scientists conclude.