Due to the increase on oil prices, food crisis and competition on the demand of foods and biofuel, this led to the interest of algae farming for making vegetable oil, biodiesel, biogasoline, bioethanol as well as other biofuels that is into the use of land which are found not suitable for agriculture. The fact about algae is that this has the potential to provide source of hydrogen, biodiesel as well as ethanol fuels. Microalgae is actually a fast growing photosynthesizing organism that is capable of completing its whole growing cycle for every few days. The fact is that there’s about 50% weight of algae that is comprised of oil than palm which only have about 20% of oil weight.
Farming algae is considered to be a good option for making vegetable oil and different kinds of biofuels. Microalgae is actually one-celled, photosynthetic microorganisms which actually are abundant in various marine environment. The potential of algae production commercially is expected to be grown in translucent tubes or in containers that are known as photo bioreactors or through open ocean algae bloom harvesting. Some other advantages includes processing of algae biomass through gasification in creating syngas, using waste streams from municipalities as water sources, growing carbohydrate rich algae strains for the purpose of cellulosic ethanol and also for carbon capture from smokestacks to help increase the growth rate of the algae.
Algae in fact have certain qualities, making it a good option for biodiesel production. Unlike the corn-based biodiesel that competes with food crops for land resources, the production methods of algae like in algae ponds or photo bioreactors is able to complement than compete with the other biomass-based fuel options. Compared to other biodiesel crops, algae will not require any significant input of a carbon intensive fertilizers. You could actually find some algae species which is grown in waters with high amounts of salt, which means that this is not a problem on freshwater supplies.
Some companies as well as government agencies in fact are funding efforts for them to reduce capital as well as its operating costs and to make the fuel production of algae commercially viable. On a recent study made, genetic engineering could help to improve the fuel efficiency of algae because algae can be modified for building short carbon chains compared to long chains of carbohydrates.
There are some companies that uses chemically-induced mutations to create an algae which is suitable for use as a crop. Some even have commercial interests towards large-scale algal-cultivation systems that wants to connect with the existing infrastructure such as cement factories, coal power plants or sewage treatment facilities. Visit this link or homepage to learn more info. about where to buy algae or about yellow tang.