It's amazing that so many impractical ideas continue to get more funding than they deserve. We've looked carefully at a number of studies on algae oil and concluded all indicate fuel from algae will cost in the range of $20 to $40/gal. One of the best recent studies was that by Paul Frymier et al, Dept of Chemical Engineering, Univ. of Tenn. The median of their cost estimates for hydrogen from algae is about $50/kg. A reasonable extrapolation is that oil from algae might cost 30% less per unit energy, or about $35/gal. There's a lot more sound economic analysis on all the alternatives here http://dotyenergy.com/Markets/MarketsOverview.htm .

There is a better solution. Scientists have recently shown that off-peak wind energy can be used to recycle CO2 into ethanol, gasoline, and jet fuel at up to 60% efficiency. These wind-generated carbon-neutral fuels, dubbed WindFuels, will compete when oil is above $40 to $90/bbl. Recycling CO2 into transportation fuels using off-peak renewable energy addresses both the oil and the climate challenges, and it completely stabilizes the power grid, no matter how much wind and solar are added. Wind will not continue to grow quickly without a solid market for its off-peak power and the ability to stabilize the grid by putting the off-peak energy into liquid fuels. Detailed scientific, engineering, and economics analyses are available at http://windfuels.com/ .

Annual WindFuels production per land area in good wind regions will exceed biofuels production density in fertile farming areas by a factor of 4 to 30. The cost of producing ethanol and gasoline from CO2 and wind energy will depend mostly on the cost of the off-peak wind energy. WindFuels will be cheaper than biofuels in most cases.

Maybe algae oil will eventually prove to be impractical. But the only way to prove that is to let a bunch of entrepreneurs loose on it and watch what happens. This is private money being spent, so no one can complain that they are being forced to pay through taxes.

The price of electricity from photovoltaic cells has fallen to about 1% of what it was when they were first invented. New inventions, refinements of old inventions, and economies of scale can bring costs down lower than anyone could have imagined at first. Just let the entrepreneurs work on it for a while. The possibility of making a vast amount of money will motivate them to find ways of cutting costs that the "experts" didn't think of.

Also, if you contrast the $10 million being spent here with the $50 billion or so that has been spent chasing fusion energy, it is tiny. (And most of the money spent on fusion has been taxpayer money, taken from unwilling people by the threat of violence.) I know fusion was not mentioned here before, but it's an example of how much energy research can cost.

The possible benefits of a successful algae oil production method are so huge that it would be worth throwing many billions of dollars at it before giving up.

Algae oil is a very interesting proposition to me in that I am involved with anaerobic digesters and we do have plenty of heat, nutrients, and CO2 as byproducts which should be applicable to algae cultivation.

However, I keep hearing that the major issue with algae oil is extracting it from the algae itself for a commercially viable cost and quantity.

Is anyone aware of the validity of the issue and/ or this problem has been overcome.

David Doty, is this the major cost factor you cite in your comments ?

I am intrigued by the idea of using Blue-Green Algae...in the presence of
sunlight......to produce Hydrogen. I am greatly in favor of a transition
to a Hydrogen Economy.
And as we know, algae grows at an astonishing rate......under the proper
circumstances.

Getting the fuel-grade products from the algae will probably only add under $2/gal. It's the cost of the algae itself - because of enormous capital and labor costs. The cheapest algae available today is $5000/ton. That's over 20 times the cost of wood pellets, which are 10 times what much bio-waste cost 8 years ago.

David, I'm not completely following you. Is the $5,000 per ton figure you quote for algae what the grower can get for their algae and, if so, is there a viable market for it?

Does the $2.00 /gal you mention for the oil the total cost or is that just the amount required to seperate the oil from the algae ? Is it additive to the cost of $5000/ ton? How much oil can you extract from a ton of algae.

It doesn't sound very commercially viable as a fuel source at those prices. What are the other uses?

Thank You