NREL makes algae ethanol breakthrough competitive with cheap oil prices

February 18, 2016 |

In Colorado, new biorefinery process developed by scientists at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has proven to be significantly more effective at producing ethanol from algae than previous research.

The process, dubbed Combined Algal Processing (CAP), is detailed in a new paper by NREL’s Tao Dong, Eric Knoshaug, Ryan Davis, Lieve Laurens, Stefanie Van Wychen, Philip Pienkos, and Nick Nagle. The paper, “Combined algal processing: A novel integrated biorefinery process to produce algal biofuels and bioproducts,” appears in the journal Algal Research.

The research follows work previously done at NREL and published in 2014 in The Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Green Chemistry. In that work, scientists examined two promising algal strains, Chlorella and Scenedesmus, to determine their applicability as biofuel and bioproduct producers. They concluded Scenedesmus performed better in this process with impressive demonstrated total fuel yields of 97 gallons gasoline equivalents (GGE) per ton of biomass.

Category: Fuels

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