Algae-to-Fuel Research Enjoys Resurgence at NREL

clipped from www.renewableenergyworld.com Passenger jets cruise at 35,000 feet without a hiccup. Catfish farmers lease ponds to biofuels entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists sink $1 billion into green crude. Judging by the headlines, can it be long before we're filling our tanks with clean fuel from algae? At NREL, researchers are accelerating efforts to identify and characterize the most promising strains of algae for fuel production. The work has resumed more than a decade after its original algae fuels program was curtailed because the fuels were considered too costly to compete with petroleum. Today, algae fuels still are not close to being economically competitive with petroleum, according to NREL scientists. So what's changed? Record high crude oil prices, instability in the Middle East and other oil exporting regions and global warming concerns connected to increasing levels of carbon dioxide have made algae an appealing potential fuel source — again.