Ultimate Review: The Unlimited Biotech Potential of Algae
(Labiotech.eu) Is the Future of Biotech…Green? The Algae Industry ranges from Biofuels to Nutrition to Fashion and Microalgae hold lots of potential for the industry to expand. But why? And do Venture Capitalists agree?
Microalgae have already been established as incredibly valuable to the biotech industry, in part due to their ancient genetic diversity and resilience, providing a bio-platform for production of food supplements, biofuels and even aesthetic effect (see Algaemy from Berlin).
So what kind of Industries are looking to Exploit Microalgae?
Who is working in the Algae-based Biofuel business? Well, a vast number of biotechs – and start-ups (such as Solaga in Germany) look to make certain processes (such as waste remediation) economically sustainable by producing biogas on the side. Here we’ll just mention a few in Europe…
UniVerve (Israel) has begun to scale-up its process for algae cultivation. The extracted oil, using wet extraction tech, can be used as feedstock for all biofuels, and produced relatively cheaply.
AlgaEnergy (Spain) also demonstrates that pursuing algae for biofuels is very desirable since yield is very high, it uses either wastewater, brackish or seawater, and does not require the use of agricultural land (a major plus).
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AlgaEnergy’s industrial Plant “Arcos de la Frontera” near Madrid, has the goal of fixing the CO2 emissions from industrially originated real flue gas by using microalgae cultures, transforming this noxious gas into biofuel products.
Algenol (Germany) employs enhanced blue-green algae (or cyanobacteria) photosynthesis to convert CO2 and seawater into “sugar” (pyruvate) and then into ethanol and biomass. Evodos (Netherlands) on the other hand is a developer and manufacturer of “Dynamic Settlers” (Spiral Plate Technology) to separate out algae from other materials in the process. READ MORE