Algae - a solution to peak oil? Virgin Airlines says "yes," others say "no"

I really hope photosynthetic algae reactor concepts come to fruition. The latest closed reactor prototypes are hugely promising. Just imagine it, cleaning Co2 from the bubble while supplying all of our energy needs...

Big Oil is getting green with envy.

the ones who say "no" in the article sound like they have some sort of agenda.

Very cool discovery..

yea, the people who were saying "no", were saying it with regards to biofuels derived from food producing crops like corn, not algae.
i dont think they said anything about algae based fuels, which werent used in their "publicity stunt"

How many oil could China could have created from the Tons of Algae that was removed for the Olympics!?

Looks nice, perhaps another set of Engineers could find a way to reproduce this Algae in different environments, or we could use more of the Sea to go greener in all sort of ways.

This does sound promising but I'd like to know what the projected costs of producing one barrel of usable oil using this technique are likely to be. How much energy is used in producing, harvesting and refining this stuff? Is it really scalable? Just to supply the US's current oil needs would require 172750 acres!!

Again it is all in potential and something we should be investigating. It isn't a catch all solution though. We should still be investigating a reduction in our energy consumption and the production of a range of fuel types.

Algae has a right to live!

I'm glad that academicians are searching for alternatives to oil for consumption.

I have a pond full of algae behind my house, I'm going to be rich!

I can see it now, tepid water becoming the black gold of the future.

If someone makes a personal sized algae-to-energy conversion device, I'll be an early adopter, for sure.

Well, i think, its cool, but we shouldn't look as this as a permanent answer. oil, whether it comes from the ground or from algae, it is still oil. but, for now, this is the "cheap fix" that eveyone is going to be praising, until we move out of the era of oil.

nice, neat, cool, fun.

This really is a sound solution.

Ultimately, the above posters are right. W have to be careful to not let this give us an excuse to become wasteful and stupid again or to exponentially expand our economies like before.

But that being said, I've heard that a 1/10 of the area of New Mexico would be enough land to meet the oil needs of the entire nation.

I'm leaning towards freshwater vs. saltwater algae oil production personally. More energy for your investment. We just need to make sure there is a little freshwater to go around for our algae needs, recycle our wastewater, drinking water etc.