For a healthier environment today, tomorrow and in the distant future: algae. That’s the belief of Riggs Eckelberry, CEO of Origin Oil, in Los Angeles.

Eckelberry sees this algae tech spreading rapidly across Europe where last year the E.U. tax on CO2 emissions quintupled. If you have a plate glass factory, cement plant, utility burning and fossil fuel, you need an algae tank that consumers that CO2. Turns waste into valuable resource. Eckelberry and I speculated that in the future there may be CO2 pipelines delivering the valuable gas to algae-driven utilities. Meanwhile, every major industry that generates CO2 or other organic gas emissions needs its friendly algae installation.

How confident is Eckelberry? “We’ll provide the technology and there’ll be a tornado of adoptions.” He’s seeing intense interest across Europe, from Japanese companies, and in far-flung development centers like Dubai and Mumbai. Why? The algae solution is localized, uses primarily off-the-shelf technology combined with know-how and process information from Origin Oil.