Brunswick Community College's (BCC) Center for Aquaculture and Biotechnology (CAB) has implemented a Biofuels from Algae project as a joint effort between the departments of Aquaculture and Biotechnology. This included the design and construction of an 1800 gallon photobioreactor system during phase 1 of the project. Phase II focused on the downstream processing of oil extraction. BCC's CAB has a patent pending status on this process, which is purely mechanical, easily scalable and relatively cheap to implement. The final phase of the project (pending funding) will optimize and refine the oil extraction process, which will give us the opportunity to file a full patent, license the patent to industry or develop a trade secret with an industry partner, which will quickly move the process to commercialization. If the final phase is funded we will also obtain data on the yield of oil production, yield to biodiesel conversion, chemical composition of the extracted oil and determine the best species for use in the process developed at BCC.

This is a fast growing natural strain with high lipid content

Bio-fuel from Algae grown in settling ponds at Christchurch Municipal sewage works.

An algae photobioreactor on the roof of MIT university. The clear polycarbonate tubes are approx 3 meters high, and 10-20 centimeters in diameter. It removes upto 86% of the NOx and 40% of the CO2 of the smokestack emissions that are bubbled through it. The algae are feeding on exhaust with 13% CO2 content. This size algae photobioreactor can't handle the entire exhaust emissions, it would need to be much larger for that. This photobioreactor you see here on the roof of MIT, has since been dismantled and reassembled in Naboomspruit (now called Mookgopong) South Africa at a biodiesel plant.

Seambiotic - Innovations in Sea-Algae Cultivation and Bio-Energy Production