by cacofonix » Wed Jan 07, 2009 8:46 pm
Well, you can make either ethanol ( a substitute for gasoline) or biodiesel (a sub for diesel) from algae. Put simplistically, the lipid content of algae give biodiesel, while the carbohydrate content in algae give ethanol...
If you gasify algae biomass and obtain what is called syngas, you can get practically any hydrocarbon variant from this syngas - which means you can theoretically (and also practically) derive any hydrocarbon from algae. However, the gasification process incurs heavy capital cost and hence only a few companies are trying it.
In sum, the answer to your question is: you can get either ethanol, or biodiesel (or in some cases both from the same biomass!), or also any other hydrocarbon, depending on the process you adopt