Biofuels made from algae and not from terrestrial plants

Scientists continue to search for alternative energy sources and cleaner safer, and meanwhile, a growing number of valuable agricultural land is intended to produce ethanol, an alternative fuel for transportation. Although the bio-ethanol is renewable, economists and ecologists fear, as indeed has already begun to happen, that this tendency to use agricultural land to produce fuel instead of food even more limited food resources in the world, promotes increases in prices of certain foodstuffs, and hinder efforts to fight world hunger.

A promising alternative is to use seaweed as it can be grown in shorter cycles than usual on terrestrial plants and are capable of producing biofuel equal or greater efficiency, all without having to sacrifice fertile land that could be spent to food crops.

Marine algae are a promising source of ethanol on which has been investigated very little. Now a team of experts has made significant progress in a method of growing algae to serve as a source of biofuels and at the same time help reduce the pollution of some sea areas.

Many coastal regions, including the Red Sea in southern Israel have suffered from a special type of pollution caused by human waste and a boom of aquaculture (fish farming), which leads to excessive amounts of nutrients, the end result of severe damage to coral reefs, which are already endangered by other causes, and various adverse effects for many species that depend on human populations.

Promoting the cultivation of marine algae to produce biofuels could be a way to solve these environmental problems.


It's better than the fertile lands are reserved for food crops instead of being used for the production of biofuels.

The team Avigdor Abelson and Leor Korzen, the new Renewable Energy Centre and the Department of Zoology, University of Tel Aviv, along with Alvaro Israel, the National Oceanographic Institute, Aharon Gedanken of Bar-Ilan University, and Ariel Kushmaro of Ben-Gurion, all these institutions in Israel, has developed a system for which have been considered the most common circumstances in marine environments exploited by man. The system in its different steps and aspects, processes combined to create what could be defined to some extent, as an artificial ecosystem.

By using multiple species, this new system, called CAMUS, you can convert waste into biofuels, while reducing the impact of pollution on the local ecosystem.

Source: SCIENCE NEWS