Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Biofuels from bacteria

Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Biofuels from bacteria
LIVERMORE, Calif.—You might not cook with this sugar, but from a biofuels standpoint, it’s pretty sweet. A Bay Area company has patented a group of three single-celled, algae-like organisms that, when grown together, can produce high quantities of sugar just right for making biofuels. Sandia National Laboratories is helping HelioBioSys Inc. learn whether farming them on a large scale would be successful.The demand for clean, domestically produced, renewable energy has resulted in a lot of research on algae. Algae is a desirable biofuel source because it doesn’t compete with food crops for land, water or other resources. The water used to grow algae is not usually suitable for agriculture. Typically, algae farms aim to produce large quantities of biomass, so they can then be harvested and converted into fuels, chemicals or other bio-based products.