South Korea to use algae as fuel source

Moreover, this country does not just create all sorts of prototypes and concepts of devices for processing algae into fuel, like hundreds of large and small institutes, laboratories and just enthusiasts. No, the South Korean government has officially announced that until 2013, algae will be used as an energy source for commercial purposes. This means that the stage of flasks and test tubes is practically passed, and the stage of industrial introduction of the developed technologies begins. Of course, it is not still smooth, much to be finalized, but kelp, algae, which are found in abundance, can already be used as a source of fuel. True, before the creation of industrial enterprises for the processing of algae another three years.

Over the past half-year, a lot of various experiments and tests have been carried out in South Korea, where scientists turned kelp algae biomass into biofuel. As it turned out, in the present tense, the technological process that provides such a transformation is quite expensive. It turns out that processing tons of kelp into fuel costs about $ 4,300. Over the next three years, scientists are going to reduce the cost of this process, at least ten times. It is clear that $ 4,300 is a very high price, so scientists still have to work and work.
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South Korean scientists claim that from one ton of such algae, through a series of transformations, you can get a whole million liters of bio-oil, a substance that could well serve as fuel. What kind of "oil" it is, and exactly what stages of transformation must the algae pass in order to become a fuel is not yet specified.

However, they do not despair, noting that laminaria has many advantages over other representatives of living organisms, which are also capable of producing energy, or at least become fuel as a result of a number of transformations. Laminaria - grow rapidly, multiply rapidly and are very cheap. These algae can be cultivated in shallow water in almost any quantity, the main thing is to cheapen the process of converting biomass into biofuel. In addition, laminaria can be used not only to create biofuels, but also, for example, to heat buildings or produce electricity (exactly, scientists did not specify, unfortunately).

South Korean scientists are transforming algae into something called “bio-oil” by abandoning an even more expensive way to convert biomass into ethanol (still the most common method of producing fuel from organic matter).

In general, let us hope that by 2013 we will not die in a nuclear war , we will indeed become witnesses of how science makes it possible to obtain fuel from “pasture” material. By the way, kelp is the notorious seaweed, so this seaweed is good for health and can become a fuel - just some kind of miracle, you will agree.