Algae source of energy

Thursday, 1 September 2011

Green Algae

Green algae has a noticeable pigmentation that is due to green chlorophyll, which captures light energy for food making process.

They have similar life-cycles, pigments, stored food supplies like land plants. There are three main steps for the re-production of algae:

Uni-cellular
Colonies
Multi-cellar*

*This is the final and the most important stage; this is where you will be able to extract oil.

Green algae has been the main subject for many commercial companies. These companies use algae for many purposes, such as: Health care (medicine) and some others are developing ways to extract efficiently oil from it.

Algae bio-fuel is one of the solutions to the current energy & oil crisis. This is because algae is the most common plant on planet earth and is simple to use (their structure is simpler to extract oil from than from other plants).

It has been found that by feeding the algae more Co2, it grows more. This is because algae uses photosynthesis to transform Co2 and sunlight into energy. This would help to produce more oil, because it could re-generate 15x more than normal oil sources such as corn & switch-grass. This also means that the energy absorbed by the algae is used more efficiently, that's probably why it's weight can increase in a given time very quickly.

The advantages of using algae as an energy source are:

It can grow in any surrounding from fresh water to contaminated water.
By absorbing Carbon dioxide it could reduce greenhouse gases

Many other plants cannot do that. So these are big points to take in consideration.

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Basic Introduction Of Algae

Alga's are the simplest plants in their structure, although they vary in their sizes, some can be only seen through microscope (micro-organism). Alga's have spores & don't have seeds as most of the land plants do.

Alga's are the oldest known plants/protists on earth, the earliest recording goes back over 900 million years. Alga's do not have real roots, stems or leaves like land plants do.

There are different types of phylum's of alga's, but there are three main categories:

Brown algae
Green algae -> have spores, are one celled, the reproductive unit is capable of giving rise to a new individual cell without sexual fusion
Red algae

Their pigmentation is either red, brown or green.
We are looking at green algae:

Green algae has a noticeable pigmentation that is green chlorophyll which captures light energy for food making process.

Green alga's have a similar life-cycles, pigments, stored food supplies like land plants. There are three main steps for the production of algae, the last step of the algae is the main one where you can start extracting oil.