It was not too long ago that we saw an effort by the New Zealand Airways to try and convert Jatropha weed in to biofuel and while we have not heard any further story in that regard, we have the Arizona State University trying to convert Algae into Jet Fuel. An Arizona State University spinoff company has secured $3 million in public and private funds to advance its technology that converts algae to jet fuel. The brains behind the algae-to-jet-fuel amazing concept are ASU professors Qiang Hu and Milton Sommerfeld, who head ASU’s Laboratory for Algae Research & Biotechnology.

Arizona Technology Enterprises negotiated a licensing agreement with a private investment group, Heliae Development, which will return fees and a share of any commercialization income to the university. Heliae, led by Frank Mars, will also invest $1.5 million in the technology. While the technology sounds ultra cool, its current effectiveness is limited to the lab.

The experiments that have been performed in the ASU lab have so far proved that the much despised Algae could very well be a bounty waiting to be found in terms of acting as producers of biofuel. The ASU scientists identified algae strains that can be converted to fatty acids and be used to make a kerosene-based aviation fuel. The algae are “medium-chain” fatty acids that do not need to be treated with an expensive chemical to be converted to kerosene, unlike other comparable fuel sources derived from animal fat. This should get the protesters of biofuel off of our backs for a while as Algae is surely not causing world food crisis!

Via Azcentral