Algae Farm Power Algae fuel or Algal biofuel is an alternative
to fossil fuel that uses algae as its source. Several companies
and government agencies are funding efforts to reduce capital
and operating costs and make algae fuel production commercially
viable. Harvested algae, like fossil fuel, release CO2 when
burnt but unlike fossil fuel the CO2 is taken out of the
atmosphere by the next generation of growing algae. As locations
go, Columbus, New Mexico is hard to find but is a pretty good
place to stage the first attempt, here on Planet Earth, to
cultivate crude oil as an agricultural crop. To do so, three
partners are attempting to do something else that has never been
achieved before — using algae as a major, global crop platform —
not on the scale that has produced vitamin and nutritional
supplements, but on the scale and at the costs more closely
associated with the dozen or so great staple crops around the
world. It is turning a 300-acre expanse of desert scrub into the
world’s largest algae farm desi