Alternatives to the Mountains of Mordor

One wonders if the Carlyle Group's banksters have done Dick's dirty work to drive these guys out of business?

...Algae makes oil naturally. Raw algae can be processed to make biocrude, the renewable equivalent of petroleum, and refined to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemical feedstocks for plastics and drugs. Indeed, it can be processed at existing oil refineries to make just about anything that can be made from crude oil. This is the approach being taken by startups Solix Biofuels, based in Fort Collins, CO, and LiveFuels, based in Menlo Park, CA.

Alternatively, strains of algae that produce more carbohydrates and less oil can be processed and fermented to make ethanol, with leftover proteins used for animal feed. This is one of the potential uses of algae produced by startup GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, based in Cambridge, MA.

The theoretical potential is clear. Algae can be grown in open ponds or sealed in clear tubes, and it can produce far more oil per acre than soybeans, a source of oil for biodiesel. Algae can also clean up waste by processing nitrogen from wastewater and carbon dioxide from power plants. What's more, it can be grown on marginal lands useless for ordinary crops, and it can use water from salt aquifers that is not useful for drinking or agriculture. "Algae have the potential to produce a huge amount of oil," says Kathe Andrews-Cramer, the technical lead researcher for biofuels and bioenergy programs at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM. "We could replace certainly all of our diesel fuel with algal-derived oils, and possibly replace a lot more than that."

Not if Halliburton has anything to do with it...

Solix still seems to be in business, as amazingly does the more tenuous LiveFuels.

They aren't out of the woods yet, particularly if the economy starts bubbling: private equity loves to do its hostile takeovers while the value of a company's stock is rising. Look for these start-ups to move toward profitability, and then get eaten alive before they can produce much useful- unless a miracle happens and the DINOcrats actually start acting like real Deomcrats and regulate the banksters...