Blatant Reality

I recently wrote an article for Celsias.com about OriginOil’s one step extraction process. Here is excerpt:

OriginOil recently announced a big breakthrough that could potentially advance the entire algae biofuel field. In April, they announced that they had developed an extraction process that separates oil and water from the algae biomass in one step without heavy machinery or chemicals.

 

Up until this point, creating a process that efficiently extracted oil from algae had been one of the major challenges that remained for researchers. They could already extract the oil from algae but the process involved many steps that were both time consuming, involved the use of some hazardous chemicals, and was very energy intensive.

 

The development of OriginOil’s “Single-Step Extraction” process eliminated many of the previous hurdles researchers faced. For example, this process does not need all of the chemicals previously used to separate the oil from the algae biomass. The only compound used in OriginOil’s process is CO2 which helps to increase the pH content of the algae/water mixture. They have also reduced the energy required to separate the oil from algae. With their “Single-Step Extraction” process, the energy costs are now 90% lower than the other processes currently used.

The article has some great illustrations on how the process works as well as a time lapse video showing the extraction in process. Check it out.