Magnetic Harvesting of Algae

High oil content algae offer the prospect of producing biofuels by using (1) land that is not suitable for other crops and (2) low quality water that is not suitable for irrigating ordinary agricultural crops. Unfortunately current harvest methods are too expensive for use in the production of a commodity product. This project will explore the addition of a suitable magnetic material to the growing algae, in order to enable the algae to be efficiently collected in a magnetic field, with low energy consumption. (This technique has already been used with bacteria in waste processing.) Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The technology should speed the use of algae to produce orders-of-magnitude more fuel from each acre. The high-intensity production of biofuels would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and our production of green house gases.