Atlas Bear

ExxonMobil is known for being a big oil company and that often gives them a bad rap. ExxonMobil is also known for the worst oil spill in history, which happened 21 years ago and the effects are still being felt today. Well, it looks like ExxonMobil is trying to fix their battered environmental image by investing heavily, to the tune of $600 million, in algae-based bio-fuels. Working with Synthetic Genomics, ExxonMobil now joins Dow Chemical who is also investing heavily in algae technology.

Many companies are going towards bio-fuels that come from algae because ethanol-based fuels are now being seen as not economically-viable because of the high price it puts on food costs and how much corn has to be diverted in order supply fuel rather than food. In addition, algae is seen as better than ethanol for supplying fuel because it is cheap, it can be grown in controlled conditions and it does not take much space to make the fuel.

Right now, ExxonMobil is working to find answers to the three big roadblocks to this technology, which are finding the best strain of algae for fuel, how to grow the algae for fuel and how to produce it economically using the existing infrastructure of the world. ExxonMobil hopes to have answers to these questions within the next five years.

While bio-fuel crops like corn yield 150 gallons of fuel per planted acre, algae fuel is expected to supply 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre of algae. That is a huge increase and it means much less space to make the fuel. All of the algae are made in a sealed-growth chamber that lets sunlight in so the algae can grow. Once the algae have been grown, it is harvested and the oil is extracted from it and made into refined diesel. All that is needed for all this to happen is a bit of carbon dioxide (thereby helping to remove some CO2 from the atmosphere) and sunlight.