Biofuel made from power plant CO2

Biofuel made from power plant CO2
New Scientist
06 October 2006
Phil Mckenna
Magazine issue 2572

"If you're working at a power plant, you just saw your carbon dioxide turned into something you can drive home with." So says Isaac Berzin of GreenFuel Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is developing a way of producing biofuel from the noxious emissions of power plants.

Two of the world's greatest energy users are electricity generation and transport. Both are responsible for huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, as most power plants and vehicles still rely on fossil fuels. Now GreenFuel and others are hoping to marry the two together with an emerging technology that uses a by-product of one to supply fuel to the other. Doing so could dramatically reduce their overall carbon dioxide emissions.

At the heart of the technology is a plastic cylinder full of algae, which literally sucks the CO2 out of a power plant's exhaust. The algae can in turn be converted into biofuel, creating ...