Grow Your Own Energy

A NASA-backed experiment harvests algae for oil, releases fresh water.

By Jonathan Trent  |   Posted Monday, Sept. 3, 2012, at 7:15 AM ET

Before we run out of fossil oil, we will thoroughly tap the sea floor, find and frack wells wherever they may be, and excavate and extract the most recalcitrant of oil shales. In so doing, we will fuel our lifestyle for a few more decades at the cost of releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to global warming, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, acidifying oceans—and setting course for a future for which there are few optimistic scenarios.

In the face of all this, scientists are racing to find alternatives. Biofuels are my passion, but they have had rather a bad press, from complaints about displacing food production to the inefficiency of soybeans and the carbon footprint of ethanol. Microalgae have a low profile but they deserve a much higher one, since the fossil oil we mine mostly comes from microalgae that lived in shallow seas millions of years ago—and they may be key to developing sustainable alternative fuels.