Biofuels from Algae Project

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Brunswick Community College's (BCC) Center for Aquaculture and Biotechnology (CAB) has implemented a Biofuels from Algae project as a joint effort between the departments of Aquaculture and Biotechnology. This included the design and construction of an 1800 gallon photobioreactor system during phase 1 of the project. Phase II focused on the downstream processing of oil extraction. BCC's CAB has a patent pending status on this process, which is purely mechanical, easily scalable and relatively cheap to implement. The final phase of the project (pending funding) will optimize and refine the oil extraction process, which will give us the opportunity to file a full patent, license the patent to industry or develop a trade secret with an industry partner, which will quickly move the process to commercialization. If the final phase is funded we will also obtain data on the yield of oil production, yield to biodiesel conversion, chemical composition of the extracted oil and determine the best species for use in the process developed at BCC.