BrevardBioDiesel Blog

Florida Today reports on experiments by University of Florida researchers and South Florida's Vecenergy to find genetic variations in Jatropha suitable for oil production by flying samples in the International Space Station.

The experiments study cell cultures such as these:

"We are curious to learn what genes will be activated. Maybe some of those genes could help us develop new plants," Wagner Vendrame, University of Florida associate professor of horticulture, said. "They will get a tremendous variation. We know we are going to see something. We just don't know what."

Algae are attracting attention because the strains can potentially produce 10 or more times more fuel per acre than the corn used to make ethanol or the soybeans used to make biodiesel. Moreover, algae might be grown on arid land and brackish water, so that fuel production would not compete with food production. And algae are voracious consumers of carbon dioxide, potentially helping to keep some of this greenhouse gas from contributing to global warming.

Companies/organizations mentioned include:

• Sapphire Energy
• Colorado School of Mines
• University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center
• Union of Concerned Scientists
• Synthetic Genomics
• Bioalgene
• Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
• Phycal

No mention of local company PetroAlgae.

I ran into this cloud point data recently. As most of the commercial biodiesel recently available in this area is produced from an animal fat feedstock, this can help you determine a safe blending ratio based on expected low temperatures:

This is from the "SBA Good Book of Biodiesel" produced by the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance.