OriginOil announces first customer for oil-from-algae technology

 Company's technology uses algae to turn CO2 from power plants into fuel, vegetable oil, plastic and hundreds of other useful products, via sound waves and electric pulses that enable the oil to separate out in solution. Their fist customer will be MBD Energy of Australia.

Now that people are realizing the grave costs of fossil-based oil derived from drilling with the Gulf oil volcano catastrophe; advancements in oil derived from renewable sources such as algae are welcome news.

OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform algae, the most promising source of renewable oil, into a true competitor to petroleum, has been making major strides in its oil-from-algae technology.

The company recently announced a breakthrough direct-solar growth design that uses growth layers to harness the sun’s energy more effectively than existing pond systems, while greatly reducing the real estate required.

Then last week, CEO Riggs Eckelberry was interviewed on CNN and described how the technology works and is different from other approaches.

He compares extracting oil from algae to extracting CoolAid from water. OriginOil can crack the oil from the algae without having to remove the water. This is done via a combination of ultrasound and electrical pulses to crack the microscopic algae cell wall, liberating its oil, which rises to the top, while the biomass drops to the bottom. The biomass can be used either as fuel, fertilizer, or livestock feed. The oil is straight vegetable oil, with its high unsaturated fat, "which is actually quite good for you." It can also be used for making plastics, varnishes, fuel, and hundreds of other uses. "We like to call it 'crude without the tar' because it doesn't have the heavy metal contamination.

Later that day, OriginOil announced their first first customer, MBD Energy of Australia. Funded by Big Coal, they are moving aggressively to capture all the CO2 these coal-fired power plants are putting out. "This is the frontier of the algae land rush", said Eckelberry.

In short, through the OriginOil process the algae consumes CO2 then results in the many usable products including fuel.

"So we will see a movement toward algae systems being located all over the world, wherever CO2 is being emitted, and creating energy at those locations. We're talking a phenomenal distributed energy trend," Eckelberry concluded in the CNN interview.

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