Oil will run out sooner or later so we need to consider alternative non-petroleum based fuels for our cars and lorries. We also need to reduce existing consumption of petroleum-based fuels so that carbon emissions are diminished and potentially damaging effects of climate change are attenuated. There are many ways to approach these problems but one attractive way is to make biofuels from algae; in principle these are carbon-neutral fuels. This idea has attracted quite a bit of interest but the usual bottleneck is making enough algae. There are many players in the field including Craig Venter and ExxonMobil. One man in South West England, James Morris, however, has some ideas about increasing production of algae that may get round the bottleneck. He has a prototype apparatus up and running and I visited him at Plymouth Marine Labs. You can read the full story from Devon Life Magazine here.
Philip Strange Science and Nature Writing 
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