Algae are exceptionally gifted chemists and help climate protection. This is because algae take in carbon dioxide (CO2) and sunlight to produce chemicals such as carbohydrates, lipids, and amino acids. In special cases they even produce bioethanol, which is a valuable substance for the chemical industry and for use as a fuel or fuel additive.
Linde (www. linde.com) engineers, together with algae specialists from Algenol Biofuels (www. algenol.com), are developing technologies that provide these green cell factories an optimum feed of CO2.
The minute, micron-sized algae cells, which cannot be seen without a microscope, prefer to breathe in carbon dioxide and to drink salt water—oxygen just incurs as annoying waste. Cyanobacteria, more commonly known as blue-green algae, survive by swallowing up the greenhouse gas CO2, and they’ve been doing this for over 3.5 billion years.
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