Scotland Looks at Seaweed for Biofuel

Don’t try stuffing seaweed into your car just yet, but a new project in Europe just received £5 million ($7.5 million) to help turn marine plants into biofuel. The BioMara project will be led by scientists at the Scottish Association for Marine Science and include researchers from Ireland and Northern Ireland to look at producing biofuel from marine biomass as an alternative to production from land-based plants.Seaweed is a type of algae, and a significant amount of funding has already gone into developing biofuel from algae, with San Diego’s HR BioPetroleum making a deal earlier this year to build a commercial-scale plant in Hawaii. Other algae-to-biofuel startups include Massachusetts-based GreenFuel Technologies, San Francisco’s Solazyme, and New Zealand’s Aquaflow Bionomic.

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