This month the U.S. Department of Energy announced an investment of nearly $1.5 million in projects to develop renewable energy from Hawaiian seaweed, following large investments in other parts of the nation in a new push toward the potentially groundbreaking development of seaweed-based biofuels.
The $1.5 million will go toward establishing two large-scale offshore seaweed farms for development and production of biofuels. Of this hefty sum, $995,978 goes to Honolulu’s Makai Ocean Engineering for the development of an ocean simulating model to facilitate offshore seaweed farm design, Kailua-Kona’s Kampachi Farms receives $500,000 to develop an offshore macroalgae farm and test out different seaweed harvesting methods in search of the most efficient model.
The recent investments in Hawaii are just one part of a recent energy trend toward biofuels. The DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program is developing nationwide projects to establish a large-scale macroalgae agricultural industry under the under the Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources (MARINER) program.
In Massachusetts, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was awarded a whopping $5.7 million from ARPA-E to fund two projects to further advance mass cultivation of seaweed on an industrial scale. $3.7 million of this will go toward the development of a breeding program for sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima), utilizing cutting-edge gene sequencing and genomic resources for the most accurate and efficient selective breeding possible, resulting in a 20 to 30 percent improvement over wild plants. For this endeavor, WHOI will work in conjunction with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, another MARINER project funding recipient that is currently developing scale model seaweed farms capable of producing sugar kelp for less than $100 per dry metric ton.
The other $2 million given to WHOI goes toward developing a self-sufficient underwater observation system to monitor these large-scale seaweed farms for long periods of time without human intervention. This revolutionary technology is being created by a team from the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering department.
This huge push in funding and biofuel investments comes in the hope that seaweed could soon be used to power our homes and vehicles. According to ARPA-E, the U.S. could potentially produce 300 million dry metric tons of combined brown and red seaweed per year. Converted to biofuel, this yield could supply 10 percent of the nation’s annual transportation energy demand—a game-changing amount.

More at: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Ener...o-Biofuel.html