The 10 Top Biofuels Stories of the Year

7. Change the World: Sapphire Energy’s Green Crude Farm, illustrated

Editor’s Note: Rain or shine, algae articles are perennially popular, but none more so than Sapphire Energy. In this pair of articles, readers got the news on the commencement of production at the Green Crude Farm and, in the follow-up, got to see the Farm in a series of images taking the reader from pond inoculation to harvested biomass. It proved to be a popular read.

As locations go, Columbus, New Mexico is hard to find but is a pretty good place to stage the first attempt, here on Planet Earth, to cultivate crude oil as an agricultural crop.

Let’s say that again – growing crude oil as an agricultural crop. It’s never been done before. Not a crop for something to eat, or to wear, or for materials for walls or floors – but something that is deep inside all three: energy itself.

To do so, three partners are attempting to do something else that has never been achieved before – using algae as a major, global crop platform – not on the scale that has produced vitamin and nutritional supplements, but on the scale and at the costs more closely associated with the dozen or so great staple crops around the world. Which is to say, this is a tall order. A monumental, change the world attempt.

The partners? The US Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the private investors behind Sapphire Energy – who have jointly financed the construction of Sapphire’s Green Crude Farm, of which 100 acres is in place, out of an eventual 300-acre facility, converting brackish water, CO2 and sunlight into oil-rich microalgae, from which a crude oil is extracted.

More on the Green Crude Farm here.