Swansea research aims to harness potential of microalgae

Researchers at Swansea University are investigating various ways of harnessing the potential of microalgae, which are culture blooms of photosynthetic single-celled organisms.

‘It’s a tantalising resource in the fact that microalgae grow much faster, and you can get higher yield of things such as oils, compared with terrestrial crops,’ said Dr Adam Powell of Swansea. However, he added: ‘A lot of this technology has previously been oversold to some of the larger oil-refining companies and they started to pull out because the initial claims couldn’t be verified.’

While microalgal do have some key advantages over crops — with some estimates of product yield close to 15 times greater per volume of feedstock — the main problem is the amount of energy and resources required to harvest the cells out of the culture.

‘If you see a very dark culture in a pond it’s probably less than one per cent algal cells, so you need to try and find effective ways of de-watering the culture,’ Powell said.