With today’s slowly diminishing energy resources, people have already been getting more and more concerned and therefore are conducting researches especially on biofuel. Algae are looked at these days as something that might just save humanity from this predicament. Though the chances for the plant to really move from test tubes to barrels are slim, there are definitely a lot of good reasons why it should be put to real rest. First, algae thrives in fresh water, salt water or sewage and it doesn’t compete with other food crops for land or any other resources needed for it to grow. Second, it has a lot of theoretical yield of oil per acre which is a hundred times greater than other crops.

But despite all the publicity, no body can deny the fact that there are still a lot of work to do in proving that this plant can be reliably transformed from a thick, green substance to a finished fuel able to provide for America’s 870 million–gallon-per-day petroleum need.

"I get a lot of people telling me that they’ve got thousands of gallons, but when I actually ask for a sample I can get maybe two," says Jennifer Holmgren,UOP renewable energy and chemicals division director. The main task of Holmgren’s office is to refine jet fuel from feedstocks, and this includes algae.

Solix Biofuels lead scientist Bryan Wilson says, "Google some of the numbers, and you’ve got people claiming that right now they’re producing 35,000 gallons per acre per year, and they’ll be producing 100,000 gallons—and that’s just impossible". Wilson, having had worked successfully for two years in the fledgling algae industry furthers, There’s probably not more than a few barrels floating around right now."

Companies wanting to be "pond scum" superpowers have increased compared to the last two years, a lot of them backed by Chevron and Shell. $6.7 million was the amount granted by DARPA to UOP for them to be able to study how "second-generation" feedstocks, or nonfood crops, could turn into JP-8 jet fuel for U.S. Air Force and NATO.Airbus and JetBlue just this month, announced that it is going to be their goal that 30% of jet fuel would already be replaced with second-gen biofuels by 2030. Air New Zealand and Dutch airline KLM are already working on the same goal.

"It’s frustrating for the outside world, but we’ve been learning how to do agriculture for about 5000 years, and we’ve been learning how to make oil from algae now for only a couple of years. So there’s a lot of learning, and the curve is pretty steep," Wilson says. "This is probably going to be the first summer that you’re getting anything more than just test tubes of oil produced."

This is already a second attempt in putting algae on the biofuel limelight. The U.S. government did its first attempt in the wake of the last oil crisis but it was killed in 1996 by the Clinton administration. Until the present, algae is still struggling in proving its worth in the midst of record-high petroleum prices.

Choosing which kind of algae to start with is already a very gigantic task. There are over 100,000 species, each adapted to grow in different environments. The different algae species can produce oil in varying amount – or none at all. More than 3000 different strains from all over the world were collected by the government in the 1980s, 300 of which were deemed to be promising. The secret formulas of biofuel startups are genetically modified superplants and today, many algal strains have been engineered into such. Despite this, no winner has been announced officially yet. The difficulty of the entire task of replacing conventional fuel with second-generation" feedstocks is proven by the so much more difficult task of finding the right specie.

"It’s not as easy as running a combine through a field of canola to get the seeds and crush them," says Michael Weaver, CEO of the Washington biofuels company Bionavitas. "For anybody who thinks that we can go from ‘Hey, let’s look at algae,’ to full-on fuel production in the period of the past three to five years, it’s just never going to happen that way."

The big questions that the proponents of this endeavor have to face now are how much oil it can produce, how soon and whether it will live up to its promise.

"The jury is out on all of them—nobody has fully demonstrated that their system is going to be affordable and scalable, and be robust in terms of operations and maintenance and the ability to produce a large amount of oil routinely," says Ron Pate, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. "There are a lot of naysayers out there, and that’s fine. It’s good to be skeptical. But at the same time, I think there’s enough promise with algae that it needs to be given a better shot than what’s been done in the past."