Algae

• Vinay says this is a promising technology - [1]
• Small scale spirulina productin from Mr. Jourdan in France? - [2]
• Other small-scale examples are in Auroville, India, which is very likely the world's longest-running Spirulina operation
• Then there is another Indian small-scale example in Madurai (video here) - 150 g/day/20 square meters
  • Good applied data point of a working system
• Some successful village-scale examples in West Africa. But all of these are rather labor intensive.
• Gunter Pauli and ZERI did an interesting integration project in Namibia: Spirulina and BEER ! That's my favorate IWFMS. Basically: Brewery wastewater is highly alkaline, is used for growing spirulina (eliminates cost for chemicals, takes harmful alkaline wastewater out of the waste stream), spent grains from brewery barley are first used to grow mushrooms, then leftovers are put in biogas tank. Biogas powers brewery. It's ingeniuous.
• There is one patent about growing your own Spirulina at home in a photobioreactor. In terms of contamination, that doesn't seem to be such an issue with Spirulina because of the highly alkaline pH, nothing much else will grow at pH 10.5.
• http://www.instructables.com/id/An_Algae_Bioreactor_from_Recycled_Water_Bottles/
  • Critique: This is a cute puppy show. Quick calculation shows that you will get about 1 gram of algae from the setup under optimal conditions per day, based on empirical data from the Madurai work above. Therefore, if you did this manually to extract fuel, you would use up more calories in your effort than you get out of the fuel. No one has figured out how to do this with economic feasibility for fuel production. What are the efforts closest to success? This is definitely a proposition that could work, but efficient means of algae collection are one of the technical difficulties that one encounters in practice.
• http://algaelab.org/ : A community algae lab in Berkley, CA seeking the development of an open-source/DIY-oriented algae technology