Oilprice has been reporting on the long, drawn-out death of the dream of algal biofuel for years . A field once crowded with startups and hyperbolic promises of industry disruption and energy innovation, the pool has all but dried up. The incredible abundance of microalgae (there are approximately 70,000 species) and the species’ incredible resilience and ability to acclimatize to seemingly any environment seemed to make it the perfect candidate for the kind of cheap, efficient biomass an economically viable biofuel model needs. What’s more, the fact that it could be grown in the sea or in a lab and not on land that would otherwise be used to grow food crops (as in the case of corn- and sugar-cane based biofuels), made it an especially promising field of research. But, as it turns out, all these promising traits just weren’t enough to make the promise of algal biofuel […]