Plants at the pump: Multilab project seeks toughest strains of algae for biofuel production

Regular, unleaded or algae? That’s a choice drivers could make at the pump one day. But for algal biofuels to compete with petroleum, farming algae has to become less expensive. Toward that goal, Sandia National Laboratories is testing strains of algae for resistance to a host of predators and diseases, and learning to detect when an algae pond is about to crash.