Algae hold a lot of untapped potential for use in industry. So far algae have provided invaluable nutrition in the health food sector but have struggled to be competitive against petroleum-derived chemical production. Algae are more favorable to petroleum from an environmental standpoint but the production cost of culturing, collecting, extracting and refining adds up to make the process too expensive for practical use. There is a need to improve production efficiency to reduce the cost of algae-derived products in order for them to be a viable alternative to petroleum-derived products.
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Source: Phys.org