[dennisw]

I can promise you that chemical engineers routinely process worse matrices every day (I used to work for "le Giant chemical company", and had to design instrumentation to monitor a lot of those processes--so I'm well aware of what's possible).

This will require lots of energy. More money down a rat hole to get that algae goop free of most of the water that comes with it

[patton]

Dennis, are you being sarcastic, or silly? You never heard of a press?

[Wonder Warthog]

"This will require lots of energy. More money down a rat hole to get that algae goop free of most of the water that comes with it."

Not particularly. You burn the "non-oil" fraction of the biomass (still carbonaceous material, and thus combustible) to generate process heat---just like sugar mills. Most of the "getting the algae goop free of most of the water" is done by filtration--not a hugely energy-intensive unit operation. Every city waste treatment "bio-oxidation" plant handles a similar process every day.

As I said before, when I worked for "le Giant chemical company", they also had a "biox plant" to let the buggies "eat" the organic content of their plant wastewater streams. The only difference between that biox plant and the envisioned algae-to-oil plants is the type of buggies used (and of course, the steps to separate the oil from the protein and carbohydrate fractions). But again--those are standard chemical engineering operations.

There is NO new technology needed to operate such plants---the new technology comes from finding (or genetically engineering) the right micro-organisms, and finding the optimum conditions to foster their growth.