New England Researchers Race To Turn Seaweed Into Biofuel
UConn Professor Charles Yarish poses with two jugs of seaweed at the Marine Biotechnology Lab at the UConn-Stamford campus. Yarish is at the forefront of seaweed R&D, helping to develop new technologies to convert the algae into fuel. Photo by Charlotte Weber for WSHU
For the last 10 years, scientists all over the world have been racing to figure out how to convert massive quantities of seaweed into biofuel. UConn Professor Charles Yarish is one of them. He’s spent his career studying seaweed, and he just got news that the federal government is going to fund one of his dream projects.
The grant from the Department of Energy is $5.7 million, and will go to Yarish and colleagues at the University of Connecticut and a team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Their goal is to figure out if it would be viable to mass produce seaweed for use as biofuel in the federal waters 12 to 200 miles off the New England coast. That area has been designated by the U.N. as an exclusive economic zone.