DIY Algae Biodiesel is Harder Than You Think

What happened

There’s one thing [Silent H] wants you to know before you watch his video about making biodiesel , embedded below: he started this project before he’d even heard of the Strait of Hormuz. No, he’s just independent-minded and wanted to try making his own fuel when diesel was– in retrospect– cheap as chips.

That’s probably a good thing, because while [Silent] gets his pint of fuel at the end of the video, it’s not from algae; it’s from a backup crop of sunflowers. As it turns out, he picked what was the perfect algae and the absolute worst algae for making biodiesel from: Chlorella Vulgaris . It’s perfect because it’s easy to grow, and easy to extract from the growth medium, as it sinks when it is ‘ripe’, and has a very high oil content.