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 …. DIY Algae Biodiesel is Harder Than You Think. 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.
Of course [Silent] didn’t want to toss algae cakes into a steam powered canoe, he wanted diesel fuel for his vehicle. That’s where the project broke down: Chlorella Vulgaris cells are exceptionally tough, and if you can’t rupture the cell wall, you can’t can’t get out any appreciable oil. A few grams by solvent extraction is all he manages before switching to more tractable feedstock.
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