Algae is a major player right now in the “build the next biofuel” game. There are lots of technologies in existence from simply growing oil-heavy algae that can be pressed for their oil to make biodiesel, to engineering bigger, better, oil-excreting species’, to work like this, making artificial hydrocarbons from the algae biomass. There’s a lot of this going on at a lab bench scale. Somewhat less at a test-facility scale. And so far, nothing at anything near an industrial scale, though there are a lot of venture capitalists betting the farm on it. The problem is one of price. No one has gotten close to the price of petroleum from algae, so unless someone comes up with a much cheaper tech, or gas prices rise (perhaps from a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system?), we’re not going to see this at scale. If those things do happen, there are other alternative liquid fuels also lined up to compete with algae to be the fuel of the future.