Atul Saxena

We are a group of professionals working on Biodiesel projects in India. Presently, we have evolved a technology to produce Biodiesel from Jatropha curcas oil. However the availability of raw material at low cost is a BIG challenge.

I find Blue Green roof project extremely innovative & that is reason of joining this forum.

Since India has a tropical advantage, hence I am keenly interested to work on creating a model to produce Algae for oil using Blue Green roof concept.

To start with we want a right culture of Algae & roof/equipment design to start the project in the shortest time (let us say two months from now at the max).

This model, we can share with sola roof community members spread all over the world.

I am based in New Delhi, India. I shall be happy to receive any member of community who plans to come to India either for work or pleasure.

Atul,

Many species have been identified as possible to use for oil from algae. I intend to use CCMP647. Navid R. Moheimam used it succesfully for a research project at Murdock Universiy in Australia. His most successful production was with raceway ponds. Navid's faculity advisor, Michael A. Borowitzka, authored a chapter in "Algal Culturing Techniques" ISBN 0-12-088426-7, about growing algae in raceway ponds. (The editor of the book is Robert A. Anderson, the Director of CCMP.) If you want to get a quick start, I would suggest you use CCMP647, CCMP's directions for culturing it, and Michael's directions for raceway ponds. After we have raceways succesfully working, we can integrate algae production into Solaroof. That is how I plan to proceed.

I feel that is is not necessary to convert the oil to biodiesel. Using the algae oil directly may be more cost effective. (Unless you have an inexpensive source of methanol.) - Bobby (OpenEcoCommunity.NoNameYet)