Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

The objective of this capstone project is to determine the economic feasibility and environmental impact of developing signature sustainable high value products – such as surfboards – using materials derived from algae versus petroleum. This report will incorporate what has been done before, current knowledge, and future pressing conservation issues as they relate to this emerging horizon of biotechnology. Federal government funding supported biofuel research in order to develop gasoline gallon equivalents derived from renewable resources, at first from terrestrial crops such as corn and soybeans, and more recently from algae as a viable resource. This research can now be leveraged to make many petroleum replacement products, but these need to be both economic, as well as environmentally desirable, and this report is intended to identify the feasibility of developing such products.