None so far - the few start ups have not shown anything new.

Its still a hollow plastic bb.

If it is in fact 'chemically identical' to crude oil, does this mean it can be used to produce plastics etc? This would at least be useful and require a much smaller scale of operation, rather than simply wasting it by burning it as usual.

It's hard to tell where they are going that is different, but one possibility is to have cyanobacteria produce long-chain hydrocarbons directly rather than through triglycerides which are transesterified to make biodiesel.

Here's some skepticism: Follow the EROEI. These guys are quick to point out that the cyanobacteria conduct photosynthesis so the sun is their main energy source. However, the organsisms still need phosphate and other nutrients. How energy intensive is it to get a sufficient quantity of nutrients into the feed solution and to get the nutrients in a form the cyanobacteria can use? I don't know the answer to this, but I noticed in the article they say this:

Also crucial to making the green crude commercially viable is to use the byproducts other than oil from the algae. "You can probably derive 40% of the algae's weight in oil and you've got 60% of other stuff and there's a lot of valuable components in that in terms of chemical feed stocks."

Since they're looking to sell off by-products as well, that says to me low EROEI. My evidence is that making ethanol from corn only has a positive EROEI if the by-products are used in animal feed. Otherwise, you're looking at a net negative. If these guys are looking for something else sell in order to make it "commercially viable", I bet they're in the red on energy.

Violinist -

At the risk of being repetitive, the thoughts I have on the general subject of algae-to-fuel schemes are the same ones I have already expressed several times on this site. And that is:

Unless someone can demonstrate that they are able grow strains of 'fuel rich' algae at a high rate and in a stable manner in open ponds rather than closed transparent bioreactors, then there is little to be optimistic about algae as a large-scale fuel source.

Large bioreactors made of metal are expensive enough, but the cost of ones made of photo-stable transparent plastic would be prohibitive on a large scale. One really has to try to visualize what these things would look like when scaled up to full commercial size. There is nothing outlandish about a square mile's worth of open ponds (done all the time), but just try to visualize a square mile of transparent plastic bioreactors. Such a monstrosity would probably consumer a goodly chunk of the world's current yearly output of that type of transparent plastic.

The disposition of the dead biomass left over after the fuel has been extracted is a major technical and economic consideration. If an economical use for this stuff can be found, so much the better. But if not, then one is left with a large wet mass of highly biodegradable material that will have to be handled and disposed in some manner. And subjecting it to anaerobic digestion with methane production is only a partial solution, because a considerable amount of residue will still remain.

Nor would it be wise to gloss over the nutrient requirements, some claims of nitrogen fixation notwithstanding. What you can do in a carefully controlled laboratory pilot plant and what you can do in a large open pond are two very different things.

While algae-to-fuel is a worthwhile avenue of research, we are very far from having anything coming close to a commercially viable scheme.

If you can do it in an open pond, GO. If you have to do it in a transparent bioreactor, NO GO.