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Awesome. I truly hope this idea works out.

It works like this – you pipe the exhaust from fossil-fueled power plants into algae farms. Algae gobbles up the CO2, grows fat and happy. Every day, the algae is harvested, squeezed to release the oil it contains and is dried. The oil undergoes transesterification to convert it into biodiesel, the dried algae is then used to make ethanol and the exhaust from the power plant now has 40% less CO2 and 86% less N20.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/11/tech/main1202264.shtml

This not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fueled power plants, it provides a dirt cheap basestock from which to produce biodiesel and ethanol and produces more oil per acre than soybeans – 15,000 vs. 60. The only downside is it would take a 2,000 acre farm to produce 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol per year. There’s only, say, a thousand power plants in the US with that kind of surrounding space. Assuming yields and everything are correct, we’re talking about producing on the order of 40 billion gallons of biodiesel yearly from the exhaust of existing power plants.

When that biodiesel is burned, it would released the CO2 gobbled up by the algae back into the atmosphere, but more algae farms could gobble that right back up. We’re not closing the carbon loop, as is the case with soy or canola biodiesel, but we’re getting a free ride off it at least once, possibly multiple times.

Less greenhouse gasses and N2O-caused acid rain, cheaper, easier, faster biodiesel basestock production, starter material for ethanol as a waste product and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. I think this is something everybody but OPEC can get behind.