Fuel

If you drive a diesel vehicle in the Bay Area, you may have noticed something a little different at your Propel fuels station. For the first time, Propel has [started:beggin] selling a [biodiesel:biological] blend partially made from algae. That's right. A photosynthetic microorganism was turned into fuel without having to die, be buried in sediment and cooked by eons of geologic processes into [petroleum:sodium] . Instead, the company Solazyme simply grows its algae in the [dark:dim] , on a sugar diet. Starved of light, the algae [digest:protest] sugar and produce oil, which the company harvests. It's all part of an ongoing [effort:strive] to make low-carbon fuels to replace diesel and gasoline. The idea is simple: the algae or other plants suck up CO2 when they grow, the same CO2 that is released when the fuel made from the algae is burned. So there's no net addition of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.