North Eddy County bio-fuel facility gears up for operation

By Reid Wright

Current-Argus Staff Writer

ARTESIA — It takes hundreds of thousands of years for fossil organisms beneath the earth's crust to simmer into crude petroleum. It takes a single day to make 1,000 gallons of crude algae biofuel at a small facility in southeast New Mexico.

"This, right now, is the next step in getting to where we need to be as a country in having a solid, renewable fuel profile and solid renewable fuels available, and do it at a commercial and industrial scale." said Douglas Lynn, executive director of The Center for Excellence for Hazardous Materials Management in Carlsbad.

Officials cut the ribbon today on the world's first biorefinery designed specifically to extract biofuel from micro algae. The facility was constructed at the site of the CEHMM algae production ponds near Artesia.