After the seaweed is cooked, agar is obtained as a by-product. The agar from the gelidium species is of very high quality. It can then be sold as food-grade agar, such as the one You consumed for health purposes, or it can be converted into bioethanol.
“Producing bioethanol from seaweed is a bonus,” said Phang. “But after carrying out a few years’ research in bioethanol production, we feel that it is still a long way to go, although the standard technology has been there for sometime now. Cost-wise, it is still very expensive to produce bioethanol.”
The fact remains that seaweed offers great potential for a green industry.