Algae are very good at doing certain things and very bad at others. For biofuels, the issue has largely been that people extrapolating from the lab don’t account for the vulnerability of these organisms in the wild (single cell non-extremophile algae don’t form natural monocultures period), and way way way underestimating the entropic costs of dewatering a single celled bug that behaves as a colloid.

But when algae do what they’re good at it works great. No baby formula DHA without (heterotrophic) algae.