With the temperatures and pressures involved, the question is how energy efficient this process is. The whole biofuel process is pretty hard to get net energy positive to begin with. Algae are pretty good compared to others, but I still have my doubts.

A nice story. Unfortunately it is meaningless without knowing what the efficiency of the process is.

Current refining have temperatures reaching 600 degrees C so the temperatures for this process are fairly moderate. There's a huge potential to improve the efficiency in the refining process as the algae can be tailored to create a specific 'crude oil' for a final product (gas, kerosene, diesel etc)

What happens if you add grass clipping into the mix? .................................................................................
So this could mean that the timeline for producing natural oil can easily fit into a 6000 year time frame.

It should be possible to capture a fair amount of the heat energy when cooling the mixture.

Yeah thats great. Now if they take all the bio mass know as human waste and shove that into the dry oil wells along with water they can produce algae again the old school way and maybe the owner of all those old wells can strrike it rich again.

So if scientists find a cheap means of making fuel that contributes to the C02 problem and it drys up funding toward developing viable non polluting means of transportation then we are all screwed. Oil companies already try to get everyone believing that oil can't be replaced so they'll make sure that this algae thing is bought and buried.

Is everyone missing the elephant in the room? OPEC? Every nation on earth no matter how big or small or how many natural resources it has or what type - will be able to make their own oil. As much of it as they want. States that make their living solely on the sale of oil are going to be in deep doo-doo. Economic and geo-political realignment of EPIC proportions comin up!

Hmmm. In a sunny region how about pumping the algae through a high pressure pipeline surrounded by focused curved mirrors to increase the solar heating? It may be possible to increase the pressure and/or time. Perhaps an inexpensive catalyst could be found to speed up the reaction. Centrifuging the algae as it entered the the system would be a cheap method of removing a large percentage of the water before reacting. Or, setting up something like this next to an electric power plant using the waste heat and cooling lake water to process and grow more algae would be another possibility. Use the CO2 from the plant to speed up the growth of the algae. Just a few random thoughts.

To Rt1583; That's proprietary info... Good luck getting a real number for any process form any manufacturer!
But seriously, getting this temp and pressure range, especially if the product is in an emulsion, is no big deal. Well within the range of adiabatic processes, especially if multi-stage. The part I'm really stumped by is how they keep the liquid at a set temperature/pressure for an hour