To many Southern Californians, algae are little more than a nuisance growing in their backyard swimming pools. But to Riggs Eckelberry, they are green gold.

Eckelberry, a techie by trade, recently helped start a company aiming to turn the simple organisms into biofuel that can power cars, jets and even industrial machinery.

Amid soaring oil prices and the widespread “green” movement, environmentally friendly biofuel has been gaining in popularity worldwide. According to Oakland-based research firm Clean Edge, biofuel sales are expected to more than triple in the next decade, to $81 billion by 2017.

But the industry is still young and many entrepreneurs searching for a viable alternative to petroleum are finding as many challenges as opportunities. As chief executive of OriginOil Inc., Eckelberry is hoping his company can be one of the few to break through in the already crowded field of biofuel startups.

While companies across the globe experiment with corn, sugar and other substances, Eckelberry said algae hold perhaps the most promise.

The stuff grows fast, is relatively cheap to harvest and provides abundant amounts of oil – relative to its size, at least. For these reasons, Eckelberry envisions a full-blown “algae revolution” in the works.

“Algae has been spoken about for 25 years as being the fuel of the future,” he said. “And it’s still the fuel of the future. Somebody’s got to bring it into the present.”

However, the company is already finding that getting oil from algae is not a simple process.

OriginOil’s extraction process involves a 40-foot-long bioreactor module that can hold 10,000 gallons of water. The company grows microalgae in the tanks and uses sophisticated technology to break the organism’s cell walls and extract its oil. According to the company, as much as 60 percent of the dry weight of algae is oil, and as a bonus, a by-product of the process can be used for animal feed.

The company said it has proved the technology internally and will talk generally about it, but it does not plan to release its data until later this year.

OriginOil, however, is not looking to create biofuel for the masses. Instead, the company intends to prove the technology and then license it to others. OriginOil currently has several patents pending.

“We’re going to basically facilitate this algae revolution,” Eckelberry said. “One company is not going to make algae for everybody else. We decided to make systems and solutions that can be delivered widely in the industry.”