In October 2015, founder Paul Woods resigned and the company announced they were laying off 25% of the staff and changing focus to “water treatment and carbon capture" and possibly return to fuels in the future.

[2] They received $22 million dollars of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy from 2010 through 2013 for a project to prove viability of algal-produced ethanol at commercial scales using carbon dioxide captured from industrial sources.

While this project made significant progress towards large-scale algal biofuel production, the 2015 report from the Department of Energy notes that it is "unclear whether closed photobioreactors will ever be a viable commercial option".

[2] Algenol has a number of partners including the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory, BioFields in Mexico, Reliance Industries Ltd. in Mumbai, India, and Membrane Technology and Research.

[13][14] In December 2009, Algenol received a $25 million United States Department of Energy grant to help build the Integrated Biorefinery Direct to Ethanol project in Lee County, Florida.