Algae are so good at producing oil from sunlight and carbon dioxide that there are, by some accounts, as many as 200 companies trying to make biofuels from algae. Some are obscure, little more than a couple of guys playing around with pond scum. Others are attention-grabbing, like Synthetic Genomics, the company led by pioneering scientist Craig Venter that joined forces with ExxonMobil in a $300 million research program.

Solazyme, a private company based in South San Francisco, stands out from the algae crowd, for a number of reasons.

First, there's the sheer variety of its products. Solazyme makes fuel for the U.S. Navy. It makes a heart-healthy, vegetarian, protein-rich microalgae power that goes into Garden of Life supplements and vitamins sold at stores like Whole Foods. And it recently announced a deal with Unilever to use algal oil in renewable, sustainable personal care products like soap. Its algae are multi-talented.

Then, there's the fact that Solazyme, unlike other startups, is "producing large volumes of oils and fuels, and we have been for a while," says its CEO, Jonathan Wolfson. What's large volumes? An annual rate of tens of thousands of gallons, including a little over 20,000 gallons of shipboard fuel during the first half of this year for the Navy, part of an $8.5 million contract signed last year.

Finally, Solazyme raised a Series C financing round of about $57 million during the credit crunch, much of it from existing investors including Braemar Energy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Jerry Fiddler, the firm's chairman–all of whom stuck by Solazyme through some early stumbles.

I met last week with Wolfson (pictured at right), the company's 39-year-old co-founder and CEO, whose passion and brainpower are apparent as soon as you meet him. (If you doubt it, come meet him at FORTUNE's Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment where he'll be speaking next month.) Because I'm not a scientist, it's all but impossible for me to know whether Solazyme's technology is superior, or whether it will be able to make oil at costs that make economic sense. But others who focus on the industry (like Biofuels Digest, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy) see the company as promising. Algae-based transportation fuels have a lower carbon footprint than diesel or gasoline, and they can be sources in the U.S.

Founded in 2003, Solazyme traces its beginnings to Emory University, where Wolfson and Harrison Dillon had just arrived as freshman in the fall of 1989. They met on the first day of school.

"What do you want to do?" Wolfson asked, after they'd chatted a little. He figured the answer would be something like "go get a beer" or "check out the town."

"I want to be a geneticist," Dillon replied.

Wolfson, whose father was a medical researcher, was intrigued. During freshman year, the classmates agreed to start a biotech company someday.