The screening for high lipid producing microalgae is a crucial step to enable large scale cultivation of suitable microalgae as a means of alternative energy. The Bligh and Dyer method has been traditionally used for the determination of biofuel-related lipids. But, we found that this method also extracts chlorophyll, to result in significant over-estimation of biofuel-related lipid measures. In this work, we present and characterize a method to obviate the chlorophyll interference to biofuel-related lipid determination. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.