I've done the "orbital fab to get oil" bit for coastal cities, which is fairly straightforward because you just put the satellite over the coast and the only strategic resource that can spawn coastal is oil. So it's not an unreasonable quest.
But Algae in inland cities is unreasonable. So is any land-based strategic resource quest because the odds of getting the resource you need on a land tile are very low. The quest will usually trigger on an earlier, older, larger city. By the time you have OrbFabs, those cities are working most of their tiles and are hemmed in on their landward sides. Since most cities have few unimproved tiles, and the satellite lasts 60+ turns, you're really only going to get one or two attempts before the game ends - so a wasted quest.