Posted on 09/30/2009 6:37:49 PM PDT by larry hagedon
Hmm. Is this what was behind the recent rash of recent stories about the dead area off the Mississipi Delta and the algae-killed lakes in the northern states?
So now we not only burn algae to save the Earth, but we burn Killer Algae to save it twice over?
Maybe just a coincidence. I don’t know.
yitbos
If they can reduce costs (ie make it commercially viable) and it’s not wholly supported by government subsidize....I’m all for it.
I’ve been more eager about this sort of alternative than any other, because it has the most potential.
This actually has some PROMISE. Doesn’t waste crop land to grow oil instead of food.
“hundreds of thousands of jobs”....how many will have to be government-subsidized?
Green algae bio diesel makes sense. Solar ad wind power do not.
Ethanol does not.
Aw hell, quit making sense. Ethanol subsidies for fuel, sending food costs through the roof are part of the plan. We can’t have some simple algae disrupting the flow. Exxon is big oil and must be taxed beyond recognition - this is heresy!
Amazing how free enterprise can overcome adversity. Watch and wait for some SWEEPING changes made to regulatory or tax implications of this by the idiots at the helm.
Green algae is one, and maybe the only one, of the alternative energy possibilities that seems to make sense for really large scale production. When this was discussed months ago, someone posted links to companies that had pilot projects going, and it looked promising, renewable and a truly new source of energy that wouldn’t compete for food crops to use as raw material.
The other main "food" is concentrated sunlight.
Algae can be processed into ethanol and the carbon dioxide by-product of the distillation process can be piped back into the algae tanks.
Agreed. There are a number of chlorophytes that contain large oil-filled vacuoles. In other words, this has promise.
The hundreds of thousands of jobs is likely wrong, as this is a mix between aquaculture and an automated laboratory process in real life.
Holy hell, you’ve been relegated to Chat. Perhaps it wasn’t breaking, but it’s news. Whatever.
Wish I had the link I followed months ago, but it showed a project that was inside, with long plastic tubes, about a foot in diameter, filled with water and growing algae. The tubes were arranged horizontally and stacked very high, showing how vertical arrangements could produce a lot of output and not require so much surface area.
Finally, Salton City, California has a reason to arise from the muck.
That’s another interesting method. The site I saw months ago had a video which showed their operation. Their indoor operation had large plastic tubes arrranged roughly like venetian blinds, growing the algae inside all the tubes.
The primary characteristics of ANY transportation fuel are energy content (based on an oxygen atmosphere) and transportability. These must be balanced by considerations of safety and cost to produce, plus other factors of diminishing importance.
The lower energy density of ethanol versus gasoline or diesel raises your cost of driving and makes you fill up more often. But it makes it worthless as aviation fuel, because planes are largely designed around their engines and their fuel capacity. However, BUTANOL, a 4-carbon alcohol, could work, if it could be produced at a reasonable cost. It has been used to power a single engine (on a multi-engine jetliner) and it did work. However, its energy density is about 5% lower than standard jet fuel, meaning a reduction in maximum operating range. Also, it can be mixed with petroleum in any ratio, and does act as both an oxygenate and an octane booster. And it is NOT hygroscopic. Unlike ethanol, it does not mix with water.
Hydrogen works for the space shuttle, where weight matters but cost does not. And nuclear works for big ships and submarines, where weight is almost totally insignificant.
Which brings us back to light liquid hydrocarbons - gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel - all of which are just about perfect for their applications.
My belief is that the transportation fuels of the future - decades to centuries - will be indistinguishable from today’s versions. What WILL change will be the feedstocks.
We know from our astronomers, their telescopes, and their spectrometers that hydrocarbons are found throughout the known universe. We know that Titan - a moon of Saturn - has more hydrocarbons than we expect to find on (or in) our own planet, which calls into question the whole idea that all hydrocarbons are organic in origin.
However, all of the hydrocarbon deposits that we have been able to find and exploit so far ARE biological in origin - but not the dinosaur remains of popular myth. Crude oil comes from KEROGEN, and kerogen is the result of ALGAE BEDS (and perhaps some additional plant material) being buried by silt, subjected to subterranean heat and pressure, and eventually migrating toward the surface until trapped by various geologic formations.
“Green crude” from cultivated algae short-circuits the process, and can be fed directly into the same refineries we use for crude oil today. The inputs needed are CO2, both atmospheric and waste CO2 from industrial processes, breweries, and coal power plants; a MINISCULE amound of water (compared to land plants) that need NOT be pure or clean, since many types of algae thrive in seawater, and crop runoff or sewage would provide most of the needed micronutrients; and finally, copious sunlight. NO irrigation with precious potable water would be required.
I SUSPECT that we will eventually use bio-engineered algae in closed bioreactors, but many researchers are investigating wild algae in open ponds,as well. I don’t know the final answer, but that is my best guess now.
One of the amazing things about the Age of Bio Technology is the sheer number of ways you can manipulate the processes. There is now a company setting up at a coal plant to take the CO2 from the stack, and sunlight and a proprietary process and produce industrial chemicals, which I understand are worth more than ethanol.
CO2 is a very valuable bi product of electrical generation that can be converted into any of thousands of chemical products. As the technologies grow, CO2 and the products made from it could become more profitable than the electricity from the coal combustion.
Exciting time we live in.
I have been messing up my posts, putting my comments in the box for the excerpts. I gotta pay more attention to that.
I dont know about that, but Green Algae will soon rival corn and soy beans in volumes and values. I just found out that several months ago a Japanese oil company committed to invest 800 million dollars US into an algae venture in Papua New Guinea.
That news is just now hitting American bio tech news sites.
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