[taxcontrol]

The process is expected to yield 8,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre

... per ... what? year, month, week, hour?

annually I suspect. Now lets see, the estimated demand for diesel is 2 to 3 million barrels per day. At 55 gallons per barrel that would give us a rough working number of about 125 million gallons per day (or roughly 45 Billion gallons/year). At 8,000 gallons per acre per year... we would need about 5.6 million acres to replace the exiting production.

That would be covered by a space of 100 miles by 100 miles (6.4 million acres - assuming some loss due to pipes, roads, power lines, etc). You could fit that inside Kansas or Oklahoma and still have room to spare. Heck, with some additional work I'm sure you could even put up some locations in the desert southwest and not cut into valuable farm land.

Not bad, at least far better than turning a land mass the size of Texas into soybean or peanuts for oil production.

[Red Badger]

There are much better yields from other algae diesel technologies, in the order of 10-15k gallons per acre per year, and that's just to start......

[TKDietz]

"...we would need about 5.6 million acres to replace the exiting production."


That would be nothing. We already devote a lot more acreage than that to producing corn for ethanol. We'll soon have 20 million acres of corn being cultivated for ethanol production. If these guys can really produce 8,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre with reasonable production costs, the biodiesel industry will explode. One acre would be enough fuel for 32 of the standard 10,000 mile a year drivers if they drove 40 mile per gallon diesels. Ten million acres would be enough for 320 million of these drivers, or half that many who drive twice as many miles in a year or who drive big trucks that get half as many miles per gallon. This would be huge, a massive improvement over the 40 or 50 gallons or so of biodiesel they are currently getting from soybeans.

The problem with this technology will be production costs. The startup costs will be high, and my guess is ongoing costs will be high as well. Then again, it probably isn't easy or cheap to grow 200 acres of soybeans, which is about what you'd need to grow to equal just one acre of algae that produces 8,000 gallons of biodiesel a year. Super high yielding biofuel feedstocks probably will end up having much higher per acre production costs, but per gallon costs could be much lower in the end because it will take far fewer acres to produce a lot more fuel.