Posted on 11/29/2007 3:24:45 PM PST by decimon
ST. PAUL, Minn. - The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan's lab at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research.
Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source.
Some varieties of algae are as much as 50 percent oil, and that oil can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is slashing the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.
"If you can get algae oils down below $2 a gallon, then you'll be where you need to be. And there's a lot of people who think you can," said Jennifer Holmgren, director of the renewable fuels unit of UOP LLC, an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc.
Researchers are trying to figure out how to grow enough of the right strains of algae and how to extract the oil most efficiently. Over the past two years they've enjoyed an upsurge in funding from governments, the Pentagon, big oil companies, utilities and venture capital firms.
The federal government halted its main algae research program nearly a decade ago, but technology has advanced and oil prices have climbed since then, and an Energy Department lab announced in late October that it was partnering with Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil company, in the hunt for better strains of algae.
"It's not backyard inventors at this point at all," said George Douglas, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "It's folks with experience to move it forward."
A New Zealand company demonstrated a Range Rover powered by an algae biodiesel blend last year, but experts say it will be many years before algae is commercially viable. Ruan expects some demonstration plants to be built within a few years.
Converting algae oil into biodiesel uses the same process that turns vegetable oils into biodiesel. But the cost of producing algae oil is hard to pin down because nobody's running the process start to finish other than in a laboratory, Douglas said. One Pentagon estimate puts it at more than $20 per gallon, but other experts say it's not clear cut.
If it can be brought down, algae's advantages include growing much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.
An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It wouldn't require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use sea water. And algae can gobble up pollutants from sewage and power plants.
The Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is funding research into producing jet fuel from plants, including algae. DARPA is already working with Honeywell's UOP, General Electric Inc. and the University of North Dakota. In November, it requested additional research proposals.
As the single largest energy consumer in the world, the Defense Department needs new, affordable sources of jet fuel, said Douglas Kirkpatrick, DARPA's biofuels program manager.
"Our definition of affordable is less than $5 per gallon, and what we're really looking for is less than $3 per gallon, and we believe that can be done," he said.
Des Plaines, Ill.-based UOP - which has developed a "green diesel" process that converts vegetable oils into fuels that are more like conventional petroleum products than standard biodiesel - already has successfully converted soybean oil into jet fuel, Holmgren said. And the company has partnered with Arizona State University to obtain algae oil to test for the DARPA project, she said.
At the University of Minnesota, Ruan and his colleagues are developing ways to grow mass quantities of algae, identifying promising strains and figuring out what they can make from the residue that remains after the oil is removed.
Because sunlight doesn't penetrate more than a few inches into water that's thick with algae, it doesn't grow well in deep tanks or open ponds. So researchers are designing systems called "photobioreactors" to provide the right mix of light and nutrients while keeping out wild algae strains.
Ruan's researchers grow their algae in sewage plant discharge because it contains phosphates and nitrates - chemicals that pollute rivers but can be fertilizer for algae farms. So Ruan envisions building algae farms next to treatment plants, where they could consume yet another pollutant, the carbon dioxide produced when sewage sludge is burned.
Jim Sears of A2BE Carbon Capture LLC, of Boulder, Colo., a startup company that's developing fuel-from-algae technologies that tap carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants, compared the challenges to achieving space flight.
"It's complex, it's difficult and it's going to take a lot of players," Sears said.
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On the Net:
University of Minnesota Center for Biorefining: http://biorefining.cfans.umn.edu/home.php
National Renewable Energy Laboratory: http://www.nrel.gov
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: http://www.darpa.mil
Pure Energy Systems wiki: http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Biodiesel_from_Algae_Oil
The truth is that nobody knows exactly where our “fossil fuels” came from, especially the stuff that is pumped from thousands of feet underground. There are many who think that crude oil is a natural process of the earth.
Good point!
First things first!
How are we going to use this good fortune to benefit politicians and their schemes of wealth transference?
Relax. Our law schools can produce plenty more.
Most algae are at home in the big ponds, aka the open oceans. Algae float and do not mind 50 foot waves crashing down on them. Most of the O2 in the atmosphere came from saltwater algae cracking CO2 from volcanoes. I'm very surprised that 70% of Earth's sun absorbing surface goes so unnoticed. The oceans are filled with animals that harvest algae and convert it into biodiesel for free.
Every geologist in the world accepts and knows coal is from ancient forests (in Bituminous coal you can find traces of the leaves.)
99.99999999% of the Geologists in the world accept and believe, beyond dispute, that petroleum is from ancient microscopic algae and diatoms that died and fell to the bottoms of shallow lakes and oceans, and was buried. If you examine the composition of various chemicals in petroleum they match what you'd expect if it came from algae and diatoms. Petroleum geologists constantly find oil based on the above assumptions and where there used to be ancient shallow lakes and oceans.
how about finding an algae that eats coal and makes oil???
And to get to $2 a gallon, all we need is a 'breakthrough'!
As I explained to my 'greenie-weenie' children, when you depend on 'Science-Fiction' over 'Science' to bolster your argument, you're putting your tax money in someone elses pocket.
It's still hard for them to grasp the reality, that there are not GIANT piles of corn, woodchips, algae, hydrogen, or anything else, just laying around somewhere waiting to be discovered and turned into fuel.
They didn't much like the 'miracles' needed for hydrogen, either .................................... FRegards
Seems like a good idea to me.
We're talking Sierra Club types here.
If this is the case with CO2 then the wanton lawful issue would be "global cooling", forced sewage destroying wildlife and insects, and the drastic change for the better disrupting nature in total.
Point being, they hate humankind and everything it stands for whether it be good or bad.
Don't underestimate these fanatics and their directives.
Clean? Have you heard about the fuss in SE Nevada?
In all cases, the only issue is price- will the end product of the conversion process have a sufficiently high enough market value to justify both the risk and the capital investment? The higher crude oil gets, the more projects will come to the stage where someone will accept the risk and fund it.
This is why the advocates of the “Peak Oil” theory run off the rails. They carelessly assume that hydrocarbon fuels will always come from crude oil, when in fact the very price increases in oil they wring their hands over guarantees that substitution will take place. Because, for example, diesel can be made from coal, algae, or sewage sludge, the only issue is the market price of diesel fuel, for the price indicates what the seller concludes about the nature of the supply. And clearly today, at this very moment, the price of gasoline and diesel are above the break-even costs of proven replacement and conversion technologies.
Same here. Build a vat the size of Wyoming and put a spiggot on it. Heh heh heh...
Yeah, I’ll have to concede that there. Reason is pointless in the face of insanity.
I've heard just oil, coal, wind, hydro, corn, hydrogen, bicycle, solar, lunar, tidal, foreign, domestic, and nuclear.
To date, nuclear is the cleanest and safest available.
What's this "fuss" energy you refer to? ; )
Algae are optimized to use chlorophyll to capture energy so would not likely be candidates for eating coal. But bacteria or nanomachines might be engineered to mine coal down to the last molecule.
That is where most of it came from if IIRC.
Makes sense. Algae is the most abundant plant on the planet.
If one wishes hard enough, can't they make it happen and feel good about it?
Alas, it doesn't matter because to many, it would still be a problem and a way to rape the rich and redistribute.
Oil isn't exactly approaching extinction either. (believed only by those who worship at the altar of AlGore and his "Inconvenient Truth")
The idea of it sure is a possible path to wealth and fame that P.T. Barnum would envy however.
Few people recognize this but the Department of Defense is responsible for America's great wealth. It's just that there is sometimes a 20 year lag between expensive military invention to mass consumer product that expands the economy.
The military will drive the discovery of a replacement for petroleum.
Actually, they don't seem to have much of a problem with the bad.
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