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
Al Gore and the Green Al "G"ees
They mindfully revel in that half empty glass don't they?
ROTFLMAO!
We the people defending our way of life in a concerning way and creating and supporting the DOD via hard earned labor perhaps.
That would be about a third of a gallon per square foot. That would be the equivalent of a layer of oil about 1/2" thick.
But I want to see this algea work. Because if we can find a way to make vats of algea make diesel, we can also fine a way to make vats of algea make medicines. And special plastics. And carbon nano-fibers. And electronic chips. And things no one has thought of yet, but we will.
And it will happen from raw material we flush down toilets and toss in the kitchen trash.
That is the THEORETICAL amount. I believe that the more realistic number is about 6,000 gallons. But it is still about 10 times as much as soybeans.
Proved and efficient.
Actually, the transistor was initially produced pretty cheaply for the early AM Transistor radios in the '50s. Of course, Military involvement during the 'Space-Race' led to 'integrated-circuits' or 'chips' as we call them today, and made possible these computer-thingys that I'm using right now.
$20/gallon is indeed a great starting point, but only if Americans are forced to pay that much because the enviro-weenies keep stopping the USA from building more refineries, drilling for our own oil, building nuclear power plants, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
The name-of-the-game is 'Energy', and right now, we're using-up the Middle-Eastern oil, and it's costing more because of increased world demand. In spite of all the brouha raised over 'renewable' fuels, fossil fuels will remain the way of the foreseeable future.
Trying to cram trees and shrubs into gas tanks is stupid as long as there's plenty of oil to be drilled and coal to be mined. Cramming corn into our gas tanks is selfish beyond belief, and borders on being criminal if there are hungry people anywhere in the world. Corn is food! ................................... FRegards
Only if you're the algore. And then we'll give you another award ... maybe the 'Hasty Pudding' or something - whatever that is ................................ FRegards
Partly correct. Price is one aspect, but scale is probably more important.
There are a lot of things that can be done and will be done that can add to the world's energy supplies. Most of these work best on a relatively small scale. Collective the result is probably more along the lines of a volume of silver BBs not silver bullets if the desired result is liquid fuels.
Your example of sewage sludge is a classic. Yes we can make some usable hydrocarbon based fuel from sludge ... but as full of crap as people are, we aren't going to run California on it. And methane [a gas] is the most economic end product not oil.
1,000 barrels a second. 86 million barrels a day. A barrel per day of Canadian tar sand based oil starts with $60,000 to $100,000 dollars of fixed investment per daily barrel of production. Then a lot of energy is added in terms of diesel to mine and transport the stuff and whole lot of natural gas is consumed to heat the bitumen and provide a bunch of hydrogen atoms to make the resulting mess into something resembling crude oil. This process is so capital, water and energy intensive that it in spite of large deposits and the undeniable ability to extract a positive energy return on the energy invested it simply isn't going to translate into the daily production needed to replace convention oil.
One last thing. Peak oil advocates do not assume that oil is all there is in the way of potential energy sources. [There are doomers who think that we are doomed no matter what, but that is pessimism not peak oil theory.] What peak oil advocates agree on is that at some point it will be impossible or at least wildly unfeasible to extract oil in volumes beyond that peak level and that thereafter there will be an irreversible decline in oil production. Whether the peak has already happened [some believe that it occurred in 2005 as crude oil and lease condensate have been declining during the intervening period] or whether CERA is correct and the peak won't occur for more than 20 years, is open to debate.
Most of the worlds oil fields and oil provinces are probably past peak now. Many will continue to produce oil long after we are all dead ... just at lower and lower levels.
For what it's worth, algae appears to have potential. I hope it works.
Phosphates do the trick for algae proliferation. . . that is what happens to my pool every summer.
The article I got the $1,000 figure from was referring to integrated circuits: High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio It mentions how the DoD was the technology driver, as it usually is, and therefore the origin of our modern life today. America would have been an average wealth country today if not for our large investments in defense technology in the 50s and 60s.
>What’s this “fuss” energy you refer to? ; )<
The nuclear waste dump in the Nevada desert.
Sewage sludge is but one of many sources of hydrocarbons that presently are in an unusable form and given the right economic conditions could be converted into usable fuels that would compete in the marketplace with fuels from other sources.
The company that right now is converting the waste from processing turnkeys in Carthage, Missouri with their proprietary Thermal Conversion Process stated a few years ago that their pilot plant had successfully processed sewage sludge into liquid fuel roughly equivalent to diesel fuel.
Based on that experience, they (not me) estimated that if all the sewage sludge produced in the US were converted using their process, it would produce enough fuel to totally eliminate the need for foreign imports. Even if they are wrong by a factor of two or three, that is still a lot of fuel.
When that outfit [or anyone else using a thermal de-polymerization produce a hundred thousand barrels a day net [about one tenth of one percent of current oil consumption], give me a ping. Heck, when they produce ten thousand barrels a day gross give me a ping.
Some extremely large dairy farms are producing enough methane to run a few thousand houses. I applaud them, but I would like to reiterate: As full of crap as people [and cows] are, we aren't going to run our civilization on sewage sludge or cow manure.
Oil is simply a wonderful thing. Liquid. Energy dense. Producible in vast quantities at the price of a few thousand feet of 8 inch hole, casing and tubing. However, it won’t last for ever and the alternatives are all going to cost us. In your lifetime or the lifetime of your kids, the age of oil is going to end. Maybe very soon [my belief] maybe a few years in the future. Get over it.If you want to direct your optimism in a more realistic direction, try nukes, more coal fired electric generation, wind, photo voltaics, wind or simply more efficient consumption patterns based on higher prices.
Yeah, the DoD was and is the driver in many industries. I remember paying about $10 apiece for 3 transistors for a kit-radio in 1959, and bought a complete 6 transistor radio for $60 in 1960.
Sputnik scared the crap out of everyone, and we got these neat toys today! Tomorrow - who knows ........................ FRegards
As long as it doesn't contribute to global warming, AlGore should be okay with it and since it's as natural as the sun, the carbon credits should rack up considerably.
Sorry about your needing to be sorry, but I was simply elaborating a general principle of economics- substitution, and used this tiny operation as an example of what is possible.
The management of the Carthage plant in fact did state they are making money in an article in Discovery:
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