Posted on 07/05/2008 7:54:19 AM PDT by ovrtaxt
No land or fresh water is needed. Algae floats and and is one of the few plants that grows well in the open ocean. And many things eat it so there are several options for a two or three stage harvesting process. 100% efficiency is not needed. 5% efficiency would yield all the transportation fuel we need.
I can promise you that chemical engineers routinely process worse matrices every day (I used to work for "le Giant chemical company", and had to design instrumentation to monitor a lot of those processes--so I'm well aware of what's possible).
The Klamath system already produces tons of natural algae and the tribes and enviros continuously whine about it. The lakes in the upper basin and the reservoirs and mid Klamath River are ripe for harvest. In fact they already harvest some of it as an antioxidant supplement.
www.klamathriver.org/images/algae-bloom.gif
No, you grow the algae right next to the refinery and just pipe it over.
As I said already, I agree with the rest of your post.
Dennis, check the Valcent link at post 3. They’ve beat those problems.
If I had to have a small micro-refinery in my garage and a greenhouse in the back yard, and have fuel for life, I’d take that deal.
The refinery is the hard part. Neat fantasy, though...
He said 1/10th of NM using the open pond system- the vertical system would be much less.
But so what, we have some greenhouses dotted all over the country and local oil is produced and refined in a decentralized manner. Better than having only one or two massive refineries that make great terrorist targets.
Sounds like a plan to me.
The entire state of NM is floating on an inland ocean of salt water, and last time I was there, it seemed that they had their fair share of sunlight.
Well, sunlight and desert.
Actually, sunlight, desert, salt water, and rattlesnakes.
What’s the difficulty with just allowing the algae to grom passively? Sure, piping in CO2 speeds up growth, but in a non-cost effective situation, algae will grow on it’s own with the CO2 just floating around in regular air.
Carbon neutral is carbon neutral. Not that I buy into the whole enviro-lie that carbon is a bad thing, but it will give the doomsayers one less thing to complain about.
And hippies. Don’t forget the hippies.
This will require lots of energy. More money down a rat hole to get that algae goop free of most of the water that comes with it
Oh. yes, hippies. Some NM denizen was duly impressing me, with how her hippy mother was an artist. I replied, how fascinating, odd coincidence, so is my father. She asked, is he famous? I said, no, he only made 250k last year.
The hippie chick ran away.
I've been to that link and can't figure out what their game plan is. Can you summarize it?
It seems to me they propose to hang plastic bags of algae out in the desert. Racks and racks of them covering hundreds of square miles. This sounds preposterous.
Then the stinking algae is taken from the bags and made into petroleum byproducts?
Dennis, are you being sarcastic, or silly? You never heard of a press?
Piping in CO2 is moronic and designed to make the algae to oil scheme sound sexier. A bigger deal. Like it’s a carbon sequestration scheme. Hey, burn coal nearby to make electric and pipe in the CO2 to these racks with algae bags on them. That kind of nonsense
This is really not hard to figure out. Take a biofuel refinery, put up a few greenhouses next door to feed it— instead of trucking loads of corn all over the country, or importing soybeans or other foods.
Look, the bags provide a lot of growable surface area, a shield against contaminant strains of algae, and minimal evaporation. These three problems have been the main gripe against algae as a fuel source.
Also, water and oil don’t mix. It’s easy to skim it off the top.
Why are you so opposed? You have something against technological advancement?
I agree, the algae is going to use up CO2 whether you pipe it in or not. That just seems like a waste of money, unless the accelerated algal growth (and thus, the yield over time) is worth the expense of the infrastructure.
Good luck processing that algae goop with a press. This is your way of getting the water out?
This algae scheme is a bit different but I've read all kinds of claims about how cheap algae was going to be and feed the world's impoverished masses. These claims go back decades yet the price of Spirulina was never brought below $25. You cannot feed impoverished populations at that price
Have you ever eaten algae? I have and I have some spirulina here and have been reading about it for 22 years or more
The bags are silly. Imagine, instead, a pipe of used oil barrels on the bottom, clear plastic on the top. Adjust pipe leanth to life cucly of algae, and flow rate.
Input salt water, algae starters, and emissions from local coal-fired plant at one end.
pull pond scum from other end, and water - feed water bach to front of loop.
squeeze pond scum, allow oil and water to seperate.
Feed water and dry debris back to front of loop.
Process oil.
Repeat.
Inputs - salt water, waste gasses, starter stock.
Output - diesel.
Now why would I eat that ...er, stuff? see post right after yours.
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