Posted on 07/27/2009 8:05:09 PM PDT by Flavius
A startup based in Cambridge, MA--Joule Biotechnologies--today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
“The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline).”
It looks like ethanol, diesel and gasoline could be generated with these organisms. It looks like these same organism behave the same way algae would without the requirement for sunlight. Also, they need CO2 to make it work. Now where is there a large supply of CO2? Correct, coal fired electric plants.
What is very exciting is that this process might be created for the home system. You would not need much area to brew 800 gallons, which would give you 20,000 miles of driving at 25 miles/gallon. The home heating system would provide the CO2.
Man, that is just plain funny!
Exxon-Mobil just dropped 600 million on this....I don’t think you all should be laughing....this is algae oil and it works.
well everyone needs tax write off
Uhhhmmmmm.....OK.
LOL! A little creepy.
Seniors will have to go to Obama “counselors” each year to ask them if they feel it is time. If they have a good sized retirement portfolio these counselors may actually be IRS agents looking for money and granny may need a little “push.”
We need Chuck Heston yelling “Soylent Green - it’s people dammit!”
;-)
>What is very exciting is that this process might be created for the home system. You would not need much area to brew 800 gallons, which would give you 20,000 miles of driving at 25 miles/gallon. The home heating system would provide the CO2<
That would never happen.
Government couldn’t allow that kind of empowerment to the masses.
Valcent Products says they could yield 100,000/acre of diesel fuel from their little green organisms.
How many gallons of gas do you use a year? take that and divide it into the gallons per acre and that would give you how much space you’d need. I can not imagine what could be grown to give that kind of return per acre 20,000 gallons. I have the book Alchole can be a gas and they do not have anything that has that large of a return and that includes giant sweet beets that weigh around 100 pounds each.
If this is legit, it will be more illegal than cocaine. No way they can let people become free of their tentacles. Some sort of horrible side effect will have to be invented to justify the ban but of course.
The DOE says the average house that burns home heating oil uses 730 gallons per year. Assuming that the 20,000 gal/acre number is correct then the typical homeowner wold need 0.0365 acres or 1,590 sq ft for the photobioreactors. Not bad at all.
Algal Fuels and Massive Scales
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/27/algal-fuels-and-massive-scales/
Guest post by John Goetz
I keep an active watch of the news for progress being made in the areas of renewable and alternative energy sources. One area that has caught my eye is algal fuel (biofuel produced by algae). One company that has been in the news lately is Sapphire Energy, which claims to be able to produce ASTM compliant 91-octane biogasoline. Sapphire Energy says their technology “requires only sunlight, CO2 and non-potable water – and can be produced at massive scale on non-arable land”.
I am not trying to pick on any one solution or Sapphire Energy in particular. I simply wondered how massive a scale of CO2 and non-arable land is needed to make a noticeable dent in our gasoline demand.
First, how much CO2 do we need? The IPCC guidelines for calculating emissions require that an oxidation factor of 0.99 be applied to gasoline’s carbon content to account for a small portion of the fuel that is not oxidized into CO2. To calculate the CO2 emissions from a gallon of fuel, the carbon emissions are multiplied by the ratio of the molecular weight of CO2 to the molecular weight of carbon, or 44/12. Thus, the IPCC says the CO2 emissions from a gallon of gasoline = 2,421 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) = 8,788 grams = 8.8 kg/gallon = 19.4 pounds/gallon.
Now let’s assume Sapphire Energy simply reverses the process and consumes the CO2 to produce gasoline. In other words, we take 19.4 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere for every gallon of gasoline we produce. This seems like is a nice “carbon neutral” process.
What is the cubic volume of atmosphere required to make 1 gallon of gas? Let’s assume for the moment an efficiency factor of 100%, meaning our process will consume 100% of the atmospheric CO2 it is fed. This is unrealistic, but it is unrealistic on the “optimistic” side. According to the EPA, one cubic meter of CO2 gas weighs 0.2294 lbs. At an atmospheric concentration level of 385ppm, one cubic meter of atmosphere contains 0.000088319 lbs of CO2. Thus, 19.4 / .000088319 = 219658 cubic meters (yes, I am ignoring the atmospheric density gradient as one moves from the ground upward, but hang with me). This equates to roughly 4553 gallons of gasoline per cubic kilometer of air.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, US gasoline consumption is currently averaging (4-week rolling) 9.027 million barrels of gasoline per day, or about 379 million gallons (42 gallons per barrel). Thus, to completely replace US gasoline consumption, Sapphire Energy would need to “scrub”, at 100% efficiency, just over 83000 cubic kilometers of air per day. Certainly there is plenty of air available – this volume represents less than 0.02% of the volume of air in the first 1 km of atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is an enormous amount to process each day.
Of course, Sapphire Energy’s near-term goals are much more modest. As CEO Jason Pyle told Biomass Magazine, “the company is currently deploying a three-year pilot process with the goal of opening a 153 MMgy (10,000 barrel per day) production facility by 2011 at a site yet to be determined.” Using my fuzzy math above, that equates to a minimum of 92 cubic kilometers of air a day. Still seems like a lot.
So where will all of the CO2 come from?
Presumably the answer is coal-fired power plants. But let’s see if that makes sense. According to Science Daily, the top twelve CO2-emitting power plants in the US have total emissions of 236.8 million tons annually, or 1.3 billion pounds per day. Now, if that can be converted completely to gasoline, it would amount to 67 million gallons per day, or roughly 1/6 of the daily gasoline consumption.
(Science Daily refers to the twelve as the “dirty dozen,” which I found somewhat humorous given that CO2 is colorless and odorless, and is presumably needed to sustain some forms of life. But then again, so is dirt.)
Sounds great, except that a lot of land is needed to grow all that algae. According to Wikipedia, between 5,000 and 20,000 gallons of biodiesel can be produced per acre from algae per year. Assume for the moment that biogasoline can be produced at the same rate per acre. If we attempted to produce 67 million gallons of gasoline from our “dirty-dozen” every day, we would need between 1.2M and 4.9M acres of land to do this on. The low-end of the scale puts the area needed at more than that of Rhode Island. The high-end adds in Connecticut.
I kind of doubt there is that much land around each of the dirty dozen facilities. This means the gas would have to be sent by pipeline to a giant algae field. Given our ability to pipe oil and natural gas all over the place, sending CO2 across the country via pipeline is probably doable. There may also be plenty of unused or abandoned land (think abandoned oil fields) available to produce the gasoline. Nevertheless, the production scale and transportation logistics required to make this a viable alternative do indeed look massive.
So while the technology holds promise at the micro-scale, it remains to be seen what can actually be done at a scale that matters.
Talk among yourselves.
this may be the reason for the little black boxes in cars to determine road use age taxes. that way you pay as you drive no matter where you get your gas.
Yields of 20,000 GPA/yr are what was being mentioned last year, with closed-loop systems (as opposed to open tank type farms).
I went looking for a little info for those interested.
This is from http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/algae-biodiesel/.
But which plants have the highest yield of oil per acre? One of the highest yielding conventional plants is Chinese Tallow (with 699 gallons per acre) but by far the winners are certain species of algae that can yield more than 10,000–15,000 gallons of oil per acre.To compare to conventionally farmed oil seed crops, soybean plantings can produce 50 gallons of oil per acre and rapeseed fields produce about 130 gallons of oil per acre. Algae can be very easy and rapid to grow and can stand harsh conditions such as salt/brackish water and harsh desert sun.
In the US the Office of Fuels Development, a division of the Department of Energy, funded a program through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) called the Aquatic Species Program to investigate high oil content algae species between 1978 and 1996, and this concluded that it was feasible to use algae oil production to completely replace petroleum as transportation fuel in the US. Growing the oil is only the start of the story; it still needs to be extracted and processed to produce a biodiesel of an acceptable ASTM specification to be sold commercially.
Traditionally the farming of the algae was carried out in open tanks but these were subject to contamination by viruses and other micro-organisms (also oil yields were poor). Present technology favours the siting of algae farms near to a source of animal waste for nutrients and a source of sterile carbon dioxide (a coal-fired power station), and the use of an enclosed system such as polyethylene tubes in which to grow the algae. NREL research has estimated that it would require only 9.5m acres of algae crop to supply the entire US oil requirement – far less than the present 450m acres used in the US for conventional crop farming and the 500m acres used to graze livestock.
Also I remember hearing on the radio the (can't remember his name) energy secretary at that time talking about how the united states has enough natural gas in this country, that if present day consumption were to double every year, we'd still have enough to last us over a thousand years.
Weren't the liberals also going ape-sh*t and blathering on about "global cooling" around the '60s and '70s?
I guess the next catastrophe the liberals will go gaga about will be in a few billion years our sun will either become a red giant or go nova and we'd better control cow farts.
All of this BS is about one thing and one thing only:
Liberals and their neocon, rino, and other American hating constitution despising cohorts will never be satisfied until they control:
Total control grid.
Forget it then. If this relies on coal, remember what Obamarx stated? Obamarx stated he'd bankrupt the coal industry.
One can bet their bottom dollar, the government will pass some kind of law making it illegal for one to do this at home.
All one has to do is look at NY. Some time during the early part of the last century, enterprising upstate New Yorker's started making use of the small natural water falls. They rigged up micro-electric plants and they were quite successful until the major electric companies started to feel the pinch and they got the almighty government to pass a law making these micro-electric plants illegal.
While your enthusiasm for home produced fuel is a good one, eventually the major fuel producing companies will lose profits and lobby (bribe) government to make them illegal.
They who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Holy sh*t. What temp do these average people keep their house's at, 90deg?
Damn, my house is a little bit under 1,000sq ft and if I use more then one 275 gallon tankful in an entire year, then I'm doing something wrong. In fact this year I'm installing a small wood burning stove to help offset the raising cost of fuel oil.
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