Posted on 03/04/2012 9:23:02 PM PST by Vince Ferrer
Liar in chief, pulls this stuff out of his butt.
OF COURSE Obama likes algae. After all, he’s hung out with pond scum from college on. . . .
This article doesn’t mention it, but there are many companies trying to do this sort of thing and have been running into problems for years. For some of these problems, companies are trying workarounds by genetically engineering algae that has properties that can skip some of these steps. However, this often runs into a different set of problems. It is easy to grow algae, very easy. But it is difficult to grow only the type you wish to grow, and nothing else. Cheap growth ponds only invite contamination from the wind and will lower yields. Also, algae grows so quickly that any problems can cause a collapse in the population if not adressed immediately, unlike other crops like corn. This is manageable with technology, but also adds greatly to cost.
What does the algae do to hurt the population? crawl out of its ponds and murder people?
I was meaning a collapse in the population of the algae. When using algae in an industrial process, they would want it to be continuously feeding and reproducing, at as high a rate as possible. This means that it must live in an environment that is highly tuned regarding water quality, temperature, and its food inputs. Any problems in these parameters and the algae will die out fast, not gradually. The time between a problem occuring and a collapse of the population could be as short as hours, not days or weeks.
"Three years ago I came out with a bold proposal to inflate American tires, and that alone has diminished our dependency on foreign oil by 83 percent. The remaining 17 percent can be easily made up for with algae - if we can only figure out how to make energy out of that.
"Why algae? Because we've got a lot of it. In fact, as a nation, we're loaded with pretty much everything - take dirt, for example. We have a lot - A LOT of dirt. Except 'dirt' doesn't have the same foreign, cosmopolitan ring to it as the word 'algae' has.
"So I'm hereby announcing production of a new algae-powered automobile: the Chevy Fishtank."
If algae otherwise could be coaxed into yielding passable efficiency to a fuel process, the growing sensitivity of the algae probably would be the least of our worries.
I don’t think this could really take off until we came up with an algae that thrived in the saltiness of ocean water. The expense of furnishing it with fresh water would be prohibitive.
Run for Congress?
Exactly. Hasn’t anyone done the math on how many vats of algae would be needed and how big they would have to be in order to produce 17% of our energy needs?
I have a hunch that Arizona wouldn’t be large enough to house them—and where would the water come from?
Most of the needed water would come from the tears of investors.
Investors? That would be us as Obama would pick his crony green companies and invest US funds in them per Solyandra as in Solong.
Every cow pond across the Midwest could become a federal project.
There are many species of algae which thrive in salt water. In fact one set of them, blue green algae, might have advantages. These can survive in a higher saline environment, so a tank could be created which could not be contaminated by other species. However a highly saline environment is also highly corrosive, and so expenses would rise.
Don’t forget hog wallows. Why almost any of us peasants could become landowners with interests in the “oil bidness”, selling our slime rights to the Big Algae.
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