Posted on 12/11/2013 5:05:41 AM PST by thackney
Ummm, for a start-up to grab 0.5% of the entire US oil market in under two decades is amazing (if they hit their goal and your numbers are correct). On top of that, if they have that amazing success, hundreds of others will come along to try to copy it. I could be wondrous news...
but there are always those who disdained the invention of the automobile, because it couldn't do 90 mph and cost less than $5 in its first decade of production.
The technology has already been subsidized — at the university level. A lot of universities were given grants to study it — like University of Missouri.
But we can expect to find opposition from the corn growers who would rather send taco and livestock prices through the roof than find some useage for all that useless swampland.
Good Luck to this company, I appreciate capitalism. The article was very silent on the cost of production, water use in a dessert environment, land use... it is hard to tell if this technology has a future...
True story. I worked with an ex-academic liberal - guy bounced from low level college teaching job to low level college teaching job and finally ran out of options. I hired him to code CICS, because oddly enough he did have one useful skill - COBOL, We got along OK. He moved to Athens GA, but we used to keep up with occasional emails. Then one day I emailed him the comment that although Paul Ehrlich had been wrong about everything he ever wrote, he still had a following of deranged individuals. (knowing that my "friend" secretly thought of Ehrlich as a prophet although he never actually mentioned it) He emailed back asking me never to write to him again. I guess I was a blasphemer.
My old man has been following Origin Oil for quite some time now, actually. New Mexico would be a grand place to grown the stuff... but someone will revisit and reopen the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard issue... then try and make a case for the tremendous water requirements.... but if the water can be used for fracking or irrigation... it should be able to be used for large scale algae farming.
Best bet is to wait until Al Gore invests in Algae... and then watch the Federal Big Bucks roll towards those projects...
Or better yet, get people to start voting properly and then move away from the Energy Security Death Panel regime we have.
This one is using salt water. That water can be pulled from deep reservoirs that cannot be used for drinking or irrigation.
People have been working on this for decades.
Another aglae oil outfit, Origin Oil, is traded as a pinksheet. Ticker symbol OOIL.
Joule has a pilot plant west of us here in Oil Patch City. In our area, it's not the salt content, but the declining water table and pumping of fresh water for fracking that makes it uneconomical to grow cotton.
Pumping non-renewable fresh water down oil wells for fracking is beginning to get attention here - the state oil conservation commission recently changed rules to make recycling recovered water more attractive for use multiple times for fracking.
Isn’t crud oil considered to be an ancient algae based oil?
swamp Algae covered for millions of years and compressed to it’s basic elements?
I read, years ago, that scientists could turn garbage into oil.
It isn't tied to swamps, but was often an ocean floor as well. Some inland sources as well. The microfossils found in crude oil help provide the basis of the sources.
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Green oil? Phillips 66 strikes a deal to develop it, thackney wrote:
I believe almost no sulfur in the product. I haven’t found an assay of their oil yet. Below are some related discusion/links.
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http://www.sapphireenergy.com/search-results-detail/423519-algae-could-solve-world-s-fuel-crisis
Dozens of varieties of the microorganisms, also known as cyanobacteria, bob up and down in bulbous beakers at Joule. A green brew fills small photobioreactors, which are used to test the blue algae under various environmental conditions. “Here we simulate for example the day-and-night rhythm of Texas,” says Robinson, explaining one of the experiments. The company has a pilot plant in Texas.
Thanks for this reasearched background you posted in comment #10 to another FR. Which I hope FRs have already read.
Ehrlich is almost as wrong as Algore!
It's a shame you lost a friend over it. I have been tossed out of the dark side of my family because I ate a chicken sandwich. I ate the chicken sandwich, not because I am against gay people, but because I support the right of a Christian business owner to exercise his right to Free Speech.
It's baffling that the Left misinterprets almost every single piece of information that comes their way.
Environuts are about as devout as islamic terrorists and hope to cause at least as much damage to civilization.
How big and how many will the slime pools be—or alternatively if produced in tanks, how many and how big will the tanks have to be to produce a billion barrels of usable fuel?
Is there any estimate on this or any existing comparable tank farms anywhere?
How many gallons of water and slime does it take to produce a billion gals of usable fuel? It can’t be a 1:1 ratio so the figures have to be in the multiple billions, no?
If they are talking about Lea County, yes they used well water for cotton. Same in the Pecos Valley, Roswell, Artesia and Hobbs. In the Pecos Valley, the wells are artesian and recharge in wet weather from the mountains to the west. However in Lea County, there is not much cotton farming anymore due to state restrictions on pumping and a declining water table. Right across the state line, however, Texans are pumping from the same aquifer (the Ogallaha) without restrictions and plant cotton and other crops including peanuts.
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