Posted on 12/20/2013 9:24:42 AM PST by logi_cal869
Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.(snip)
In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.
With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae.(snip)
The recent work is part of DOE's National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels & Bioproducts, or NAABB. This project was funded with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Both PNNL and Genifuel have been partners in the NAABB program.
(Excerpt) Read more at pnnl.gov ...
This shows the Biotic production of oil, the same process that when trapped away from oxygen in ocean/lake sediment, produced the oil we harvest from drilling.
This is “bio-diesel” they’ve been putting in Navy ships?
Imagine algae on the endangered species list.
Probably very uneconomical.
Would be useful to produce fuels off earth though.
biotic is biological, grown.
abiotic is non-biological, not-grown.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biotic
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abiotic
If we anticipate a steady stream operation right at the refinery, the first question is; What sort of VOULUME, capacity, output is feasible with such a lash-up? It’s an interesting process, but if it only produces a few gallons of gasoline or jet fuel or whatever per day, what’s the excitement about?
Thermal Depolymerization Process oil has been around for a while. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, even oil-refinery residues. There are actually three product streams: a form of natural gas, varying grades of petroleum (depending on the feedstock being reduced), and various minerals, either as elemental metals or oxides. The substance goes into the reaction retort vessel as a watery slurry, and cooking time is a matter of only a few hours. Actually, the superheated steam under pressure (two to five atmospheres) is what does the conversion. There is a serious amount of heat that has to be applied to start the process, but once under way, the gaseous volatiles are enough fuel to keep the process going in a series of other retorts, in various stages of the cook-down. The other problem is keeping the process supplied with feedstock material, much like an incinerator that burns trash for power generation. The kinds and composition of the feedstock have to be carefully monitored, but this is a doable technique. It would work very well on a high-volume sewage processing facility, for example, with no need for drying down the residue.
In part, perhaps. But personally I believe Thomas Gold was right about the abiotic origins of most of the hydrocarbons we extract from the earth.
The guy in the video at the link is my BIL. Hubby is pretty proud of his little bro.
So cool!
This kind of science was my 3rd-calling. Love this stuff.
That’s irrelevant if the majority of input energy is sunlight...
And there are plenty of areas in the desert southwest where land is plentiful and inexpensive and where the sun shines almost every day. A sealed system could trap and reuse the water to prevent evaporation while simultaneously avoiding the release of any stench from the algae ponds. And installing solar panels to assist in running the machinery can reduce the operating costs.
A little ingenuity could easily make this feasible. Personally, I’d also like to see some vertical axis wind turbines installed as a supplemental energy source for the operation. But no subsidies or grants. It would survive or fail on its own merits.
All the carbon in the hydrocarbons came out of the atmosphere, so it evens out.
Preaching to the choir.
Grow it on sewage.
Actually a good initial application. Then the process can be improved further. If the cost benefit in fuel production is only slightly better than crude refining, but as a method of waste treatment is cost effective, then consider the extracted oil to be a byproduct stream - still a revenue stream to recoup the cost of sewage treatment.
Anyhow, the oil from algae is about on the level of light sweet crude.
This is a very special strain of algae. It is not pond scum. It cannot be grown in open ponds, or “on” sewage. The process is not new. The only innovation here appears to be that they have constructed a continuous stream, however small.
It’s possible that there might both abiotic as well as biotic origins for oil since science is proving that both can be done in the lab.
We need this information so we can go over and PO the DUmmies.
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