...as long as it's GREEN and fur the chilrun???
Posted on 12/25/2013 3:51:31 AM PST by neverdem
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are pioneering a process that produces oil from algae in just one hour. Wet algae goes in, heat and pressure is applied, and crude oil comes out. From the PNNL itself:
“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” said [Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research]. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.”
The process can only handle 1.5 liters of algal slurry at a time, but researchers are confident that in can be scaled up. Plenty of other teams and companies are working on generating energy from algae, but this new process marks a significant step forward in the field for a few reasons. First, it can be run continuously, rather than batch-by-batch, making it easier to mass produce. Second, the algae input doesn’t need to be dried out—an expensive process—but can go in as a wet slurry. The process also produces water and important nutrients necessary for growing algae which can then be reused.
Making our own oil from algae would be great—the process is green, insofar as the carbon released by burning the resultant oil is offset by carbon used in the algae production process. And it’s sustainable, in that we can keep growing more algae to produce more oil. But, like every other green energy source, its future depends on whether or not it can be commercially produced at cost-effective levels. This method isn’t ‘there’ yet, but researchers are making impressive strides.
Note that the PNNL is operated by the Department of Energy. Reports like this one are a reminder that governments are best-served allocating money towards the research and development of nascent green technologies rather than by subsidizing them and trying to pick winners in the marketplace.
I don’t know if you have been paying attention lately but basic research has gotten a black eye. A study has shown that up to 60% of peer reviewed science articles in the best science journals were falsified.
This shows me that government being the major source of science funding has all but destroyed science.
Put the profit back in motive back in science and you will have put a major check in the balance to keep scientist honest. Falsify your science and you will never get another grant or job in science again.
When government decides what science will be funded it skews science. Global warming is the peak of this mountain but it shows exactly why government should not be funding science. Government is political and can not help but force whatever it touches in to the political realm.
What about IBM’s Watson Research Center? There are numerous other examples of privately funded pure science research largely for science’s sake, although a lot of commercial benefit does often result.
Whale oil: the green biofuel for the 21st century.
President Eisenhower warned about this in his farewell address.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Solar Powered production equipment! It’s here and it’s real.
OH, you mean just like the deep ocean floor. (Which is where oil really comes from)
You always hear of Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex but they leave the part you just quoted off. Interesting.
Good questions. Years ago, I remember reading about an awfully similar concept, called something like Thermal M???? Distillation. Supposedly, they could convert almost any organic material into oil, through heat and pressure. A company had built a test facility and planned plants near major generators of waste product like chicken processors, pulp mills, etc. Disappeared from the scene without a peep.
The process can only handle 1.5 liters of algal slurry at a time, but researchers are confident that in can be scaled up... it can be run continuously, rather than batch-by-batch, making it easier to mass produce... the algae input... can go in as a wet slurry. The process also produces water and important nutrients necessary for growing algae which can then be reused.Thanks neverdem.
I think James Woolsey was involved in that.
HMMMmmm...
How much POWER is being used to create this other 'power'?
This is a different issue, and is also not quite the way you stated here. The issue is not falsification of results (which is outright fraud and illegal), but of irreproducibility of results (which is sloppy science). Also, this is not so much an issue of basic research, but of a different kind of research. Basic research reveals fundamental processes, such as the effect of changing temperature on the production of a specific enzyme within a specific cell type. This kind of research is highly reproducible; if I describe my work, and another scientist wants to use it as a basis for his work, his first step will be to reproduce my work. Basic research is very straightforward and reproducible.
Where the issue of non-reproducibility comes up most often is in large-scale clinical/observational studies. These studies rely on large sample sizes, because the systems being studied have a lot of background variability. In order to analyze the study, heavy-duty statistics are applied. Where I use statistics to show whether the effect I measured in experimental group A is really different than what I measured in control group B, very often in large-scale studies, statistics are used to determine whether there is an effect at all--not whether an observed effect is real, but if an effect even exists. That is a huge difference from basic research.
In numerical terms, that is the difference between my using statistics to validate a 500% difference between experimental and control groups, while the large scale studies use statistics to reveal a 1% difference between the two groups--a difference that is probably not even real.
There are other **major** problems with large-scale studies that depend on statistical analysis to determine if the study shows anything. This kind of research is a pet peeve of mine, and I could go on about it for a very long time. People engaged in this kind of research very often are not trained as scientists--they are MDs, usually--and do not understand basic biochemical mechanisms and over-estimate the power of statistics. I am actually glad that objections to this kind of "science" are getting some publicity--that kind of attention is *long* overdue. Large scale studies cannot be avoided, but they desperately need methodological reform.
The bottom line is that none of this has anything to do with the fact that government funds the majority of basic research. Given the nature of how science is funded, I only see that basic research would halt if government stopped funding, because it has no commercial application and is not funded by the private sector.
Oh good. And I suppose the heat and pressure used to turn the algae into oil comes from unicorn farts. this sound like another electric car-style scam. All ya gotta do is burn “-insert conventional fuel source here -” to creat limitless clean energy...
...as long as it's GREEN and fur the chilrun???
And then it dies and something Eats IT!
How will stealing all the algea impact the food chain?
Sure!!!
They were done by Al Gore so they are VERY accurate!
Well!
That's takes care of the Congress problem; too!
Of COURSE!
Al Gore did the math!!
"Better to leave the green scum alone then, so it can clean up my carbon-footprint."
--Al Gore
President Eisenhower was a bit of a prophet. Here he describes the Global Warming science fraud that has tainted politics the world over.
Anthropomorphic Global Warming science fraud was brought to us by government funded science. A do loop of money-science-politics-money that is destroying industry, capitalism and liberty.
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