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Can't we turn it into biodiesel with algae farms? That would be win-win.

You mean like this company does? http://www.greenfuelonline.com/

(Disclaimer: I have a good friend who is an equity stakeholder.)

Combining this technology with algae after treatments like those used by GreenFuel Technologies and you have a true closed carbon cycle. Greenfuel uses sunlight and CO2 from power plants to grow massive amounts of algae. The algae grows rapidly because of high concentrations of CO2 and large surface area of the bubbletubes.

Hi there, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I missed your reply. As for sources, here is a news story from last year: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-01-10-algae-powerplants_x.htm

If you have access to New Scientist: http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19225725.600-biofuel-made-from-power-plant-cosub2sub.html

Or companies to keep an eye on: http://www.greenfuelonline.com/index.html and http://www.greenshift.com/

-Rick

The algae projects underway use concentrated CO2 to boost efficiency (gal/arce produced) so that they provide a second use of the carbon, but they are not carbon neutral because they rely on the use of fossil fuels for production. The GreenFuel pilot plant in AZ (about 0.3 acre) is getting 40% capture of CO2 according the Gary Leung who is with the company: http://www.greenfuelonline.com/. This all fine while we burn fossil fuels, but there will be a need to either do better with a 380 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2 or find a way to concentrate CO2 from the atmosphere that is more efficient than rooted plants. Global Research Technologies (discussed here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/2 6/0226222) is working on the latter problem. But, you are correct that only algae have the efficiency to produce liquid fuels on a scale similar to how we use them now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.

On the other hand, we are facing constricted supplies of oil now and doing something about that quickly looks as though it is going the route of rooted plants. The reason why is because this is presently the path of least resistance. The ethanol pump is primed.
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Silicon: better than carbon for energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

They are actually going to use the concentrated CO2 from flu gas http://www.greenfuelonline.com/. The free energy source is, as (almost) always, the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
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Sprout Silicon Leaves:http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdo t-users-selling-solar.html

Algae is the answer - they eat it up. Then you enzyme the algae into biodiesel to run your plant.

http://www.greenfuelonline.com/

Actually, silicon, the traditional material for making solar cells is very abundant. Shortages have been in purified silicon because the solar cell industry has attempted to save on cost by taking semiconductor grade silicon scrap as its raw material. Since there is nowhere near enough pentiums produced to cover everyone's roof with them, the supply of scrap is inadequate for serious solar power production. However, refining silicon expressly for solar power fabrication eliminates this issue. Useful cell lifetimes are approching 40 years with no more than a 20% degradation after 25 years.

On the biorefinery, the limit is mainly the amount of available fuel. Serious biofuel production probably has to go through algae http://www.greenfuelonline.com/ since the surface area requirements for biofuel production are very constraining and need all the help they can get. The 15% efficiency of solar is much higher even than algae. The curent waste stream is much too small to provide a significant portion of our energy use and conservation does not help since this also implies reducing the waste stream flow rate proportionally.
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Solar: better than photosynthesis: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

That was http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/ 27/2054231 but the CNET article is gone now. The company site is http://www.greenfuelonline.com/. I miss the chart in the article showing the relative photosynthetic efficency of different crops. Algae can out on top, but still nowhere close to solar panels, so...
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Sprout silicon leaves for no more than you're paying now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Hey man,

Here's an interesting exercise: replace "India" everywhere in your post with "the U.S.", and you'd basically have the status quo. If anyone is getting invaded over global warming, it'd be us. Except no one else is really into invading right now. You may not have noticed, but the U.S. is a teensy bit behind the rest of the developed world on this issue. And we're the ones accusing others of plotting to tear us down by saddling us with emissions restrictions. You've actually captured the situation quite nicely, but in reverse.

it's useless unless we can convince ALL countries to do something about it. I don't see any way of achieving that short of war.

There was a time, ancient history now, when nations employed something called- wait for it- diplomacy. You seem fixated on some sort of war on global warming. Frankly, I think that idea is, pardon me, retarded.

You are mixing up a lot of issues. India and China have less oil than the U.S., so they will have similar geopolitical motivations to move away from it. Interestingly, the US, India, and China all have a buttload of coal; what will be necessary is to strike a deal on using that, or at least sequestering the CO2. Sequestering carbon will probably increase generating costs by 20% or so (that's the number I recall). Factor in distribution costs and you're looking at a 10% increase at the outlet of the cost of electricity. Not insignificant but not exactly catastrophic. Transportation is more challenging but still feasible. Let GreenFuel get their technology mature and use the CO2 from the coal plants to make biodiesel. I don't know what the technology will be, but the point is it's not that hard to do. But right now utilities, oil companies, etc. don't have the incentives to do jack. We do need global consensus, (and yes, it's OK if North Korea and friends don't play), and that isn't easy. But to oversimplify, it really comes down to the US, China, India, and Russia. That's where most of the coal is. Oil will more or less take care of itself through the price of scarcity and where it's located. Natural gas is a low carbon/unit energy fuel, so we don't need to worry about it so much either. If we figure out how to mine the methane hydrate deposits, though, all bets are off!

The source for the numbers is from Briggs paper, which draws heavily on the NREL research also cited in the article. It is listed as a reference and discussed in the article but not cited directly to that fact. When the NREL's research money dried up, it seems all research into algal biodiesel is by private enterprises, and is focused on commercializing it. The issues seem to be cost, how to keep the algal strains focused on those that produce the most oil. But GreenFuel technologies claims to have a working system and to have deployed it at MIT's cogen facility. There hasn't been much else out of them besides press releases that I've seen, so I'm assuming they haven't figured out how to make it cost effective. Proposed algae systems can work on either air CO2 or power plant emissions, and I don't know about water usage. Some claims have been that salt water can be used if the right strains are grown.

The car is built up from a K1 Attack kit, which is a European competitor to the Lotus Elise. The Attack began as a kit car, and they've only recently started selling already-built cars in Europe. The only way to get them in the USA is in kit form. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Elise and the Attack is that the Attack has no roof (and I presume no heat or A/C) and is strictly a fair-weather car. The Attack is far from being able to pass US safety regulations (bumper, crash testing, etc), which is one reason why it's only available here as a kit. Even the more highly-developed Elise needs a regulatory exemption to be sold here. Starting in 2007 we're supposed to see a redesigned Elise that actually meets US standards.

If I'd built the thing, I would have bypassed all the hybrid technology (which is mostly hype, IMHO) and simply dropped a turbo-diesel engine into the Attack. I'm hoping that Lotus might someday build a diesel-powered Elise, that would be interesting (but I've seen no hint that they're interested in doing it). VW have shown something similar in principle, it was their Eco-Racer concept car. But there's no telling whether they will produce it.

As for bio-fuels, I have this to say: ALGAE

It's true that soybeans are not the most efficient crop for making bio-diesel fuel. It's true that growing conventional crops requires burning a lot of fuel (not to mention pesticides & fertilizer) that detracts from your energy yield. And of course they would compete against food crops for arable land. That doesn't mean you can write off biofuel. We've had articles in the past here on Slashdot about growing algae for biodiesel fuel, but everybody forgets so quickly. Tsk.

Biodiesel from algae:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/

VW Ecoracer:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/12/vw_ecorace r_pre.php

Actually the stick that's being used to encourage the production of algeal farms is ironically, the kyoto convention. any 1,000 megawatt powerplant with roughly 3 square miles of land (2000 acres) nearby can produce about 40 million gallons of algea oil, and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. and the algea thrives off of eating the co2 and nox from exhaust, while creating some potentially lucrative opportunities for the power companies.

by 2009 the system will be fully production tested, and they're currently installing several 'test sites' to make sure the system is ready to be brought online at any major fossil fuel plant world wide. http://www.greenfuelonline.com/

I also understand that the japanese are using a simmilar system, but rather than processing the algea into oil and ethanol, they 'mix' it back into coal, to be burned to produce the elctricity, that produces exhaust gas to feed the algea that gets mixed with the coal to, well you get the idea.

the ethanol and bio diesel markets may be more lucrative, than reducing annual fuel consumption by whatever 90 million barrels of ethanol and oil equate to in tons of coal.. although i found a handy calcualtor yay http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/en ergy_calculator.html
which says about 150 gallons of diesel is equal to a short ton of coal, and about 167 gallons of 'gasoline' (closest thing to ethanol) equals the energy in a short ton in coal.. hrm... but i still have no idea how much coal a 1,000 megawatt plant uses per year. if i'm interperting the calculator correctly, it's saying that you're getting over 1,000 times as much energy from 'cleaning' the emmisions as the plant is using, anually.

hrm. i have a funny feeling the news site i read the article on had some of the details 'wrong' because according to the wiki on solar power 3 square miles of land only gets a million megajoules of energy a year, roughly 2 weeks worth of power output from a 1000 megawatt plant. meh, perhaps the figures of millions of barrels was only if every 1,000 megawatt plant in the us that had room to put up an algea farm did so. that would make a lot more sense, since there are at least 1,000 of them.

Apparently you've never heard of these guys i don't know anything that scales down better than 'microscopic organizims'.

and keep in mind, that presently these rural places are just burning the dung directly, there have been numerous people trying to get the people to use methane or electric cooking produced from the cow dung instead of cooking directly over the dung, but it's a 'cost' issue. sure there are a few villages here and there that have these kinda systems, but for the most part they were the pet projects of various people who simply couldn't afford to provide the system wide scale.

Yes, You are right. It is prracticed by a company called Greenfuel. Here is their news section which links to the pbs special: http://www.greenfuelonline.com/news.htm

Here's the technical paper.

You shouldn't dismiss biodiesel with the assumption that SOYBEANS are the only thing you can make the stuff from. We naturally look forward to advances in solar cell technology, we look forward to advances in nuclear fission and fusion technology, but for some reason people hit a mental wall with biodiesel and can't imagine any technological advances happening.

The US Govt conducted studies on the cultivation of algae with high oil content, using open-raceway ponds. Greenfuel Technologies have an enclosed system using algae to synthesize fuel from CO2 waste, such as from power plants. Synthetic Genomics are working on genetically engineered organisms that secret biofuels (they are focused more on methanol or hydrogen, but the same approach could produce vegetable oil).

You can get around the whole problem of conventional farming and consuming too much arable land. None of these approaches are fully proven on a commercial scale yet. . . But then, a lot of things we discuss on Slashdot are more far-fetched than making biodiesel fuel from algae. It's hardly fair to wave away the whole idea of biofuel as if it were some annoying insect buzzing around your head, just because you found out soybeans won't fill the bill.

Algae based biodiesel solves this problem but is significantly more expensive to produce than convientional biodiesel last time I checked. Honestly though, I haven't heard about any new research in that field since the DOE Algae program was put to an end back on Clinton's watch.

I have friends working on this exact problem. Their company is called GreenFuel and they have a winning idea: take the waste heat and CO2 from the exhaust stream of conventionally fired power plants (eg, coal, natural gas) and use it to grow algae tuned to produce a high fraction of lipids. The algal output is readily converted to biodiesel. Even if it isn't super inexpensive (which by their projections it will be), it has the significant advantages of (a) using carbon twice rather than just once to produce energy in the overall cycle, therefore reducing the total CO2 load, (b) increasing the efficiencies of the plants where it's installed because it takes advantage of the waste stream, and (c) providing CO2 credits to the power companies which can be traded for cash, (d) scrubbing the exhaust gasses, thereby reducing emissions at the plant. The only drawback right now is that it requires reasonably high levels of sunlight to be effective, but they're working on that.

However, it's not as simple as that; the technology hasn't been developed to actually farm the stuff on a commercial scale, but there are people working on that. The first test deployments are by these guys, who are using the exhaust systems from conventionally-fired power to provide nutrients for the algae and prevent the release of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.

But yes, in the future you might well be able to grow all the fuel for your car in your backyard.

http://www.greenfuelonline.com/cogen.htm Neat little technology and we can use the algae for producing hyrdogen and for food ala Asimov. (No. Im not kidding. People eat algae. Yuck.)