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Renewable Energy From Algae?
Ravalox writes "With alternate fuel becoming a fairly hot trend in recent months, some academics may have applied their theoretical know-how to give us a practical solution. They offer up the idea that certain types of algae are well-suited to biodiesel production as they are nearly 50 percent oil. The article speculates that large pools could be created to farm out biodiesel from algae in areas near waste streams and salt water. They postulate that to replace our fossil fuel usage it would take only a total of a little over ten thousand square miles, which could fit in an area like the Sonora Desert."
It will if you put a pond there.
All you need is water, sun, and spores for algae to grow. Klamath Falls, OR is high desert- and anybody going swimming in upper Klamath Lake is going to come out GREEN. Algae production is already a primary industry there, albeit for New Age vitamins
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Some types of algae, in environments high in sulfur, when deprived of sunlight for a few days also give off reasonable concentrations of hydrogen. The cycle is repeatable without any damage.
Any spoon would be too big.
Algae ultimately get their energy from the sun, as do plants. Whether this is a more efficient way of harvesting the sun's energy than other ways remains to be seen. The major potential advantage is that in this casethe algae produce oils/hydrocarbons which (hopefully) could be used in place of fossil fuels (no need to design new machines)
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That aside, I'll never understand why pure alcohol has never been seriously pursued as a substitute for gasoline.
They tried it in the 1970s. Ended up taking about 1.5 gal in the tractor to grow enough corn to produce 1 gal of alcohol. But for a while, in my home county fair, lots of FFA boys got blue ribbons for building stills.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually you can buy a conversion kit to run your car on restaurant grease (www.greasecar.com). And it's only $1.50 a gallon.
Between 5 years and 500 years, most likely. Instead of asking silly questions, why don't you use Google, and find out about all sorts of interesting things, like the hubbert peak of oil production, which countries have the most oil reserves, when OPEC will have a majority of them (2006 last I heard), etc.
At least there should be more interest into alternatives to fossil fuels now that oil prices are higher, and seem unlikely to go back to their old levels anytime soon. For bonus points, you can figure out why; there are actually a lot of factors involved, from the relative weakness of the US Dollar to the current security issues in Iraq, and for gas in the US, also including the consolidation of the oil refinery business.
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Ended up taking about 1.5 gal in the tractor to grow enough corn to produce 1 gal of alcohol.
If you use corn you do get these negative results, but here in Brazil we use sugar cane. The alcohol program, started in the 1970s, produced millions of cars (many of which are still running) until a shortage in the early 1990s scare most consumers away. It is making a major comeback since the introduction of "flex power" cars about a year ago. These work with either gasoline or pure alcohol so the buyer doesnt have to worry about future supply problems.
At about $0.23 per liter (multiply by 4 for gallons) vs $0.57 for gasoline, alcohol is the current choice for everyone who can use it here even with up to a 20% loss in mileage.
Starting the car in very cold days has proved to be the only real problem in nearly three decades of continous use. This isnt a big worry in Brazil, but probably would be in other countries.
Actually, it's a little more interesting than Sun and CO2. They use controlled eutrophication. As it stands, industrial and agricultural eutrophication is a huge problem because pollutants and fertilizers run-off into streams and creeks resulting in huge algal blooms that kill off downstream ponds by cutting off sunlight. They take advantage of this and indicate that agricultural waste can be used to induce this controlled eutrophication. So you don't have to feed it anything special... just other people's garbage for a good nitrogen source that they'd have to send off for treatment anyway.
For what it's worth, part of Kerry's platform is an "alternative energy Apollo Project" to switch 20% of our energy production to renewable resources. Here's some information that might be of use. Click on the link that says "Reduce our Dependence on Foreign Oil" as evidence of my claim; it will display my source paragraph.
Finding God in a Dog
That's because your country was making alcohol from corn, and not from sugarcane. My country, Brazil, has a climate which facilitates the growing of sugarcane, and therefore cheaper sugar and alcohol production.
Government invested in a big plan for cars in late 70s / early 80s, which was successful for some years, but, when oil prices fell, that program was cancelled (altough alcohol-fueled cars continued to be produced, in small numbers, all this time ).
Now that oil prices rise again, cars with motors, called "FlexPower", which work with both gasoline and alcohol interchangeably ( and even with any mix of these combustibles ) are again selling very well. And they cost pretty much the same as cars with traditional, single fuel motors.
Hemp requires too much arable land per gallon to be a successful biofuel. You could replace all the cropland in the world with it, and you wouldn't cover worldwide motor fuel consupmtion. Same with all the other crops-to-fuel systems, whether ethanol or biodiesel.
Algae is a reasonable possibility, since it can be grown with salt water in shallow pools on otherwise economically useless land. I'm not certain it'd work, but it's the only biofuel that even has a chance.
Wow. Someone piss in your Corn Flakes this morning?
or, to use your terminology: Please for fuck's sake will you stop using hemp and marijuana interchangably in conversation? They are *NOT* the same thing.
Hemp != marijuana. It's of the same family, but it has almost no THC at all. You'd have to smoke a crate full of it to get high. But by that time you'd be dead from all the other shit in it.
There are lots of uses for hemp. And in every country that doesn't have "United States of America" in it's name, it's legal to use it for those purposes. Hemp cloting. Hemp rope. Hemp paper. Hemp oil. Hemp soap. Hemp fireboard (Ford even had a prototype car that was 70% made from this). Hell, even back during World War II, the US suddenly decided that it was a good idea to grow it again. Hemp for Victory, anyone think that was just a bunch of hippie army people trying to get high?
Quit doing the job of the War on Drugs idiots by equating hemp and marijuana.
Hey, I live in the Sonora Desert. And it's called desert for a reason. And the only way you'd ever begin to get me interested in wanting that in my backyard is if everyone here was profiting from it.
Did I mention we already have a mosquito problem, strange as that might sound.
Btw, has anyone considered what adding an additional 10K square miles of evaporation will do to the weather patterns? Of course not.
If you want to use the desert, why not hydrogen farming using solar cells? Much less impact.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not quite. Biodiesel doesn't have the sulfur or heavy metal content, and is in general a better polymer base for complete combustion.
Completely incorrect. Visit the DOE's website sometime and read some statistics that aren't from the 1970s/early 80s. There still is one person pushing those bogus numbers (Pimental), but the general scientific concensus is that it contains 30-40% more energy than we put in.
And regardless, even if it did take more energy than went in, that is irrelevant (the relevant issue is cost of inputs vs. value of outputs - for example, if you can get your energy to make ethanol from farm waste, you're in good shape, since people can't put farm waste in their gas tank, and it would otherwise be wasted).
In World War II, the Nazis made fuel by hydrogenating coal. The energy to do so came from coal, the source material was coal, and the end product had far less energy than the inputs - and yet, it ran the Nazi war machine.
Another way to put it: produced gasoline has 20% less energy than what we take out of the ground, but we still mine it. It's all an economic equation, not an energy equation. There's tons of energy in the earth; most of it, however, you can't put in your gas tank.
This is, of course, all an aside. Ethanol has notably more energy than we put into making it.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Read the article. It does an cost analysis and indicates that after the initial investment of around $130 billion, we start saving $50 billion a year from the money we don't send overseas, PLUS another $50 billion that stays in the US economy. Isn't that worth not hearing "no blood for oil" ever again? It would be kind of funny to hear "no blood for algae".
And Nigeria.
But besides Colombia and Nigeria, what has the oil industry done to us?
This reminds me of an article i read in New Scientist about 15 years ago. Someone had designed an electric powerplant that ran on dried, powdered algae, which surprisingly burns rather well. The algae was grown in a Biocoil (i think thats what it was called, big glass vessel) then dried and burnt to drive the generator. What made it neat was the way the waste heat from the engine was used to dry the algae, and the waste gases from the burning were used as nutrients for the algae. Neat, nearly closed loop requiring sunlight and some extra nutrients.
The cheese stands alone...
Well, since you're farming the algea, you just don't grow that kind.
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I know quite a number of people using straight vegetable oil to fuel their diesel engines, modified by themselves. There are quite a few of them around, and they share the information and technology freely. In fact, they are in a lot of sense, like computer geeks and open source software. Quite a number of these people I know have heard about this concept for using algae, and a couple are heavily researching it. And sharing that info with other enthusiasts. We are talking non-heirachical, distributed operations here; very difficult to take down, as we all know.
In fact, even the designs of some of these algae-plants are small scale - a few tubes of algae sitting on top of the van/truck collecting energy, these being fed into a centrifuge at the back to seperate the water, then through some filters, and into the engine.
Near-self-sustainable transport.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
No - wait
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Actually only an idiot would grow Mj in Hemp. They could, and produce some REAL low quality weed. Problem is that the hemp will pollinate the weed and create some low grade seedy shit. England actually has used hemp as a control for growing weed.
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There is actually another way scientists have found to use algae to produce hydrogen and oxygen.
Since the algae can survive as something as small as a single cell, it can thrive on simply sunlight and water algae def . When photosynthesis occurs the algae uses sunlight energy to break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The Hydrogen and Oxygen can then be captured and used to create fuel cells... When H and O are combined back together inside the fuel cell it creates water and a significant amount of energy how fuel cells work
i think this is a much better alternative than just burning up another resource.. why not just RE USE it.
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Problem is I doubt if you can just siphon off the sludge from your (no doubt smelly) algae pond straight into your tank.
:^)
The article does mention that the oil produced by the algae would have to be processed by a refinery.
So, this is not going to replace diesel, its replacing crude oil.
you did read the article, didn't you...
Vehicle has 4sec 0-60, seats 6, range 700mi.
Current:
- $100/KWh ($60,000 for the car vs. a $10,000 engine)
- Approximately 4 year battery life
- recycling is not bad, so fairly limited environmental impact, but not 0, about equivalent to throwing away 20 AA alkaline batteries/year
Future:You mean the one he proposed in 1971?
Finding God in a Dog
You can run your car on whatever you like in the UK as long as a) you pay the relevant road fuel duty tax. b) you don't exceed the pollution levels. Sadly, since most of the cost of UK fuel is tax, this makes biodiesel no cheaper than DERV.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Because TDP apparently produces 'crude' oil which (after the energy losses of TDP) must still be refined and then transesterized into biodiesel.
Oil from microalgae IS a refined oil. With such a regular vegetable oil feedstock, it is cheaper to cold-press the algae and directly transesterize the resulting oil. In that sense it is not much different than the current practice of producing biodiesel from soy or rapeseed. Then the non-oil remains are used: fed back into the algae growth cycle or turned into organic-grade fertilizer.