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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."
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.
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.
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".
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