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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."
So what do they feed on? We trading one fuel for another?
And people thought solar power was useless.
(I'm not saying this is useless, I'm saying it's a form of solar power that is cheaper and more efficient than huge metal arrays)
I live in the Sonora desert. Now I would appreciate if if you don't cover up my living area with algea, you insensitive clods!
But really, it wouldn't makse much sense to have it all in one area. Lots of little farms of it all over the world would be quite interesting though. A few miles here, a few there, and the world is happy.
Buckethead
For us to avoid a catastrophe with the US running out of fossil fuel and ending up in an awful post-apocalyptic scenario, "alternative energy" needs to be far, far more than "a fairly hot trend". It needs to be a serious movement. Getting all rosy-eyed talking about this bacterial production of biodiesel needing "only" 10,000 square miles is ridiculous. First, we need to persuade the Sheeple that (A) we are going to run out of fossil fuel, and (B) it it is imperative that we do devote those 10,000 square miles so that we can finally do so. (Or, alternatively, we could go with another alternative source of fuel, such as the TDP machines featured recently here.) Then, and only then, we can start patting ourselves on the back over devoting a 100x100 mile area of our own land to renewable fuel production, rather than depending upon volatile foreign nations to supply us with oil drawn from an ever-dwindling supply. At the moment, to the average Merkin, it will sound amazingly ridiculous to "waste" a 100x100 mile area "just so some pinko environmentalist wackos can stop using oil". (I'm sorry, but that's how the right-leaning folks in this nation will interpret it.)
The general public in the US is so amazingly ignorant, they probably never even bother thinking that we could run out of oil, much less that we will, and that is is only a matter of time before we do (if no action is taken, which is looking rather likely as always).
And half of them probably would say "Poppycock; there's no way we could run out of fuel. God wouldn't let that happen to us!" It sounds like an anti-religion troll, but I seem to recall actually hearing rubbish like that from the far-right...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The US government is acting like international terrorists, except with bigger guns.
I troll you not.
As with all alternative energy sources. It's the cost that holds it back. Whether we like it or not, oil is still the cheapest source of energy we have. Not only because of the price per barrel, albeit the highest is been in a while, but also because of the infrastructure costs associated with any new energy source.
What we need in the US, and in the rest of the world, is a real effort to fund and off-set the costs of these alternative sources. Although I will support the free-market until my face is blue, I believe this is a good case for a the public sector to intervene in the business world. The problem is that this effort must come from the top. The presidential administration, who ever is in office, must be the one to lead this effort.
I'd rather not get into a heated political discussion, but I do believe that the Bush administration wants to see us move from oil (you can stop laughing now). But they want the oil companies to lead the way. You notice that many of them, Exxon-Mobile for instance, now bill themselves as "Energy Companies," no longer wholy concentrating on petroleum. Despite the cynic, these companies do develope much of the solar, wind, and other non-oil technologies today, but don't pursure them due to cost.
(That being said, John Kerry doesn't exactly strike me as someone whose presidental administration will supprt non-petroleum/fossil fuel causes.)
True freedom from fossil fuels will not come quickly or cheaply, but I believe that if we pressure our leaders to help fund these alternative sources and lower their total cost of implementation, we can speed up the process. It may be naive but I can hope.
Think for a minute. Burning the oil creates CO2. What do the algae eat? CO2. As long as we are constantly growing more algae, it's a closed loop where we take all the CO2 out that we produce. The reason that fossil fuels are bad is that we are introducing CO2 that has been trapped for millions of years.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
...until they broke the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Last paragraph:
Now let us consider biodiesel. Based on a report by the US DOE and USDA entitled "Life Cycle Inventory of Biodiesel and Petroleum Diesel for Use in an Urban Bus"5, biodiesel produced from soy has an energy balance of 3.2:1. That means that for each unit of energy put into growing the soybeans and turning the soy oil into biodiesel, we get back 3.2 units of energy in the form of biodiesel. That works out to an energy efficiency of 320%. The reason for the energy efficiency being greater than 100% is that the growing soybeans turn energy from the sun into chemical energy (oil).
M'kay. So you get more energy out than you put in. Right.
A few paragraphs before they had just argued that cars run from hydrogen produced by electrolysis had an efficiency of 0.36:1, which made sense given their assumptions. Then they tried to use the 3.2:1 figure for biodiesel...
Are these rhetorician or scientists?
No we won't, because the algae grows by consuming CO2 from the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 removed is exactly equal to the amount released when the diesel is burned. Yes, biodiesel emits the same particulates as petro-diesel, but it has no sulfur emissions, and honestly, the kinds of emissions we're talking about here (the kind DEQ checks for, for instance) are not really that harmful to the environment -- they're simply irritating to humans.
This is very, very different than fossil fuels, where the carbon has been sequestered underground for millions of years, and we take it out and release it into the atmosphere.
In fact, algae might be a way to re-sequester some of that carbon, by growing large masses of algae then simply burying it deep, somewhere where it will not decay and release CO2 again.
While I am a tree huggin hippy myself, hemp uses top soil and is much less efficient than algae.
Now hemp as a renewable PAPER source.. I am all about that.
As much I see the positive uses of hemp, keep efficiency and our limited top soil resources in mind. We currently have an abundance of saltwater and sunlight. 100miles squared is not THAT much to lose. Plenty of space in utah and nevada.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
This is absolutely ridiculous.
We are never going to run out of water, presuming we manage to avoid bleeding it all off to space via global warming. Even if the water is dirty, you can always filter it. Perhaps at a great cost of power-- but you can filter it.
And as for sunlight... Well, in fact, we probably won't run out of water until the exact same time we run out of sunlight-- when the sun goes supergiant, and the Earth finds itself in the middle of its corona. By which time we will certainly no longer be here, one way or another...
Your "devil's advocate" attitude smells suspiciously right-wing-ish. We are going to run out of fossil fuel, within a single-digit number of generations. Are you happy now? This clearly puts the problem into the "Uh, guys, we should start planning for this now..." category, regardless of whether we're going to run out in 5 years, 50 or 500. If it won't affect us, it will affect our children, or our children's children, or our children's children's children. Do you really want to saddle them with such a horrid situation as a sudden return to quasi-Medieval technology due to a virtually complete lack of power?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I use about 800 gallons of gas a year, so according to their estimates of how much space it would require, would seem like I only need about 200m^2 (about 2000ft^2 for the metric-challenged) of space to produce my own biodiesel. So, could I just buy a 15mx15m biodiesel facility to put on my lot, and if it feeds on waste, we could pull that from the house, and we could buy in bulk the additional requirements (salt for the salt water and additional waste if our house doesn't produce enough). According to their cost estimates, the cost of a pond that size would be $1,200 with an annual maintance cost of $120/year, considering that I probably spend about $1,500 a year on gas, that would be quite a savings and it would be environmentally friendly.
What would the feasability of that be? Of course, while traveling I would have to buy someone elses biodiesel, but it would be nice to be able to save some money for people who have the 200m^2 to put a algae pond.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Using biomass does not add to global warming. Plants use and store carbon dioxide (CO2) when they grow. This is then released when the plant material is burned. Other plants then use that released CO2 in growing. So using biomass closes this cycle of storing carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a gas that, when there's too much, can contribute to the "greenhouse effect" and global warming.
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The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations (do you really think you're fooling anybody), the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
I'm just as much for legalization of marijuana as the next NORML member, but at least I'm honest with myself and other people: I want it legalized because I want to smoke it. There are plenty of good, valid arguments for legalization without resorting to lying about your motives. What we want is real societal change toward acceptance of reasonable, recreational use of marijuana. This approach does not further than goal.
Yes, hemp oil is an effective fuel. The fact is, though, that other biofuels are just as good. The only reason a person would prefer hemp over any other kind of oil probably has to do with some other motivations...
This makes the entire pro-legalization movement look shady and dishonest. Please, knock it off already.
I'm not sure hydrogen would offer terribly many advantages over biodiesel. This idea has certainly convinced me. Btw, this is dealt with in the article...
Besides, if you're using a biofuel, the net CO2 emissions are zero, and the only other significant waste product is water anyway (ignoring contaminants).
You're simply not thinking. Ever bit of CO2 we release by burning biodiesel is composed of carbon from the algae. All the carbon in the algae comes from CO2 taken from the air. Therefore, you cannot increase the amount of CO2 in the air by using biodiesel. Every bit you release is taken right back out by growing more algae.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
You'd get in trouble with the revenuers if you did that...and telling them "it's not for me, it's for my car" most likely won't get you off the hook.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'm sympathetic to hemp advocacy, but in practice it comes off as blind support by people who primarily are pro-marijuana - why not advocate sunflowers as an energy source?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Just for clarity, hemp does not contain THC, the active chemical in pot. If you try to smoke hemp, it's like smoking any other weed you find in your yard. The only gray part is that hemp plants look visually the exact same as pot plants, so you could grow the illegal stuff mixed in with legal stuff and it makes the DEA's job harder :)
I wonder how much land space is used up by oil fields, refineries, etc
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
Believe it or not, there really are people out there who really couldn't care less about the smoking part. Some of us don't smoke it, but nobody really has any trouble getting it under the current system anyway. Unfortunately, you're right in that this post is so full of technical holes that nobody who isn't a marijuana reformer (not hemp, marijuana) would believe it. It's so bad, in fact, that it encourages people to disregard the GOOD reasons for ending prohibition.
The GOOD reason is that the current system of drug prohibition is expensive, abusive, harmful, and even counterproductive. If the harm of the system exceeds the harm of those things it's trying to stop, then the system must be fixed or abolished. That has nothing to do with smoking pot.
Robert Rapplean
PERDL
Oh, hey, Moderators. It isn't off topic if it addresses a main point of the parent's post.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
yes, there are a bunch of other benefits to hemp over algae. one definitely being that it's tougher to roll algae. but by coming down like a ton of bricks on one option, not an answer in itself, but an option, shows a level of shortsightedness i see all too often these days. if hemp production and it's associated benefits to fuel, paper, food, medecine, and textiles amoung other things are not good enough reasons to grow it for you. then by all means continue to play with the set up your basement craving the day you can smoke it without going to jail.
I wish people would stop assuming that desert is somehow worthless tracts of empty land - they've obviously never been to a desert!
If you're serious about being environmentally friendly, convert 100x100 miles of cotton fields (heavy pesticide users) or rice paddies (heavy water users) to bio-diesel factories instead.
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.
Wouldn't it make a little more sense to make 10,000 1SqMile pools? Make one and you still have to ship oil all over the world. Make many and keep the production close to the consumption.
Sure, if other cheap energy forms came along, oil companies would be interested. But don't forget, these companies (their exectutives, I should say) don't operate in a theoretical economy. They have real investments -- Billions of dollars -- in everything from extraction technologies and patents to real estate and leases on oil fields, to refineries, to private armies in Sierra Leone. These investments are not easily transferrable to another, albiet related, industry. PS Sorry about the italics
----
Not to be confused with Col.
<stands back and prepares for Dan Quayle/George W. Flame War>
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Hmm ... how about this idea: Covering it, so there isn't an evaporation into the atmosphere? Sure, building a 10,000 miles^2 roof is rather difficult, but build small ponds instead, cover them - not nearly as difficult ...
Hell - you could probably have one in your back yard, if it's big enough, like a poster mentioned.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Given the crazy estimates from enviro fear mongering of how much we would need to reduce greenhouse gas consumption to make a real impact, the 10000sq.mile area is not enough. What would it replace? all... petroleum transportation fuels ... which account for only 16% of greenhouse gasses produces in America.
Yep, and most of the rest could easily be solved if we switched to nuclear power, but those same fear mongerers are primarily the ones that are opposed to it. So they can just blame global warming on themselves.
Besides, greenhouse gasses are not the only problem when talking about oil. Independence from the middle east and rising costs as the supply can no longer keep up with rising demand are top on my list. And those are not an issue for coal - IIRC the estimate US's coal supply is an order of magnitude larger than the worlds supply of oil.
Getting off of oil is a much more immediate concern than getting off of coal. And while we getting off of coal is only a political issue, we currently have no viable alternative for oil. So this is exactly what we need!
Clearly such research is good. But beware the big numbers. First, they require large government intervention(otherwise, we needn't worry and the market will take care of things), which means that you shouldn't trust their figures to be that realistic.
True, lab numbers are always to be taken with a grain of salt. I eagerly await real plants creating real biodiesel to see what the yields and cost comes out to, but this is more promising than anything else that has happend in the past.
Second, they are talking about a change in a large sector of the oil economy. This would have to be slow by design.
Why? There is very little infrastructure to change. Gas stations switch one pump to biodiesel, diesel owners take their vehicle to the mechnanic to have the seals changed, and thats it. There are already operating economical biodiesel pumps around the country. Biodiesel is easy to switch over to. Quantity that has been the hold back, and this might solve that problem.
Again, this is good, but more needs to be done. Anyone want to fund a Grand Challenge/X-Prize for the best price/performance renewable fuel?
Nah, as I mentioned, there is already a biodiesel market. Businesses who need to comply with new diesel emision regulations are saving money by using B20. The market will take care of the practical aspects of finding the cheapest solution. What is needed is more fundimental research like this.
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $50.7 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the more than $100 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries.
The most pathetic part is that the entire cost of the project, all of it, is less than the money we have already spent in Iraq to give that nation as a gift to energy traders so that they may continue on their merry international price-fixing way.
Nobody seems to have realized that we have long passed the point where it is much more cost-effective to substitute fossil fuel consumption with something else than it is to defend our alleged interests in Persian Gulf oil with military might. And that does not include construction, production, and transportation costs, amortization, etc.
Brazil has sugar cane, which is a far more efficient source of ethanol than anything you can grow in temperate areas. And it has far fewer motor vehicle miles per person than the developed world. That Brazil can do it does not mean the world as a whole can. The numbers just don't work.
Now, if you massively reduce motor fuel consumption worldwide, you have a chance. But as China and India develop, the odds of that happening are close to zero, no matter how far you tighten fuel efficiency standards and add public transportation. It's just not in the cards.
All it takes to succeed with something like this is to get the "cat out of the bag".
Diesel is already widely used - there's a pre-existing market for it. So, a company needs to exist that produces reasonable quantity and quality fuel at a price that allows it to make a profit.
That's all it takes, folks.
Turning 100 Sq miles of land in the desert into an algae swamp would have serious political issues if rammed down the throats of people by the Govt.
However, make it profitable to grow algae farms in the desert, and people will scratch, claw, and fight their way over to buy their own desert algae farmland, especially if they knew they could put a decent environmentalist spin on it.
This is the answer, folks!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
How interesting it is to see the waffling.
On the one hand, we see no problem at all with dedicating 10,000 square miles of "otherwise economically useless land" to algae pools to produce oil (and waste material: recall that there is about 50% of that algae that is NOT oil).
On the other hand, we scream bloody murder at the idea of dedicating a few DOZEN square miles of that same "otherwise economically useless land" for building nuclear powerplants and waste storage facilities, even though the nuclear plants will deliver one hell of a lot more power than the algae will.
It's not an excuse, dear coward. It's our sovereign right. At least the same right U.S. has to throw 25% of world atmospheric pollution having only about 3-4% of the population, filling the air of the whole world with toxics without any regard. If other countries throwed CO in the atmosphere at the same levels, air would be un-breadable. Next to that, Amazonia is not even a problem.
Until the world act environmentally as a whole, which I do want to happen, I don't recognize any international concern about Amazonia. Maybe, someday, U.S. and others invade us, using a WMD claim or a better lie for that, and then Amazonia become a U.S. state. Until that, it's our problem. Want to help? Help to put a more environmental-friendly government in your country (specially if this country is U.S. - since if in China, which also didn't signed Kyoto, you couldn't do much anyway). I'm all for international agreements on climate, an all against colonialism in an environmentalist disguise.
For a nuclear power plant to be much use it needs to be in the vicinity of a metropolitan area. Despite what the energy traders would have you believe, you CAN'T just pipe electricity from one side of the country to the other.
Nuclear power requires a tremendous amount of water, and produces a lot of waste heat. Around Philadelphia they diverted a good chunk of the flow of the Delaware river to feed the Limerick plant, which then dumps the heated waste water into the Schulkyl.
To be fair, water consumption and waste heat are not specific to nuclear power. They just tend to be such large scale operations, owing to economies of scale.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Oh, I agree. I like nuclear power.
However, it's hard to use it to power vehicles. (Same applies to wind or solar or even coal.) Your choices are batteries (which have major performance drawbacks), or fuel cells running hydrogen extracted by nuclear-generated electricity (which will require all-new vehicles and a new distribution system).
Algae trades those difficulties for a different one -- the physical complexity and capital investemnts to grow enough and extract the oil.
I'm not sure algae will work; it's a lot of infrastructure to set up, and may not be economically feasible. But it's the only fuel "crop" that meets the basic test of petroleum replacemnt -- the physical ability to be grown in sufficient quantities. Not hemp, soybean, and/or canola oil; nor corn and/or sugar cane ethanol; not any combination of conventional crops. Algae is the only plant that could even possibly replace rather than supplement petroleum.
It is in fact a business like any other business, run by average to slightly above average people. They have been making tons of money and have lots of power based on the way things have been. They don't want things to change - there might be something unforseen that upsets their apple cart.
From a purely selfish point of view, when what you've been doing has put you in a powerful place and kept you there, it's perfectly sensible. It's not some conspiracy to keep things from getting better. It's fear of the unknown in play to keep things from getting worse (from their POV).
It's selfish and wrong, but in an ordinary human sort of way. You can see examples of this (why don't paper companies all convert over to bamboo or other quick-growing renewable plants? It's not because there's something wrong with the idea. It's because changing might rearrange the power structure. They already know all the right people and right things to do to be very good at making paper from wood. Someone else might know the right people to take over if they start demonstrating it's profitable to make it from something else.)
Young companies have to try new things - they can't succeed if they don't figure out a better way to do it than everyone else.
they picked the Sonoran Desert because of the effects of algae pools could possibly reverse the rather severe environmental damage a section of it is currently experiencing.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.