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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Not only what do they feed on, but what do they "produce" (for lack of a more polite term)? There are some algae that produce dangerous toxins that could be a hassle to deal with. For example, how would we deal with 10,000 m^2 of the algae that cause red tide? (the article claims that the "left-over sludge remaining makes an ideal fertilizer", so maybe it's not toxic, but merely smelly, but this is something I'd want to know more about.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Well, based on the fact that they state that "Some species of algae are ideally suited to biodiesel production due to their high oil content (some as much as 50% oil), and extremely fast growth rates.", I dont think they plan to just harvest from whatever happens to be growing in the swamp. More likely, they are going to pick particular species of algae that do not produce harmful toxins. Not to mention that it was suggested that this be performed in a controlled environment.
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
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Not to be confused with Col.
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.
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 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.