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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."
As more evidence comes out daily of the ties between the leaders of petroleum producing countries and terrorists (not to mention the human rights abuses in their own countries), the incentive for finding an alternative to petroleum rises higher and higher. The environmental problems of petroleum have finally been surpassed by the strategic weakness of being dependent on a fuel that can only be purchased from tyrants.
I must say, I wasn't expecting quite that sort of introduction to an otherwise very informative and logical essay.
That aside, I'll never understand why pure alcohol has never been seriously pursued as a substitute for gasoline.
The coolest voice ever.
Algae generally would feed on sunlight and ambiant CO2. We'd probably need to seed their waters with appropriate minerals, like iron, so they could grow healthily. A nice perk of this is that instead of digging up carbon in the form of oil or coal which we then send into the atmosphere, we take carbon out of the atmosphere, arrange it into oil using solar powered algae and then burn it back up into the atmosphere.
Or we could switch immediately to hemp which also eats up CO2, require ZERO modification to current engines, and support farmers in the U.S. http://www.artistictreasure.com/learnmorecleanair. html
Hemp Car
Hemp For Fuel
Norml
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX had a plot involving an algae called OILIX that could create oil, and of course some bad guys kidnap the scientist and his creation. Kinda interesting that it can actually be done in real life though.
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. Second, they are talking about a change in a large sector of the oil economy. This would have to be slow by design.
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?
What? You don't have $1B to blow?
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
This is an interesting idea. I've always maintained that a biodiesel industry would be best suited for a distributed model. Small installations around soybean farms to produce the oil and lower transportation costs.
I guess a model like hoover damn would work. Build a large central installation that would produce a vast amount of energy. In doing so it provided a state with an economy that would have otherwise ended up like maine.
No offence to maine but asside from lobster, timber, and steven king their aint much.
I'm sure there are other costs and payoffs but that's the biggest I see so far, aside from the forgone conclusion of a cleaner environment and energy independence.
What could possibly go wrong?
Diesel is difficult to clean, because combustion is often incomplete, but recent cars with particules filters are quite clean (in Europe, where diesel is a reality, even for small/medium cars).
Now, for biodiesel, you have to remember that all the carbon you release in the atmosphere was not captured by plants eons ago, but just a few month ago. So, replacing petrol by biodiesel result in no increase, but a stabilization of CO2 level.
10,000 square miles isn't that big; a 117 mile diameter pool. You could build that somewhere in Nebraska and no one would notice for years aside from airline pilots.
Sounds good to me. Supplant oil production with algae and we can stop attempting to protect middle east oil resources from theocratic dictators. The only reason civilization still persists there is to maintain enough control to pipe out the oil...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Consider that the rate of expenditure on alternative power sources is closely tied to how far off doom is. If we won't run out of fossil for 50 or 500 years, we're probably perfectly on track. Without evidence that the problem is more pressing, why waste money on solving it so long before we need to?
Don't you think that money's better spent on education, health care and disease control, political stability, and a little bit of hedonism to make it worth it? Is it better to have a world of plague-ridden and destitute people who have unlimited power, or a balanced world with lots of healthy people and enough power for it not to be a problem?
And you really ought to quit overusing emphasis on specific words. It ends up distracting the reader from what you're actually trying to say.
Replying to my own comment ... You might have missed this part in the last paragraph:
That brings the overall energy balance down to 1.38:1, roughly three times better than the 0.36:1 of the hydrogen fuel cell car. This figure means that for each unit of energy that goes into growing the crops and producing the biodiesel, 1.38 units of energy are available to be used for moving the vehicle, a net gain of 38%, compared to a net loss of 64% for hydrogen.
So they are in fact using the same assumptions for overall efficiency calculations for biodiesel and hydrogen.
And, as another poster pointed out, you still haven't explained why you think this is thermodynamically impossible.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
>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).
Ignorance is only a factor for those willing to forget basic economics 101 from elementary school. It dictates a simple principle that is as follows:
We will never "run out" of anything. It will simply become unaffordable for almost everyone.
Why?
Supply and Demand.
What *could* happen, is that oil becomes a strictly controlled substance, similar to cocaine, and simply becomes unavailable for sale so that various militaries can use it to power ever increasingly hungry aircraft, and possibly use trading oil to force other countries into various positions. Again, we still haven't run out.
Basically, oil could (has?) become the new gold.
>"just so some pinko environmentalist wackos can stop using oil".
Oddly enough, about the *ONLY* likely scenario (not the only one, but things like the earth exploding, I don't believe in) that could cause us to run out of oil *IS* communism, which, by its very nature, ignores the effects of supply and demand on prices, and rather presses the effects more viscerally on to the proletariat.
>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...
Religion ain't got nothin' to do with it. I'm sure any PhD in economics from a recognized university could explain why we won't run out of oil even better than I have.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Oh, please. The oil industry doesn't kill people. ... outside of Columbia, at least.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
...how much energy would it take to PUT a 10,000 square mile pond in the middle of a desert in the first place? Last I checked, water was kind of heavy and had a really annoying tendancy to evaporate or sink into the soil. Ya'll might need to fire up a couple more nuclear powerplants before you go terraforming a bigass sandbox.
...Hey, wait a second - I see whats really going on here! Filling a desert full of water? You guys are trying to muscle in on the mud pie market, aren't ya? Oh you evil, capitalist pigs! I knew this story wasn't really about saving humanity from a power crisis! For shame!
Unless of course, someone has a really big garden hose nearby. I know thats how I did it back when I was 5... but I wasn't paying for power or water back then either. Sure did give me the "Step 4: Profit!!!" on my mud pies though.
Ummm. Let me speculate a bit. If bio-fuel is oil-like, wouldn't an oil company be interested in it? They are already dealing with the stuff. With this they don't have to buy it from some far off land and ship it here. They don't have to drill and explore for it. They simply feed it! That sounds like a great deal for an oil company.
Big oil seems to be the boogey-man. It's just a business like any other business. If the economics change, they will eventually have to change. You don't think that if some cost effective way to make oil was developed they wouldn't jump on it like white on rice?
It all comes down to economics. Right now fossil oil is still relatively cheep. They could try to fight the economics, but why?
Why?
Independance from the oil companies.
1: Charge from domestic supply.
2: Charge from PV on the roof of my house.
3: Upgradable range. You can get 250-380 miles from NiMH batteries, LiON and LiS should improve on that.
4: Acceleration, peak torque at 0rpm.
5: Servicing costs.
Deleted
Hey! You're spoiling the self-congratulatory pseudo-Green backslapping, man!
This is just another one of those situations that gives proof to the saying that you can't solve a technical problem with the level of thinking that created it in the first place. Everyone's so stuck on trying to find a 'green' replacement for the spectacular amounts of energy we use that they don't realise that the energy gluttony itself isn't green.
I too, remember from school that deserts make their own weather. If you filled a desert with a solar farm that absorbed 30% of the solar energy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it stopped being a desert. Worse, when it starts raining there, whose rain did it used to be?
The only things this sort of giant-scale solar collection would be useful for are removing the 'heat island' effect in cities, and in halting desert encroachment in areas where desertification is already a problem (for instance, Sub-Saharan Africa). Anything else, and you're playing with fire.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
However, unlike solar cells, the algae produce no nasty by-products during manufacture, regenerate themselves if damaged, and eat up human waste on the side. Plus, the algae are quite simply far cheaper:
Note that I'm not taking into account here what the economy of scale would do for the cost of the solar cells, but I'm imagining that the lower cost to maintain algae would still make them the preferred choice.
I like to tell people why biodiesel and linux are very much based on the same principles. Biodiesel is an Open Source fuel supply. Quite literally, anyone can make it, just by going to the supermarket and buying the ingredients off the shelf. Because of this, the knowledge to make biodiesel can't be stopped by the fossil fuel interests.
:) Biodiesel is the same damn thing.
Think about it....
Fossil Fuel companies == Microsoft
Biodiesel == Open Source and Linux
The parallels are just so numerous, it's astounding. There are many many stories of some kind of fuel efficient engine or other technology that has been bought by FF or Auto companies, and quietly disbanded so the technology was never applied. MS has done the same thing countless times, but look how far it got them with Linux.
Another parallel is how fast people are jumping on the biodiesel bandwagon. Fossil fuels are causing a world of catastrophic problems, and the obvious solutions are lacking. But biodiesel is an VERY obvious solution, that just about anyone can gravitate toward. It gives farmers jobs, and reduces pollution from any diesel vehicle, it increases energy security, it doesn't cause global warming... etc.
The Algae aspect is really the first nail in the coffin for the fossil fuel Age. Think about it... a year's worth of fuel for the USA, from just 11,000 square miles of desert. And those figures use 1996 technology for algae production... given a little bit more R&D, it will get better.
There's a lot more parallels for biodiesel and Open Source... for example the distributed nature of fuel production and the distributed nature of code production. You can think of more and reply to this post.
About me...
I have used B100 in my VW Jetta Wagon for two years straight, without a single problem. My car runs cleaner, quieter, and smells like french fries from the exhaust. I am one of the founding members of the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland Oregon (www.gobiodiesel.org).
Kevin Whilden www.solarhifi.com
I have to say, I was about to reply and ask where you came up with that number. I thought the efficiency was much higher than that in plants. Fortunately, I took time to check into it before I opened my big mouth, and you're right. Turns out sugar cane is about the most efficient plant at converting solar energy into chemical energy, and that is at 1% efficiency.
Having a major in biochem, I wanted to say the effiency is closer to 90%. Turns out I was thinking of the Calvin cycle.
So, I have to agree with your main point, solar cells would seem to make more sense. Perhaps algae are more efficient than plants? Or perhaps the cost of maintaining an algae farm would be so much cheaper it could be worth it?
In any case, my main concern about a biological solution is infection and poisoning. I would think algea, just like most other living organisms are sususptable to both. If we truely became dependent on these farms for energy, one bad algea virus or bacteria (natural or designed by man) could be a catastrophe.
just some thoughts,
puck
It will if you put a pond there.
But if we put a pond there, isn't it no longer a desert?
Yep. B-)
Am I to believe that folks have wanted those dry arid conditions to ensure their silicon riches are preserved, and thats why nobody thought to build a pond there?
Nobody put a pond there before because it cost a LOT to come up with water in a place where there was little, and exposing what litte there is makes it evaporate and blow away. Desert is 'WAY fertile (the trace elements aren't washed out).
But plants need to dump most of their water into the air to pump their nutrients around. Then they make most of that energy into their structure, only a small fraction into their fruit, seeds, stored starch, sugar, or what-have-you harvestable material.
And they need serious manipulation and babying: Maybe clean the soil of toxins over years before starting. Dig it up every year, add fertilizer, bury the seeds, kill the weeds, add LOTS of water (if it isn't provided by rain), kill MORE weeds, kill bugs, tear up the plants, separate the fruit.
It's much cheaper to do it where the soil is already good, roads and industry are handy, water is available (and keeps raining back to be reused several times if you DO import it, as in California's central valley) than to haul water a couple miles UP and a couple hundred horizontally to start from scratch in a desert. (The trace elements are a LOT easier to haul to good soil and water.)
Net result is that using crops like corn for fuel is just about a break-even proposition.
But production of algae only needs tanks, air, water, trace nutrients, and lots of sunlight. No plows and tractors - you pump the material through a small harvesting plant rather than working a field - much cheaper. The land itself is only a support for the tanks, so you don't need to pull expensive quality dirt out of other production.
Desert has lots of cheap flat land and sunlight.
Put your tanks on it. Add your air by pumping it through (powering your pumps with the absorbed solar heat) - and recapture the lost water for reuse. Your crop is 50% oil - made from water, atmospheric CO2, and solar energy. The other half is the trace nutrients, which you also recycle. Now you've converted solar energy efficiently to oil with essentially no fossil fuel input and litte water loss (mostly the water that supplied the hydrogen for the oil).
Yes, it makes VERY good sense. Low initial capital (cheap land, some machinery, lots of clear pipes or transparent tanks). A SMALL amount of water (compared to growing plants) in, along with a little bit of miscelaneous consumables (filter paper, nutrient replacement for making up recycling inefficiencies), and LOTS of sunlight. Oil out. Add a much smaller tank of some OTHER bug to fix nitrogen if you really want to cut your inputs.
A desert would be great for this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
based on research I'm involved with, they'd convert sunlight to oil with nutrients coming from sewage or farm/industrial waste. This has been in development for at least twenty years and not nearly as simple as it sounds.
Getting optimal yields (or even any yield) out of an aquarium is not cut and dried.
This article is a very broad and very simplistic overview of the concept. I have no idea why someone in a physics department would write such a pithy article when it's a biology problem and much more complicated than he makes it out to be-- it reads like a 5th grade book report.
Farming only 6% of continental U.S. acreage with biomass crop would provide all of America's gas and oil energy needs, ending dependence upon fossil fuels.
Manahan, Stanley E., Environmental Chemistry, 4th edition.
Hemp is Earth's number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months. Hemp is easy on the soil,* sheds it lush foliage throughout the season, adding mulch to the soil and helping retain moisture. Hemp is an ideal crop for the semi-arid West and open range land.
* Adam Beatty, vice president of the Kentucky Agricultural Society, reported instances of good crops of hemp on the same ground for 14 years in a row without a decline in yield. Beatty, A., Southern Agriculture, C.M. Saxton & Co., NY; 1843, pg. 113. USDA Yearbook, 1913.
Hemp stems are 80% hurds (pulp byproduct after the hemp fiber is removed from the plant). Hemp hurds are 77% cellulose--a primary chemical feed stock (industrial raw material) used in the production of chemicals, plastics, and fibers. Depending on which U.S. agricultural report is correct, an acre of full grown hemp plants can sustainably provide from four to 50 or even 100 times the cellulose found in cornstalks, kenaf, or sugar cane--the planet's next highest annual cellulose plants.
In most places, hemp can be harvested twice a year and, in warmer areas such as Southern California, Texas, Florida, and the like, it could be a year-round crop. Hemp has a short growing season and can be planted after food crops have been harvested.
Each acre of hemp would yield 1,000 gallons of methanol. Fuels from hemp, along with the recycling of paper, etc., would be enough to run American virtually without oil.
Text from "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" © Jack Herer
These are pretty old resources but the government has put a stop to all hemp research fora while. This is a really crappy website but the Jackherer.com is down: http://www.electricemperor.com
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Oil is cheap if you don't count the $400B annual subsidy that big oil gets also known as the Department of Defense. Granted, it isn't all spent to keep oil flowing, but quite a bit of it is. Also the $100B or so annual subsidy they get from the Department of Transportation. And that's before you count the Bushco plan to topple evil doers that coincidentally are sitting on an ocean of oil. $150B here, $150B there, pretty soon, it adds up to real money.
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.
Nice idea but TOO small a scale - if you want to run the truck more than a few minutes per day.
Solar input at noon-intensity is on the order of a kilowatt per square yard. Solar input is equivalent to about five hours noon-intensity per day (varying by season, latitude, and weather). A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kilowatt. So if your truck is about 8 square yards and COVERED with algae pipes the ALGAE only gets about 8*5*4/3 = 53 1/3 HP hours per day.
Then derate that for the efficiency of the algae and the extraction plant. Let's be 'way generous and say 20 HP hr of fuel with GOOD algae. Then you're using it to run an internal combustion engine, so divide by at least 4. Now you've got 5 horsepower for an hour to run your truck, which hast to tote a LOT of algae water and extraction plant before you even start loading cargo.
Solar powered vehicles are possible IF they're ultra-lights, OR if they use a LOT more collecting surface than the vehicles themselves to make fuel.
That's why horses eat grass rather than having chlorophyl in their skin. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Another good place to put it might be OVER the freeways in sunny areas as a sunshade. That area is lost to vehicles already, so why not ALSO collect the energy to fuel some of them without using up even desert land?
Use transparent pipes and let the green light through. Like a plesant drive through a forest rather than in direct sunlight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Good point, another thing I've wondered about, is that with hydrogen cars, instead of releasing the water into the atmosphere from the exhaust, the vehicle should hold it in a tank, and with a sophisticated hose/socket, while filling up with hydrogen, the water get's sucked out of the car and deposited at the station to be recycled, afterall, it's JUST water.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
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.
In fact this happens in the oceans already. Algae die and sink. Some of the carbon they take down forms sediment and just sits (until it gets indorporated into rocks) Some takes millenia to be carried by the bottom currents to an upwelling.
A recent theory of ice ages has them partly resulting from a positive feedback loop:
- Ice sheets sequester water and dry the land.
- More desert area means more nutrient-containing dust carried into the air.
- Nutrient-containing dust settles into the ocean, encouraging algae production.
- Algae pull CO2 out of the air, reducing the greenhouse effect.
The critical nutrient was predicted to be iron. An experiment was recently done where traces of iron were seeded into some large and very barren sections of the Pacific, which experienced massive algae blooms.
This implies that if we ever actually have a problem with global warming we can turn it around by seeding the oceans - especially the south Pacific. This might even be easily and cheaply done just by adding iron compounds to the fuel of cargo ships going through appropriate regions. Or a couple C47s converted to oceanic crop-dusters could take care of it.
The main problem will be to avoid overdoing it and starting another ice age.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hurray for the Big Lie! Remember kids, the more often you repeat it, the more people will think it's true!
For those of you interested in the truth, and not GOP talking points propoganda, read this
Personally, I think a gas tax is a great idea, as long as it is accompanied by other programs that encourage reduction in fossil fuel usage -- i.e. as long as its effect is actually reduce consumption, and doesn't end up just making people pay more for the same amount of gas as always.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
So now we have potential of plentiful cheap hydrogen, and a great mobile way to store it for autos. . . Why is there this big holdup!
The lake it created is huge, true enough. That means that it submerged millions of acres of land; not that it made them usable. Plus, we aren't allowed to use this water for agriculture or anything else; the resource is controlled by the corps of engineers, and it is designated for use downstream. It might surprise you to learn that the critical designated use is not farming use.
Why? Because there is not "more water overall" available as a result of the dam. There is simply some stored which didn't get to go downstream earlier. What they primarily use it for is to release it when the river downstream gets low, to keep the level up for navigation.
This use does not dovetail well with agricultural use. That's because the river is naturally at its lowest during the months when agriculture isn't irrigating - in the winter. When the inflow to the river proper is low because the water lays frozen on the ground, instead of coming as runoff. So it is not uncommon for the most water to be let out of the lake in the winter.
Currently, the lake's level is the lowest it's been in decades, and there is a problem even having enough to keep the river level where everyone wants it.
There's no huge amount of irrigation going on, at least, no more than there would be if the river was undamned in the first place. There's no free lunch - all the water in the lake, came from the river in the first place.
What having the lake does is allows the corps to even out the flow; when the river is flowing harder than required for navigation, we store it. When the river isn't flowing so well, we let water out of the lake. Barges and such generally keep off the sandbars, and the feds (the corps of engineers, specifially) are happy.
The primary significant, continuing benefit of the dam is to re-route the water from an artificially produced higher level to a lower level through turbines, continuously creating a great deal of electrical power. That higher level only exists in our region because of the dam - the slope downstream was not enough to run big turbines otherwise.
You couldn't (for instance) use water in the lake to flood the kind of area that the article postulates; it wouldn't suffice (despite the incredible amount of water stored in the lake) and whatever water you drop into an arid region is going to evaporate unless the region is covered, which is a huge cost I don't think anyone is going to want to put out for.
There are climate issues lurking here as well; if you significantly change the radiation-absorption characteristics and/or the humidity characteristics of a region the size that we're talking about here, you're going to have some consequences of some kind in the local climate at the least, perhaps more than local. It'll probably have an impact where you're getting the water, too.
There is another benefit for us locals; we get to boat and swim in the lake; I often go rock-collecting on the shoreline, which is quite rich in interesting minerals. The locals kick and scream when the corps lets the water out in the winter, because they see what limited tourist traffic the region gets decreasing with every foot the lake drops. It's a big story for the local paper, and the cafe here resounds with the bitching of the local businessmen, who of course have incomes tied directly to the condition of the lake.
Personally, I benefit when the lake is low, because minerals that are rarely exposed are avaialble for collection. But I'm the exception, not the rule.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
However, I don't know that the oil produced by algae can't be turned into gasoline in any case, with some loss in efficiency which would be reflected in higher energy cost at the pump.
If this stuff can be turned into gasoline cost-effectively, it's time to start building these energy farms NOW.
The $200B that's gone into the War on Iraq could have been spent instead on biomass projects, and we could stop dealing with the Middle East.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I have very cheap access to a 1/3 acre greenhouse that is set up for hydroponic food production. I think it would be fairly simple to convert it over to alge production. There is even a 20KW generator we could play with! It currently runs propane, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to put a diesel engine on it, hell, I think it's even wired to the house.
I've been itching to do some R&D on something. I bet the algae sludge would even make good hog food and their waste good algae food. There is room to try. If anyone would like to help with knowhow or money or whatever please respond here or get ahold of me at geek-ranch.org. I'll also contact gobiodiesel.org.
The greenhouse is good for three reasons. 1. It is easy to get it to 140F to simulate desert temperatures. 2. It will keep rain out of the growing solution. 3. The concrete floors make for stable pools.
http://www.marxist.com/