Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.
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?
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
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
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
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!