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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."
If this is true, I expect these guys will be involved in a "tragic fatal accident". *cough* Shell *cough* Imperial.
I wish them luck
Alge grows in the 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)
Father: Son, why did you drive the car into the pond?!
Son: I was low and fuel and I decided to look for some algea.
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I can hear the "People for Algae" advocacy groups getting angry already. They're people too!!
Mix that algae with vinger-producing algae, and then splice these into lettuce. You'll have a salad that dresses itself!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
My swamp land will make me rich!
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
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.
At this rate, we'll be able to abandon the middle east in 5 years completely.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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
my pool is green.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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.
Some types of algae, in environments high in sulfur, when deprived of sunlight for a few days also give off reasonable concentrations of hydrogen. The cycle is repeatable without any damage.
Any spoon would be too big.
Algae ultimately get their energy from the sun, as do plants. Whether this is a more efficient way of harvesting the sun's energy than other ways remains to be seen. The major potential advantage is that in this casethe algae produce oils/hydrocarbons which (hopefully) could be used in place of fossil fuels (no need to design new machines)
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and by the way, i blog
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!
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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
If we can get usable energy from pond scum, are spammers now a national resource?
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.
Look up in the sky. Observe the giant glowing thing pouring lots of energy down on you. Note that a portion of this energy lands on farmers' fields.
Now do you understand how this doesn't violate thermodynamics?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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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Between 5 years and 500 years, most likely. Instead of asking silly questions, why don't you use Google, and find out about all sorts of interesting things, like the hubbert peak of oil production, which countries have the most oil reserves, when OPEC will have a majority of them (2006 last I heard), etc.
At least there should be more interest into alternatives to fossil fuels now that oil prices are higher, and seem unlikely to go back to their old levels anytime soon. For bonus points, you can figure out why; there are actually a lot of factors involved, from the relative weakness of the US Dollar to the current security issues in Iraq, and for gas in the US, also including the consolidation of the oil refinery business.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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).
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.
San Bernardino county in California is 20,000 sq. miles. That's only one county. Take half, we won't mind!
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.
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 $0.57 for gasoline, alcohol is the current choice for everyone who can use it here even with up to a 20% loss in mileage.
Starting the car in very cold days has proved to be the only real problem in nearly three decades of continous use. This isnt a big worry in Brazil, but probably would be in other countries.
You'd get in trouble with the revenuers if you did that...and telling them "it's not for me, it's for my car" most likely won't get you off the hook.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Actually, it's a little more interesting than Sun and CO2. They use controlled eutrophication. As it stands, industrial and agricultural eutrophication is a huge problem because pollutants and fertilizers run-off into streams and creeks resulting in huge algal blooms that kill off downstream ponds by cutting off sunlight. They take advantage of this and indicate that agricultural waste can be used to induce this controlled eutrophication. So you don't have to feed it anything special... just other people's garbage for a good nitrogen source that they'd have to send off for treatment anyway.
Hey, I live in the Sonora Desert. And it's called desert for a reason. And the only way you'd ever begin to get me interested in wanting that in my backyard is if everyone here was profiting from it.
Did I mention we already have a mosquito problem, strange as that might sound.
Btw, has anyone considered what adding an additional 10K square miles of evaporation will do to the weather patterns? Of course not.
If you want to use the desert, why not hydrogen farming using solar cells? Much less impact.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wonder how much land space is used up by oil fields, refineries, etc
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
...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.
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?
This also has a cool side benefit - now our descendants 100 million years from now can have their own fossil fuels, conveniently stored underground for them by us!
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
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.
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.
This reminds me of an article i read in New Scientist about 15 years ago. Someone had designed an electric powerplant that ran on dried, powdered algae, which surprisingly burns rather well. The algae was grown in a Biocoil (i think thats what it was called, big glass vessel) then dried and burnt to drive the generator. What made it neat was the way the waste heat from the engine was used to dry the algae, and the waste gases from the burning were used as nutrients for the algae. Neat, nearly closed loop requiring sunlight and some extra nutrients.
The cheese stands alone...
Well, since you're farming the algea, you just don't grow that kind.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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
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."
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.
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
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?
There is actually another way scientists have found to use algae to produce hydrogen and oxygen.
Since the algae can survive as something as small as a single cell, it can thrive on simply sunlight and water algae def . When photosynthesis occurs the algae uses sunlight energy to break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The Hydrogen and Oxygen can then be captured and used to create fuel cells... When H and O are combined back together inside the fuel cell it creates water and a significant amount of energy how fuel cells work
i think this is a much better alternative than just burning up another resource.. why not just RE USE it.
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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
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.
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
What does a 10-thousand-square-mile organism eat to make all this oil? And where would we grow that?
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.
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.
You mean the one he proposed in 1971?
Finding God in a Dog
Depending on the vegetable oil used the exhaust fumes could make already obese americans want to eat more fries...
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
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.
You can run your car on whatever you like in the UK as long as a) you pay the relevant road fuel duty tax. b) you don't exceed the pollution levels. Sadly, since most of the cost of UK fuel is tax, this makes biodiesel no cheaper than DERV.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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/
Because TDP apparently produces 'crude' oil which (after the energy losses of TDP) must still be refined and then transesterized into biodiesel.
Oil from microalgae IS a refined oil. With such a regular vegetable oil feedstock, it is cheaper to cold-press the algae and directly transesterize the resulting oil. In that sense it is not much different than the current practice of producing biodiesel from soy or rapeseed. Then the non-oil remains are used: fed back into the algae growth cycle or turned into organic-grade fertilizer.