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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)
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
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)
___________________
and by the way, i blog
That aside, I'll never understand why pure alcohol has never been seriously pursued as a substitute for gasoline.
They tried it in the 1970s. Ended up taking about 1.5 gal in the tractor to grow enough corn to produce 1 gal of alcohol. But for a while, in my home county fair, lots of FFA boys got blue ribbons for building stills.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's because your country was making alcohol from corn, and not from sugarcane. My country, Brazil, has a climate which facilitates the growing of sugarcane, and therefore cheaper sugar and alcohol production.
Government invested in a big plan for cars in late 70s / early 80s, which was successful for some years, but, when oil prices fell, that program was cancelled (altough alcohol-fueled cars continued to be produced, in small numbers, all this time ).
Now that oil prices rise again, cars with motors, called "FlexPower", which work with both gasoline and alcohol interchangeably ( and even with any mix of these combustibles ) are again selling very well. And they cost pretty much the same as cars with traditional, single fuel motors.
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."
Completely incorrect. Visit the DOE's website sometime and read some statistics that aren't from the 1970s/early 80s. There still is one person pushing those bogus numbers (Pimental), but the general scientific concensus is that it contains 30-40% more energy than we put in.
And regardless, even if it did take more energy than went in, that is irrelevant (the relevant issue is cost of inputs vs. value of outputs - for example, if you can get your energy to make ethanol from farm waste, you're in good shape, since people can't put farm waste in their gas tank, and it would otherwise be wasted).
In World War II, the Nazis made fuel by hydrogenating coal. The energy to do so came from coal, the source material was coal, and the end product had far less energy than the inputs - and yet, it ran the Nazi war machine.
Another way to put it: produced gasoline has 20% less energy than what we take out of the ground, but we still mine it. It's all an economic equation, not an energy equation. There's tons of energy in the earth; most of it, however, you can't put in your gas tank.
This is, of course, all an aside. Ethanol has notably more energy than we put into making it.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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
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
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.
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.
In the 1930s we had a huge surplus of labor that FDR put to use making dams (and canal works) all over the west. They were (and are) engineering marvels in that they operate only by gravity and provide water to millions of square miles of farmland. Not quite a garden hose, but a 1/4 acre's allotment of water would easily fill a pool.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
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
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.