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Bio-diesel Made from Sewage
tito writes "A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds.
It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from 'wild' algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April."
E85 != Biodiesel.
... well... biologically produced diesel fuel.
E85 is ethanol.
Biodiesel is
Finding other idiots on
Only reason E-85 costs more in the US is because we make it with corn instead of sugar cane. Brazil based theirs on cane and produce it for about half what it costs for gasoline.
How much is that compared to the oil consumption of New Zealand? How many of those factories would be needed to be independent of crude oil and would that be feasible?
NZ consumes around 151,900 blue barrels a day that's around 8815 million litres a year. So this plant will be able to provide around 0.01% of NZ's fuel.
But, there is going to be no single replacement for fossil fuels, there's going to be many (and this is just the first plant).
I wish Aquaflow Bionomics Corporation's home page was a little more professional looking, but this is most certainly good news!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The UNH Biodiesel Group calculated that algae farms in the Mojave Desert alone could supply enough fuel to replace all the gasoline used in the USA. That was just an example to show the land-area requirements. In practice you would want algae cultivation spread out around the country. (The availability of waste feedstocks around the country is one reason.)
I like biodiesel as a long-term solution for several reasons. . .
Because an air-breathing engine draws much of its "fuel" mass from the air, it starts with a large advantage in energy density, and it will be hard for other energy sources -- batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels -- to ever compete.
Unlike hydrogen, we already have the infrastructure in place to handle, store and distribute biodiesel, and millions of vehicles that can already run off it, and the capacity to economically produce millions more of them.
Producing it from algae mimics the process by which petroleum originally formed, over the eons. It might seem unrealistic to produce enough biofuel on a year-by-year basis to replace the *millions* of years worth of petroleum that we routinely burn without thinking anything of it. . . But the natural processes that created petroleum were haphazard, and hardly what anyone would call efficient.
If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.
We might not ever see dirt-cheap fuel again, but I'm optimistic that we can come up with petroleum alternatives at a level that allows our economy and industry to keep on functioning.
I think you mean switch to sugar cane since it's 8x more efficient than corn. Corn is what we already have, and sugar is what Brazil is using right now.
TDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion produces light crude, not biodiesel. It'd work just fine on sewage, in addition to pretty much anything else that contains any lipids, plastics, gums, rubbers, etc. Long carbon chains, basically.
I keep my eye on the company and technology, and am extremely disapointed that the only commercial plant up and running so far is only pumping out approximately 800,000 gallons per year from waste (turkey offal) that's not actually waste because the US government hasn't outlawed using animal products as animal feed.
According to the UNH study and Wikipedia, the yield of algae farms is about 5000 to 20,000 gallons per acre of pond per year. This number varies mostly due to the pond conditions, strain of algae used, and oil collection method employed.
However, it is worthwhile to note that even the low end (5000 gallons per acre per year) is over 100 times better than soybeans (50 gallons per acre per year) or rapeseed (about 120 gallons per acre per year)... which are the two dominant crops providing biodiesel in America and Europe today.
To supply the entire US fuel needs would require as little as 0.3% of US land area to be covered by algae ponds. This translates to about 28,000 square kilometers, or about 11,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that is about 1/8th the size of Kansas... and well less than the area devoted to Soybeans currently.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
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I still think that HEMP is the way to go.
From 1 acre of hemp you can produce
1300 gal of bio diesel
The equivalent amount of paper as 10 acre's of trees
The equivalent of 5 acres of cotton in cloth.
Hemp Seed flower (For cake, bread, etc)
and
Pulp products that can replace cardboard and many plastic products.
This is from the different parts of the plant. That means that you get ALL of them at the same time. Not just growing corn for fuel and throw away the rest.
I'm not sure I see your point. You're saying we'd need to find 26 municipalities with wastewater treatment plants to convert to algae farms, which would be part of the requisite wastewater treatment solution as well as producing fuel, in order to match one plant which requires farmers to go out and actively produce feedstock for at added expense? That's more than just 'decent' in my book. And imagine what your municipality would say if you told them they could offset the costs of fuel and wastewater treatment at the same time - ka-ching!
Taking advantage of existing feedstock (read: waste) beats growing feedstock for most efficiencies. And if you want to look for more viable biodiesel feedstocks, there's a wide number - rapeseed, mustard, jatropha, and palm oil. See the table at Wikipedia. Note that algae wins hands down over crops.