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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."
You can produce bio-diesel from a vast diversity of lifeforms as long as they contain lipids. The real question is to know if a source can be economically viable.
1 Million litres may be a decent start, but it sure isn't much. There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year, and that hardly makes a dent (src: popular mechanics). (and yeah I know bio-diesel has a higher BTU then corn-based ethanol, but it still wouldn't reach even close to the output of another alt fuel plant).
If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?
As Australia consumes 50 billion litres of oil yearly, and this plant produces 1 million litres of oil yearly, I'd say you're going to need a lot of waterways clogged with algae!
On a side note - I believe the Australian waterways are clogged with blue-green algaes? (The same neon-blue blooms you see in many US waterways). It's a big problem - but I'm not sure blue green algaes are suitable for this method of biodiesel production.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Algae farming actually has the potential of replacing all diesel and gasoline usage in the US using only a tiny fraction of the land area available. There are several cost/benefit analyses of this on the 'net, such as this one. Estimates of algae-biodiesel yield range from 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre/year. Soy-diesel has a lower yield, but has some other economically beneficial by-products. Biodiesel is the most promising energy technology I have seen to date. Compare biodiesel to ethanol -- the producers of ethanol find it more economical to burn fossil fuels in ethanol production than the ethanol -- DOH! With the current price of dinofuel around $3/gal, biodiesel is also suddenly cost-competitive, and for about $3000, you can buy a home biodiesel production facility that can manufacture 40 gallons/week at a cost of about 50 cents per gallon plus whatever you have to pay for the oil, and about 2 hours/week in ongoing labor.
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I believe once the percentage of Biofuel in normal fuel goes above ~10% this is when modifications are needed to the vehicle.
The modifications are minimal. Some seals and fuel lines may need to be replaced, and a larger fuel fiter is often required. Any diesel engine can be converted to run 100% unrefinned cooking oil by simply adding a cooking oil fuel tank. The problem with most bio-diesel is that the fuel becomes too thick at lower temperatures. In the artic 2% bio-diesel may be too much. In California you may be able to run 100% all year long. Engines that run on unrefinned cooking oil typically start on dino-diesel and heat the cooking oil with waste heat from the engine.
Can't beleive this got accepted when my submission yesterday got rejected. here it is Note: 3.5/gal/day of Diesel from 1 Pig!
Once it is rejected you can't recall it, that is not good. But here is the link: UI researcher makes crude oil from pig manure
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