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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that several start up companies include one from MIT are looking at using (both natural and engineered) algae as source of bio-fuel. Since algae grows quickly and absorbs green house gases. From the article "Soybeans can give you 50 to 60 gallons of oil an acre compared to 75 to 125 gallons for canola, but algae is almost limitless because it grows so fast, so potentially you could get 10,000 gallons per acre."
A Look Back at the
U.S. Department of Energy's
Aquatic Species Program:
Biodiesel from Algae
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf
Why don't they look at how to make liquified coal cheaper and better?
Firstly, "they" are of course looking at that. The fact that some scientists work on biodiesel does not mean that nobody is looking at liquified coal.
Secondly, liquified coal doesn't do anything towards solving the CO2 problem, so biodiesel should always be preferable.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Actually, they have found a use for Lawyers ... as source of nutrients for Pond Scum.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There was something a bit like this on Dirty Jobs as I remember. It was a research project that took the output of a power plant (a portion of it) and ran it though tubes of algae that would filter it and remove CO2 and grow, then they could burn the algae afterwards. That way they could get the "free" energy (from the sun that the algae was storing) plus is was carbon neutral if implemented on a large scale.
We just have to be careful that while we enslave the algae, they don't know it's happening so they don't start an uprising. I don't want a very thin layer of mad green goo covering everything.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Wow.
This algae idea could grow on me.
The opposite of progress is congress
So, what's it like posting from 2028?
An alternative approach: Hydrogen from algae. (PDF warning, scroll to page 4)
Ah, dammit, the Wikipedia page is easier.
I found this conclusion interesting: "...we project costs for biodiesel which are two times higher than current petroleum diesel fuel costs." (Emphasis mine)
So the price of gasoline in 1998, the year the paper was written, was around $1.25 per gallon. I'll pay $2.50 a gallon for algae fuel anyday.
There is a great need to increase world-wide carrying capacity without impacting high biodiversity ecosystems such as the Brazilian rainforests or continental shelf fisheries, and that reduces greenhouse phenomena. There may be an economic option that uses sea water pumped to desert areas powered by the fact that ground level temperatures are much higher than temperatures at high altitudes. Indeed, it would dump greenhouse heat to space for its power while producing biodiesel, electricity, fish, fresh water, salt and real estate -- all in quantities demanded by developed-world populations -- without adding to, and possibly even sequestering, greenhouse gases.
Proposals for solar updraft towers have typically assumed that they would be single use structures: solar to electricity via heat differentials between high altitude air and ground level greenhouse-enclosed air. The resulting system has marginal economic value.
Something which would further enhance the value of the solar updraft tower power structure is to use the greenhouse area for algae ponds to add biodiesel, water, fish and salt production to the production of electricity normally envisioned.
Doing so brings the proposal from marginally viable to viable, with a net present value, primarily from live fish production, of $3.5 billion per system, thereby allowing for far higher capitalization and/or return on investment.
Let's start with just the value of algae biodiesel:
The greenhouse area required per solar updraft tower of is huge:
(pi * (5km/2)^2) ? hectares
= 1963.49 hectares
producing peak at peak 200MW via a 1km tall tower.
We now add to this the production of algae biodiesel:
The UNH estimate for algae biodiesel production is 1 quad per 200,000 hectares. Let's assume only half of the area of the solar updraft tower greenhouse would be available for production at any time (the other half would be used for ponds that buffered heat for the inner ponds, produce fish, provide additional evaporative surface for desalination and provide recreation for residential areas at the outer rim).
That gives us:
(1963.49/2)hectares/tower;200000hectares/quad ? towers/quad
= 203.719 towers/quad
Or about 200 towers per quad of biodiesel.
We can now calculate the biodiesel per tower:
7.2gallon/1e6btu;200tower/quad ? gallon/tower
= 3.5998E+07 gallon/tower
or about 35M gallons of biodiesel per year per tower.
At $2/gallon for wholesale diesel, this yields $70M biodiesel revenue per year.
Now for electrical revenue:
At an average rate of sold production only 1/2 (100MW) of peak capacity (200MW), electrical production per tower per year, is:
100MW;year ? GWh
= 876 GWh
At $30/MWh wholesale:
100MW;year;30$/MWh ? $
= 2.628E+07 $
or about $25M electrical revenue per year.
Interestingly, the biodiesel revenue is nearly 3 times the electrical revenue of a solar updraft tower!
200*200MW or 40GW electrical peak capacity is produced per quad of biodiesel.
Further that same UNH document estimates 19 quads to replace all transportation fuel in the US or 3800 towers, which would also produce 3800*200MW or 760GW or .76TW of electricity.
Current winter capacity in the US i
Seastead this.
From a quick scan - "Even with aggressive assumptions about biological productivity, we project costs for biodiesel which are two times higher than current petroleum diesel fuel costs".
If that was in 1998, then at should be very feasible with current petrol costs, especially taking into account the added value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Indeed so! The 2006 inflation adjusted price in 1998 was $18 a barrel, last I checked it was three and half times this right now. In fact the average inflation adjusted price over the last 33 years is about double the 1998 price.
If the DOE algae biodiesel cost estimate is correct then it has already been on average a break-even technology for a third of a century.
Both the total world production of oil and the production of oil available for export are peaking about right now. This has been predicted for years: http://www.energybulletin.net/147.html and current studies verify this.
Thus the cost of oil is not likely to experience any significant downward trend from now on, ever.
The original article's production estimates are a bit suspect though. The 20,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre they give as the upper range of production is 47 g/square meter a day. The DOE gives a maximum annual production of 50 g/square meter of algae (not biodiesel) a day.
Still, the technology looks really good.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
If the 100,000 barrels per acre is even close to accurate there's more than enough hog waste to produce what biodiesel we need. I single factory farm could provide enough for hundreds of acres of algae ponds. Nitrogen is miracle grow for algae so farm waste could be the new middle east. I'd read about this process years ago but the numbers seem much better than I could have imagined.
Yes. The fastest-growing and oiliest algae are diatoms, which are saltwater microscopic organisms.
One of the major advantages of biofuel from algae, is that it grows quickly in saltwater ponds in hot areas like New Mexico. As a result, no fresh water or farmland is wasted. Also the land wasn't being used for anything else. Also, algal fuel is carbon-neutral (it sucks up as much CO2 as is released by burning it) so it doesn't contribute to global warming.
TFA seems remarkably unconcerned about the fact that dense concentrations of algae require a continuous supply of water, which is not required for soybeans, canola, etc. Add to this the proposal that these algae farms are going to be in the desert -- an environment not noted for concentrations of water -- and one wonders how all of this is going to work on a large scale. Perhaps we could scumify [technical term...] a few of the more notorious human-engineered desert lakes -- Mead, Powell, Nasser, Chad, and there are probably others -- but one isn't going to immediately make Death Valley or the Gobi into the Saudi Arabia of scum-fed biofuels.
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
I have been reading about biodiesel from algae for at least 5 years now. Sounds great: Closed carbon cycle. Free energy from sunlight. Happy friendly energy.
My question is: where are the big oil companies? Why aren't they buying up huge tracts of land in southern Texas and Mexico and digging huge ponds? Why aren't the hiring algae biologists by the thousands? Building proof test algae refineries? Seems to me that if this were such a great idea ExxonMobil etc would be all over it like flies on algae (so to speak).
Perhaps they are and it is all being kept secret. But as far as I can tell every article/web post/discussion of this process traces back to a single paper by a single biology professor with some basic input/output calculations and not much else. Which makes me a bit suspicious.
sPh
> If that was in 1998, then at should be very feasible with current petrol costs,
Only if you can burn the product in current systems, otherwise you have to factor in the conversion costs. And you have to assume oil prices will still be insane when your production makes it online. I'd bet on oil remaining high for a while personally, not sure how many billions I'd bet though.
> especially taking into account the added value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
How moronic do they make Greens these days? Yea that pond scum will absorb a lot of CO2... and release it right back when you burn it for fuel. So it is carbon neutral unless you plan to compact the algae into bricks and bury it. Of course neutral still beats burning dead dinosaurs who fixed their carbon millions of years ago.
Stories like this are why I don't worry about running out of oil or about global warming. Anytime the system begins to get unbalanced it forces a correction through the free market, and it works even faster and better when the government stays the hell out of things and allows nature to take its course. As oil becomes more expensive, potential replacements that used to be discarded as uncompetitive start looking viable. Once one gets established the intense competition that drove the cost of oil production down will make the new thing cheap and plentiful.
Democrat delenda est
Ok, so lets say we don't run out of oil. Not only do we not run out of oil but it remains the most economically viable source of energy for some time to come. At what point does the "free market" then solve global warming? Seems to me that an unregulated free market would just keep on polluting until it is too late (or at least really bad).
The only way to keep corporations from destroying the environment is to regulate them. Enforce environmental standards and fine the hell out of corporations when they violate. Sorry, but free markets don't work for everything.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You might want to actually read the article you posted in your own link. Free markets do not just fail whenever externalities exist. If that were true, capitalism itself would have failed by now. Negative externalities do tend to create "less socially optimal" situations, but that doesn't mean that market forces can't correct for them, either. I agree, however, that it seems unlikely that corporate enterprise is likely to spontaneously create a solution for global warming.
Breakfast served all day!
So the free market is incapable of solving Global Warming without Government.
What is this "the" free market of which you speak?
All markets are made by laws, and laws are made by governments. There is no "the" free market, any more than there is "the" internal combustion engine. Markets are machines, made by human beings to solve human problems. Laws made by governments are the mechanism by which we define markets. There are no markets in nature; without governments, there are no markets at all.
So to set "the free market" up as being in any way opposed to "Government" is to fundamentally fail to understand the nature of the relationship between the two. All markets are created by governments or quasi-government (i.e. violent) forces. They are shaped by various forms of regulation, including incorporation requirements, insurance requirements, and other things. "Free" markets are more-or-less free of overt governmental price-fixing and other direct political interference of the type Haliburton depends on. But there are many free markets of various types. And all of them depend on laws and therefore government for their existence and operation.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.