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Novel Algae Fuel-Farming Method Gets Big Backing
Al writes "Dow Chemical has given its backing to a Florida startup called Algenol Biofuels that hopes to produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands. Dozens of companies are trying to produce biofuels from algae, mostly by growing and harvesting the microorganisms to extract their oil. Algenol has chosen instead to genetically enhance certain strains of blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, to convert as much carbon dioxide as possible into ethanol using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel. Algenol's bioreactors are troughs covered by a dome of semitransparent film and filled with salt water that has been pumped in straight from the ocean. The photosynthetic algae growing inside are exposed to sunlight and fed a stream of carbon dioxide from Dow's chemical production units. The goal is to produce 100,000 gallons of ethanol annually."
Lets just hope the corn lobby doesn't catch wind of this...
This is a bad, bad idea.
How long before it's noticed by the Invid???
Good for Dow. It's probably about time some company jumped on this. I'm just waiting for one of the big oil companies to shut them down so they can go back to using expensive corn crops for ethanol. I mean, corn? Really? Couldn't they have come up with anything more costly that produces less ethanol? Oh! Coming in 2015 from Shell: puppy ethanol!
If it pans out, this is an obvious win. Not to stare a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but exactly how are these algae modified, and are we sure they won't be able to survive in the wild?
Note, the only reason I repeat myself is that I get this message when I try to leave out the body: "Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)"
But less than 2,400 barrels of ethanol (~1,600 barrels of oil) is such a small drop in the bucket as to be laughable (The US consumes ~21M barrels a day!). Of course scale it up and feed it the output of some GW scale coal plants and you are starting to make at least some impact.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Just a test facility, I suppose. Does it scale? 'cause we're gonna need these by the 1000s.
of that pondscum whiskey.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Sorry. Read that as "Novell Algae Fuel Farming Gets Big Backing" and thought it a good question to ask if it ran Linux.
Is this thing on? Check. Check.
From TFA: "Every gallon of ethanol made creates one gallon of fresh water out of salt water."
This sounds interesting. If this can be cheaply scaled up, it sounds like coastal towns all over the developing world would want to become gas providers for more inland towns -- it solves their water problem at the same time as it solves their cash flow problem.
I suspect there is a lot of distillation in the process as well, to purify the alcohol. So this sort of system would couple well with hot equator sun and passive solar systems.
All this makes me wonder: how much human waste can you pour into the system to fertilize the algae? Can this system be used to solve that problem, too?
And what do you do with the algae? Once you have a full tank, you just want to maintain the status quo, but the algae will continue to reproduce. Could the excess turn into an animal feed?
1)make a carbon-dioxide sequestering device.
2)transfer CO2 to algae ethanol farm
3)profit!!!
And here I thought this was going to be about Exxon backing Synthetic Genomics. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/business/energy-environment/14fuel.html Algae fuels are just so hot right now!
"Instead, Algenol has chosen to genetically enhance certain strains of blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, to convert as much carbon dioxide as possible into ethanol using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel."
The non engineered algae only produces ethanol anaerobically, this GM sucker makes it and it seeps out (no harvesting needed) with C02 and sunlight...
Wonder what happens if some of it gets out in the wild, you would have your 21M barrels and lots of drunken fish.
Hold on didnt we see your cousin in Alaska earlier today?
... using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel.
Most of the reasonable plans I've read involve growing algae in ponds, sucking it up, and running it through a press (rather like an olive press)
The expensive part of the operation isn't the press - it's the pond.
As I recall, NREL recommended holes in the ground lined with plastic, and the pond was still the most expensive part.
$1.25 a gallon is about twice the spot price for methanol, and $1.25 isn't what they can do, it's what they hope they can do eventually.
Color me unimpressed.
... this could turn out to be the one that will allow us to tell the OPEC to go drink their own oil.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So, we could hook up the CO2 exhaust from a coal-fired plant, use that to grow algae, and then turn algae into fuel? And as a "dreadful" side-effect, we get clean water from sea water?
Greenhouse gas reduction, renewable fuel, and fresh water...
Why aren't we focusing everything we have on such a process? It sounds too good to be true.
Man oh man, you guys have done it now. Burnin' up the the Rougarou's swamp gas is really going to upset him...
1) Dow makes magic algae.
2) Economic pressure forces Dow to make algae directly excrete ethanol in high concentrations (about 20%).
3) Algae gets into environment
4) Algae kills almost anything near it.
5) Algae lives on rotting stuff it killed.
6) Water around algae becomes flammable, sparked by lightning. Fires ensue.
7) Worldwide, waterways and oceans become alcohol laden.
8) Dolphin's social life improves remarkably.
9) Whales start singing a *lot* more.
10) Seals start coming ashore, seeking bars when their algae supply runs out. Barfights ensue. The ACLU gets involved. Punching seals is declared a hate crime.
11) Growing algae becomes illegal. Everyone grows it anyway. California semi-legalizes "medicinal algae."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Why would you worry? Now red tides will come new and improved with added octane!
I hear sugarcane is a good source of grain alcohol (ethanol).
I think i hear the corn lobby at my door...
connection reset by peer.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
They finally get what they claim they want.
Cleaning the environment while producing fuel and fresh water.
Yet from the reaction, you'd think someone is trying to destroy the planet.
If anyone has any doubt left that radical environmentalists are for crippling the economy rather than saving the planet, read the first post in the article. The guy laments that this must not impede the phasing out of the Internal Combustion Engine...
So sad...
I have a theory that if this goes wrong, and some of the stuff gets out into the ocean, you get a blob like the one they're tracking up there...
Attack of the Exploding Algae.
> Hey, Dude, got a cigarette.
>> No, Asshole, buy your own tobacco
> I got a cigar, Asswipe. Got a match
>> Sure, Asshole. Here. Kkaaaabbbbboooooommmmm.
Yours In Comediy,
Trout Kilgore
You don't wan them to figure that out, do you? ;-)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Cyanobacteria has some similarities with algae, but it is not algae.
It actually can be quite toxic, to boot. This doesn't seem all that ecologically-minded to me....
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
When considering new technology, scale is largely irrelevant. For a proof-of-concept, 2,400 barrels is not much more or less useful than 240 or 2.4 million, since even at the latter level, it's more an indication of how well funded the project is than it is an indication of the usefulness of the technology.
The questions are:
1) Can it be done?
2) Can it be done cheaply enough?
After those two questions are answered with "yes", then scale is largely a matter of getting sufficient capital, and working out the mechanics.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Got it, in one! Bioengineering is potentially dangerous. Various analogs of the "grey goo" problem are a real bioengineering risk today, and we're not ready to deal with it any more than the far future hypothetical nano-engineering risk. Corporations, by default, will be inclined to ignore risks like this, and it's not clear how to effectively regulate it. Think the financial crisis was a problem? Wait until we make our first major screw up with bioengineering.
For the record, I think that this type of ethanol production has the potential to replace oil for transportation. We need to make sure we invest properly in risk investigation and management, so we don't completely wreck the biosphere in some disastrous new way, in the process.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Everywhere we look, we see single-celled organisms swapping genes. I'm just sayin'.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
read more. talk less. the article describes a pilot project. if you read it, the article also mentions another project which aims to produce 1 billion gallons annually.
That 100,000 gallons is from a 24 acre demonstration plant.
Sounds like a bit more than a drop in the bucket when you consider that fact.
They need to make Butanol instead of ethanol. It's a much better motor fuel.
As a couple of other people have pointed out, these are cyanobacteria, not "algae". Except for being microscopic and having photosynthesis, cyanobacteria are a long way from algae, although they used to be called "blue-green algae" before biologists figured out what they really were. They're actually a type of bacteria and are a very ancient group, possibly as old as 3 billion years or more. They are single-celled prokaryotes with a very simple cell structure which has no nucleus and lacks significant organelles. Algae, on the other hand, are eukaryotes, which evolved much later; they have a much more complex cell with both a nucleus and organelles. Among these organelles are chloroplasts, which do the actual photosynthesis in algae cells, and in fact these chloroplasts may be descended from cyanobacteria which became internal symbionts within eukaryotic cells.
Combine this with those artificial trees that pull CO2 from the air. Use Artificial Trees to gather CO2 from the air, Use CO2 to feed Algae (along with salt water), Use algae to create ethanol AND potable water, use ethanol to create fuel, burn fuel for transportation, capture released CO2 using artificial trees Charge for water and ethanol fuel add a CO2 collection tax to car and fuel purchases Profit ???
Simple: You put dead people into the tanks!
There will be a small additional cost for taking care of the mold-men that rise from the vats.
The downside is the land area required for the algae ponds, followed by the fact that your output is determined by solar input. They are basically solar panels.
replacing the troughs with floating platforms on the other hand might remove the need for land and pumping seawater.
Deleted
TFA says 6000 gallons/acre/year of ethanol which translates to around $6000/acre/year assuming 0 costs. OK, so how are they going to amortize an acre of photobioreactor on $6000/year?
Seastead this.
Dont dump it all back into the ocean. Especially not in one place. Could layer it over the ice caps...that means less direct fresh water feed into the oceans from Ice melt. it also might slow melt if placed on darker rock/earth.
Alternatively Africa has come up with some novel ways to handle Brine, their Mangrove Brine Fields are quite clever...Mangroves can grow in high salt enviroments.
Besides salts are used in MANY different processes so likely they could barrel it up and sale it tanners, metal workers, and many other industrial purposes.
I can just see it now, we create some sort of alge that somehow gets out of its containment unit, and gone unchecked ....sounds like we might be needing to bottle air up just in case a sort of self inflicted disaster occurs....! O_O
replicates itself until it has no more source of fuel, oxygen that is, to continue reproducing, cutting our own air supply
I can't believe that I of all people have to be the one to point this out. (Please bear in mind when I say that, that I am one of those Free Energy dudes who thinks Pons & Fleishmann were on to something and that it was suppressed).
--I mean, I'd be as happy as anybody for a smart solution to the fuel problem to be embraced by industry. While wind and solar farming seem to be catching on, hydrogen and electric vehicles seem to be anathema. But anyway, the point of this post. . .
Bacteria need more than sunlight and CO2 to produce an energy-rich byproduct like alcohol.
They need biomass of some sort. The petri dishes we used in my highschool biology lab didn't come with nutrient agar spread across the bottom for no reason, now did they?
The last time I read up on one of these fuel-from-algae efforts, they involved feeding a rather large quantity of SUGAR CANE and WOOD CHIPS to the cultures. Scaled up to industrial quantities, this method of fuel production works out to be about the same as Corn Ethanol. Growing gasoline. Anybody who needs to be informed as to why this is an incredibly stupid idea should go and inform themselves at once.
This story looks like very carefully worded P.R. spin. "They produce their own sugars"? Ugh. Human cells can do that too. It's called, "Burning Fat". That energy has to come from somewhere, and it doesn't come from Salt Water and Carbon Dioxide.
Come on Slashdot. Wake up. Conservation of Energy doesn't go away just because it spends a bit of time being green and gooey.
-FL
The Polytechnic campus of ASU in Mesa, AZ has created jet fuel out of algae. That school has been focusing on many other solar technologies as well, since Arizona annually has an abundance of sunny days.
Suppose there is a spill within the production plant, can it be cleaned up? Can a spill harm the environment for 100's of years? No one else is asking the questions, please help me understand with some reasonable answers. Thanks in advance.
Neat!
I don't actually have a problem with bio-fuels if they are used correctly. --Oil is a bio-fuel which just happens to have been stored for millions of years. Basically, plants convert and store sunlight energy, and so it's essentially using Life to harvest solar power. It's the way in which food crops are being used to fuel cars which causes trouble.
I'd love to see a smart solution like the one you suggest. But after all the arguing is over and the dust has settled, it really comes down to this one fact: Big industry doesn't like smart solutions. --Not when "Smart" means, "Cheap and Efficient", which invariably means selling fewer units less frequently, and that's bad for business.
It's not cynicism. It's just math. Only when we become a lot wiser as a species will the larger equations of general happiness for all overtake low-level greed-based business math. We're not there yet.
If we want "Cheap and Efficient", we have to make it ourselves or work in community-based co-operatives.
-FL