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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...
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!
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.
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of that pondscum whiskey.
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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?
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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!
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.
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."
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But remember they're using C02 as an input to the process. If cap and trade goes through this would allow them to sell or avoid buying carbon credits for other processes. I think C02 is a relatively common by-product in industrial chemistry. $1.25 isn't too bad if the cost of one of the inputs is negative.
Also, don't underestimate the value of a continuous process. The big knock on batch processing isn't the cost of the press, but rather the complication (and cost) it adds to scaling the process. It's the biggest reason we see all those little pilot projects that seem promising but never go anywhere.
For reference that would require the entire east coast be filled to ~55 miles inland.
Ever driven across the central part of the US? There's lots of corn... 87 million acres, or about 136,000 square miles, actually. Now, I know not all of that corn is used for ethanol production. However, there are large swaths of land in the US within reasonable distance of an ocean which aren't much use beyond growing pine for timber (like coastal areas of North Carolina or Texas) because they're not suited for growing other crops. This could be a much more efficient use for such land.
Plus, not all of that 24 acres is actually producing ethanol. We're talking 3100 tanks that take up 250 square feet each, or about 17.79 acres. As this technology matures and as farms are scaled up, you'll likely see increased output per acre.