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Company Claims Potential Magnification In Bio Fuel Production
duanes1967 writes "A company called Joule Biotech claims to have a breakthrough in biofuel production. Their process can create 20,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year at a cost of about $50 per barrel. 'Algae-based biofuels come closest to Joule's technology, with potential yields of 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre; yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement. What's more, for the best current algae fuels technologies to be competitive with fossil fuels, crude oil would have to cost over $800 a barrel says Philip Pienkos, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Joule claims that its process will be competitive with crude oil at $50 a barrel. In recent weeks, oil has sold for $60 to $70 a barrel.'"
... begging for money that comes up with these "revolutionary" breakthroughs. Did we not learn anything from the tech boom/bust?
Whenever there is a lot of government money flowing into an industry, there is never a shortage of snake-oil salesmen lining up to grab a piece of it. There really isn't a limit to what they will say they can do.
They are greedy. they are in a for-profit business. Once we realize that green investments by most of the big oil companies is not some show to appear green, and really a strategy for them to continue operating refineries it all starts to make sense. If the big oil companies have to buy unprocessed biofuels from New Mexico and Arizona instead of shipping it from the Gulf of Mexico and the Middle East, who cares. As long as the fuel is good and cheap they can build or convert refineries to process it. Ultimately the big oil companies are in the business of refining matter to make it usable in an internal combustion engine.
Given the assumption that big oil wants to survive (and thrive) and continue profiting. The myth that big oil wants to suppress innovation because they have some sort of warped ideology where they hate the Earth and the environment. (sorry, capitalists are nothing like the villains on the Captain Planet cartoon from the 1990s)
While I have no proof, I think an argument could be made where big oil does suppress, or at least has motive to suppress, innovation that makes it easy for any individual or small start up to transport people and materials without the the use of products from big oil's refineries. This sort of conspiracy at least fits big oil serving their own self interests. The other conspiracies where big oil spends a billion dollars on "green" investments as a PR stunt seems far less likely, because it uses money so inefficiently.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The problem is that if you allow the price of energy to fluctuate below the cost of production of alternatives the alternatives will never take off because your ROI potentially goes negative. Since we know that oil will run out in the future it makes more sense to start allowing alternatives to flourish now while we have known reserves then to wait until the natural price floor encourages them (ie it might be too late with a horrible economic collapse and resulting war if we wait too long). Not to mention the likely environmental effects of continuing to burn fossil fuels until they are near exhausted.
Btw I said nothing of pouring tax dollars down a social rat-hole, I actually advocated increased taxes in one area with an offsetting credit in another which is tax neutral to some level of consumption and tax positive above that level (ie discouraging the unwanted behavior while not disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged.)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think the inability of the bacterium to compete in nature might be a PLUS. I'd rather have it in pools that required constant human supervision, than spreading into the ecosystem.
Ideally, while they are engineering it, they will build in a tolerance/requirement for, say, growth in a high-ph environment. Then, it will have a hard time contaminating us, and we'll have hard time contaminating it.
It all sounds great until you realize that we are at war and have standing armies in a whole bunch of other countries because of oil. If we can find a way to produce a fuel that means we don't need to import oil, then we can bring the troops home, close up a bunch of foreign bases and save a lot of taxpayer money. Those holes you speak of are nothing compared to the social^W corporate welfare rat-hole that is the military-industrial complex.
Water usage is one. Biofuels need an enormous amount of water to grow, process, and refine. There was a water expert at NIST who recently covered this, but the upshot of his presentation was: if you don't address the shortage of clean water before you start producing biofuels, you have a new and serious problem to address. Most of us in the Western world are not accustomed to water shortage, due to our excellent water distribution systems, so we tend not to think about it. If you compare biofuels and petroleum products on the basis of water usage alone, oil wins. Sorry, I don't have the slides, or I would link them.
Food shortage is another. You need to take into account-- at least in the US-- that biofuels compete with food production. This is partially due to entrenched political interests. Again, in the west, this probably didn't affect you (unless you were, say, in the cattle feed market or a small beer producer), but I've read that the grain shortages (and resulting high prices) in Asia last year were the direct result of a double-whammy of biofuel production and crop disease.
Now, I personally don't think that the two things above rule out biofuels as a viable alternative for the future. We just need to be aware that they are not without their consequences; they solve some problems, and introduce new ones.