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.'"

Comments

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops, my bad, I read 40,000, not 20,000. So their actually at 10% efficiency, which while unlikely at least has the merit of not being theoretically impossible.

The new Karma Whore strategy:

1. Form a strongly/zealous worded numbers heavy post with math attacking the article.
2. Rebut your own argument with a correction showing that the article is entirely feasible.
3. ???
4. Post at +1!

don't ridicule

[circletimessquare]

algae-based fuels MUST work, and MUST achieve greater efficiency

or we must learn to master fusion

but fission won't last forever, and fossil fuels won't last forever, and currently all renewable sources (including algae) are tiny boutique niche sources that won't satisfy our huge energy demands

civilization will go into decline unless we master alternative energy sources. civilization already funds the enemies of civilization in order to dig on their land (wahhabi islam is an obscenity... to hell with your moral relativism, reactionary fundamentalism of any religion is pure evil, but wahhabi islam is example #1 of this kind of evil)

so don't criticize, and don't joke. this is very serious. we must get this right. if these joule guys are snake oil salesman, then fine, to hell with them

but this entire subject matter is very serious. in the next 200 years, we will either master an alternative enery source, or in 800 years, after the next middle ages to come, there will be archeologists writing doctoral theses about why this age of man failed

and this story is about why we would fail: the inability to master cheap alternatives

to hell with killer asteroids, nanotech gone amok, atomic bombs in iran, or other speculative modern bogeymen. lack of cheap energy won't possibly do us in... on our current track, lack of cheap energy WILL do us in

this is the biggest issue of our time

Re:Uhh, Heavily Bought Into By Oil Industry

[hedwards]

Biofuels aren't carbon neutral, I'm not sure where you got that information from, but they aren't. You can potentially produce them in a way that minimizes the emissions, but as long as you're talking about burning them you're still emitting them.

Now, if we want to start using them as the basis for hydrogen fuel cells then you might see carbon neutral, but at that point you're involving a lot of technology that's not really even available. You'll notice that they're talking about producing things which are known to not be carbon neutral. The fact that you don't drill for it is not sufficient to make it green. It just means that you're not drilling for it.