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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.
Just brand this as "$50/barrel oil derived from harvesting common, readily available snakes and processing them in a revolutionary (and certainly patent-pending) way".
... 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.
You may want to inform Exxon Mobil that their recent six hundred million dollar investment is snake oil.
Big oil's investing in this, I wouldn't write it off as snake oil:
My work here is dung.
Scan to drive their stock up. Nothing more.
Re:"If the new process, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory, works as well on a large scale as Joule Biotechnologies expects, it would be a marked change for the biofuel industry." I've been attending some of the algae biomass workshops in the SD area. There's a lot of excitement out there. But the problems of engineering and economics dwarf the problems in the lab. ï Don't give this crowd your hard earned scratch until they've gone beyond pilot plant stage. For a thorough review of the problems involved how about this position paper from a 40 year veteran of the field. http://www.spirulinasource.com/bios/johnbenemann.html ---537
The energy contained in 40,000 gallons of B85 biodiesel = 40,000 gallons x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 1.55 MM kwh
The energy falling on one acre of land ~= 5kwh/m2/day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4 MM kwh/year/acre
So they're capturing 21% of ALL solar energy falling on each acre of land in their fuel. The efficiency limit for photosynthesis is around 15%, which isn't calculated on a per-acre basis, but on a molecular exposure basis. Even if you could cover each acre with pure chlorophyll, the conversion efficiency would not exceed 15%.
This is therefore a green scam, undoubtedly designed to temporarily pump the company's stock. The last big one I heard of to do this was Valcent Technology's subsidiary Global Green Solutions. Don't believe the hype, especially when it's physically impossible.
A-Bomb
As best as I can tell, their process is likely using genetically engineered algae that perform better than the best existing "natural" algae for biofuels production. There aren't really any other candidates for genetically engineered organisms for this particular goal.
The problem is that to be so efficient at biofuels production, such algae are at a severe competitive disadvantage to other less suitable species. Based on what I've seen so far, one of the biggest problems with algae biofuels production has been contamination of bioreactors with species that grow more easily but are not suitable for biodiesel production. If someone engineers algae to be even better at biofuels production, it'll likely make the contamination problem even harder to solve.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
And it would be uneconomic with the $25 oil that we had at the beginning of this year.
Any technology that can put a significant amount of fuel onto the market (say 5 or 10 percent of the current market) needs to be able to compete with prices below what oil is currently trading at before it will attract significant capital.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Saw that myself.
My inner cynic reminds me that:
A Human Right
I've seen plenty of perpetual motion devices which have been demonstrated in the laboratory. Until it's a reliable peer-reviewed and reproduced experiment, it holds little to no weight.
we should name a unit of energy after the company
I've been hearing that these ethanol energy plans would use more water than we have available. While that's certainly true in California (there's a drought here), I wonder if it's true in the rest of the US. If water becomes scarce, it's gonna get expensive, and it will no longer be feasible to use it to produce ethanol.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
I did the same rough pencil and paper calculations, and the efficiency claim they are making is 10%+, which really would be amazingly outstanding if possible, but is so high I'd find it highly doubtful.
I'd be happy with 2-5% efficiency with such a scheme.
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If only we could actually run our cars on Snake Oil we'd be all set.
/I have no reason to believe Joule Biotech is "snake oil" fwiw.
I like music
I have an idea that is 10x their idea!!!!.... Mine promises infinite energy for all (free in fact), and the best part is that it will be ready next week if you just give me $100 million dollars immediately... In fact, after the wire transfer goes thru, everything (at least for me) will be wonderful...
In short... Anytime you see a company talk about the next great thing, but they have not done it yet is just marketing for dollars... If their idea was so good, then why are they having to tell everyone about it... Also, If they have not built anything yet, then why have they already burned thru "substantially less than $50 million dollars"....
The real question is, how many snakes can we raise per acre, and what's the average oil yield, per snake? Can snake oil become competitive with crude oil? *grin* If the snakes are green, does that make it truly green energy?
The "secret recipe" has, as one of it's ingredients, just over 20,000 gallons of gasoline.
BTW, have you seen how E85 cuts engine performance? The EPA milage numbers for a late model E85 burning Suburban show 16 MPG on regular gas, and 12 MPG on E85, or put another way, it would take 1 1/3 gallons of E85 to travel as far as one gallon of fuel, more than eliminating the "savings" of using E85 in the first place.
1.333 of 0.85 gasoline equals about 1.13 gallons of gasoline to travel as far as one gallon of gasoline (and this "back of envelope calculation" ignores all the fuel consumed in creating the E85 fuel).
For thsoe of you slow with math it takes 1.333 gallons of E85, which is diluted so-called E0 (no Ethanol) gasoline to travel as far as 1 gallon of E0 fuel WITHOUT the Ethanol. And there is the subsidies, and the research money,and the taxc incentives, etc. What exactly was the point of E85 again?
Ken
> yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement.
Nope.
6,000 to 20,000 is somewhere around a factor of 3. An order of magnitude is a factor of 10. Or as wikipedia puts it:
"An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is 95 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth. Order of magnitude differences are called decades when measured on a logarithmic scale."
Still impressive.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
20000gal x 76000 btu/gal ethanol * .000293 kwh/btu => 0.445 MM kWh .445/7.4=> 0.0601 =>~~6% efficient
It isn't even snake-oil - it's dimensional sleight of hand. Basically, they are taking a reactor vessel and flattening it out so that they can use solar energy for input. And someone said "Hmmm, if we make this big enough, we can use really big words to describe it." So when they say "per acre", they mean "per X thousand reactors, which happen to fit on an acre of land".
This is to agriculture as cocaine is to chewing coca leaves - same raw materials, BIG difference in process, cost, and end product. It actually sounds like a good idea, but for the marketing deception.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Ok.... 2,000 (taking the low) to 20,000 is an order of magnitude. However.... when the range is 2,000 to 6,000 well
thats a pretty big range. There is a factor of 3 between the low and high water marks for the previous tech. Does it seem fair to judge the new tech based solely on the low water mark for the old tech?
So essentially its anywhere from a factor of 3 to an order of magnitude. Which is, at least in my mind, not really as good as saying its "an order of magnitude"
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
First snakeoil... now algaeoil! What's next?
My page.
Well, assuming there is a viable competitor to gasoline (never mind the somewhat dubious claims of photosynthetic efficiency, they are claiming over 10%, with photosynthesis being about 2%-4% in the real world) You will only manage to set the upper price for gas. Given that the gas is pretty much completely speculatively priced, the availability of a competition would be to put a practical price limit. This is good in that it ensures gas will be cheap. This is bad because it ensures gas will be cheap. It is counter to the environmental agenda which is to get us off of fossil fuels. Ensuring its cheapness is a step in the wrong direction. Furthermore, as pointed out by others, the algae needs a substantial amount of water and land to scale. This in and of itself is an environmental burden. I think the real answer lies with photo-electric solar cells. The only downside to those is the many greenhouse gasses used in their manufacture. I see that as temporary as we discover and invent to materials to make the cells out of.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If you've read the article, you will note that it states specifically that it doesn't use algae.
It does say that the closest thing out there to what they do are ones that use algae.
When the first cars were built, the closest thing to them was the carriage, but automobiles didn't use horses to power them.
As to the people questioning as to whether they are using genetically engineered organisms, the article clearly states that they are.
Yes, your fuel may soon come from a genetically engineered non-algal microbe.
Sure, fine and all that, but I still want man portable fusion cells... Or maybe pocket antimatter. >^_^
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
Am I the only one who doesn't even bother to read these "revolutionary energy breakthrough" stories? Seriously, I read them for a year or two back in the day, but stopped after that, and for the last 5 years I don't feel like I missed anything.
The only thing that makes me pay attention is when it's revealed these new startups are headed by the brother-in-law of some eleceted official who then attempts to get them a sweetheart deal on real estate, tax breaks, regulations, permits, etc.
We simply need to tax fuel enough to establish a price floor that will encourage alternative investments. The Europeans are already there so now the US just needs to start increasing the tax rate at say 25c per gallon per quarter and we will be there in a few years. You'd need to increase the standard deduction to balance out the regressive nature of such a use based tax but it would encourage alternative fuel generation AND curb demand at the same time, a win-win situation.
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with entirely transparent (i.e. entirely plastic or glass) bioreactors?
Remember that in the unlikely circumstance that this project goes to actual production, the most important ongoing cost of this project is going to be financing the capital investment which is proportional to the amount of capital going into this. So it isn't just the cost of the plastic or glass bioreactor megastructures, it's that cost times x. The numbers might pencil out at $50 minus costs of financing (though without seeing their spreadsheets, I have trouble believing that), but including financing?
IMO, story's bullshit until proven otherwise.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Why not convert the numbers in the summary to how many barrels per acre/year, or how much money per gallon. When did adding the important units of measurement (and converting them all to the same base) become so difficult?
Produces 20,000 gallons per acre, at $50/barrel.
I got a car with a 18Gallon tank that gets 3.5L/100km. Oh, wait.. that makes no sense..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
"Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies."
What kind of microorganism? Is the result ethanol or hydrocarbon? These are two wildly different metabolic pathways. The organisms excrete fuel? So do I, especially after eating a lot of beans.
This whole thing smacks of a fund-raising scam.
Isn't this the stuff stranding folks at sea with bad (nautical) engines, caused by ethanol?
I sure hope I'm right; I'd like to think there was *anything* that could touch the effeciency of fossil fuels, but do we have land available for growing both food and fuel?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Hydrocarbon producing algae escaping into the environment....
.
Whole ecology destruction, anyone? Anyone? Any takers? You! With the gas guzzler? You don't give a flip about some ocean life do ya? Well, here's your algae oil/gasoline. Now go home and don't upset the government/financial speculators. We know what we're doing....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Gallons of oil in a barrel = 44
Barrels used per day in U.S. = 20,680,000 in 2007
Barrels user per year = 7,548,200,000
Gallons used each Year = 332,120,800,000
Gallons per Acre per year for this process 20,000
Acres required to meet U.S demand for a year = 16,606,040
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We simply need to tax fuel enough to establish a price floor that will encourage alternative investments. The Europeans are already there so now the US just needs to start increasing the tax rate
Why?
Why do you automatically assume that if the Europeans do something it must be right for every place on earth?
If this breakthrough is for real, and it was developed in Cambridge Massachusetts USA, with the tax structure we have today, and nothing like it has appeared out or Europe with all its horrendous taxes, then where is the basis for your euro-centric view?
How will pouring more tax dollars down social rat-holes help solve an energy crisis?
Do I necessarily believe this announcements? No, not yet. Does that mean I should run to Europe and adopt every tax-grab they dream up? Of course not.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"...at a cost of about $50 per barrel..." Yeah, if you replace legal workers with illegal ones.
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I'm not really that worried about it, there appear to be multiple technologies that will be quite viable at the equivalent of $100 per barrel (which isn't fantastic as a consumer, but it is plenty manageable for me). Given the way corn ethanol went last year (and I'm talking about the huge over-investment in infrastructure, not the apparent impact on food prices), I'm not real excited about the government picking winners.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Assumptions:
- They can actually generate 20,000 gallons per acre per year
- 1 gallon of biofuel will get you the same mileage as 1 gallon of gasoline
US gasoline usage = 378,000,000 gallons/day = 137,970,000,000 gallons/year
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
Area needed: 137,970,000,000 gallons/year / 20,000 gallons/acre/year = 6,898,500 acres = 10,779 sq.mi.
Comparative area: Massachusetts is 10,555 sq.mi.
So, we'd need an area slightly larger than MA to generate the needed biofuel. This may seem like alot, but...
Farmland in US: 922,095,840 acres = 1,440,774 sq. mi.
Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm
Percent farmland to convert to biofuel: 10,555 sq. mi. / 1,440,774 sq. mi. = 0.73%
This isn't much, if you ask me.
Now, for the financial incentive to do so:
Value of 20,000 gallons of biofuel at $50/barrel: 20,000 gallons = 476 barrels * $50/barrel = $23,000
Corn yield of one acre: 162 bushels/acres (Iowa)
Source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a1-14.pdf
Value of 162 bushels of corn: 162 bushels * $4.77/bushel (Estimated 2008 Calendar Year Average) = $772.74
Source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a2-11.pdf
So, converting one acre of corn farmland to one acre of biofuel farmland will increase the revenue from $773 to $23,000, a nearly 30-fold increase.
So, this looks like it might be worth it depending on the cost of conversion and cost versus revenue. It'll certainly be interesting to watch.
I void warranties.
Uh, fuel is transferable and the US accounts for what 40% of world consumption, so as long as we do not have a price floor alternatives have to compete with artificially cheap dino-gas (add the cost of 2 gulf wars and our support for Israel to the last two decades consumption and you get a much higher price per gallon, not to mention the environmental externalities that aren't priced into the pump price.)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The cord would be a nightmare, but 4 HP is plenty for cutting. I used to cut my parents' lawn in the late 80s with a 2 HP motor; you either cut more often or go a bit slower when cruising through tall grass.
They don't have to pick winners, just raise the floor price of dino-gas and let everyone else compete. That is what they should have done instead of the stupidity that was the farm belt subsidy disguised as energy alternative that we got. It would have encouraged alternative energy sources at a lower cost to the taxpayers and without encouraging an 'alternative' that consumed oil at near 1:1 levels.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When reading their press releases, look not for the number of gallons of oil per acre, but for the gallons of oil per dollar invested in the photobioreactor (or pond). If they give you the former and not the latter, they're probably scamming.
Seastead this.
What part of "Price" do you not understand?
These people created this and the price point at which it becomes economic may be higher or lower than the current price of oil.
So be it.
Price fluctuations are not evil. They are the market adjudication of supply and demand.
Price fluctuation are your friend. Static or legislated prices totally screw up economies. Do we really need to replay the downfall of the soviet union again just to drive home this point.
The amount of fossil fuels left in the ground exceed by several orders of magnitude that which we have used to date. Its just not economic to get to them. But at some point shale oil and oil sands will be economic, as will bio generation which is the subject of this story.
Arbitrarily jacking up the price by adding tax does nothing constructive, and yes, deny it as you will, the tax proceeds WILL be poured down a rat-hole of social programs as witnessed by your own words "disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged".
You automatically assume no environmental effects of these alternate energy efforts, while failing to recognize we consume way more oil today than we did in the days of smog filled skies.
You automatically assume the Europeans used their high taxes to further research, yet they are hopelessly behind in clean coal technology, oil sands, or coal-to-liquid technology. Hint: The money went into social programs. Tax removes money from the developmental cycle. It does not facilitate anything but bureaucracy and stifling regulations.
There is no justification for propping up the European model here.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
needed to make this work will be hard enough to keep alive even within the protection of the systems built to grow them and in the wild, have the same kind of survival prospects Bambi would have in a country full of Godzillas.
If the description is accurate, the project is intended to harvest money from investors, not biofuel from solar energy.
No need for hysterical panic unless you're one of the small investors whose money is actually involved.
Tech Public Policy stuff
6 Big Oil firms heavily invested in this? Far from seeing it as a sign that this is not snake oil, I suspect 6 Big Oil firms standing behind the guise of a start-up asking for public money. Perhaps they don't even need the money but they mind not letting this money going into the development of viable alternatives. And if there is an alternative for oil, Big Oil would be the last I would trust into its development.
So you are proposing burning oil until we have little left and then burning oil sands and oil shale? Wow, that's incredibly short sighted. We need sustainable alternatives and the sooner the better. Continuing to rely on stored solar energy is a bad long term strategy even if there are zero environmental problems from doing so (highly unlikely).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Maybe about 20-30cents a gallon at most?
Fifty bucks a barrel for something that has far less energy density than gasoline is too high in my opinion. Far less energy density per mass & volume + requiring all vehicles have their fuel lines made corrosion resistant to the max due to ethanol's corrosive properties makes it a lose unless it's cheap as fuck compared to gas.
O.k., so that just picks petroleum derived gasoline as the loser.
I don't really see any need to do that. I am comfortable with the notion that alternative fuels that can be produced at sufficient scale will be developed regardless of government intervention.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
>So you are proposing raising taxes?
Wow, that's incredibly insightful.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And you don't think part of investing in your own future is buying and destroying any competing technology? Plus, you're ignoring the reality that every business on earth can only operate because sustainability is not a requirement for existence. Essentially, the cost for bringing the earth a little closer to disaster is zero, since the unborn generations to come have no vote in a market system tuned entirely for short term vision.
I do not believe in secret meetings where evil businessmen plot to destroy the earth. But I do know that they have been convicted of abusing newcomers to any business through price fixing, buying up patents and burying them, and other "business practices" that are the antithesis of true market economics.
In order for technology to evolve and improve, the dinosaurs must die. But while the dinosaurs are the most profitable businesses in the world, and have several countries entirely dependent on them for their existence, they will die a slow death without some sensible economic reforms. And while they are dying, everyone is suffering for 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.
The economy is in the toilet, and you want to tax fuel? No. Just plain no. There is no reasonable excuse for taxing the shit out of people worse than we already are. This would hurt everyone, even those without cars, because of the increased cost of transportation for food and other goods. I already don't drive any miles I don't have to. How the hell is this going to cut my demand for fuel? Quite simply, it isn't. It is simply going to shove another tax up my ass. A tax can't modify geography; it won't make anyone's minimum commute distance any shorter.
Furthermore, if you dry up demand for fuel, you kill the market for new biofuels like this. In order to do away with "bad" dino fuel, we need a robust market for biofuel, which will lead to an established, growing, maturing profitable biofuel industry.
The whole reason this article is exciting is that it shows another potential cost-competitive biofuel process. If the process is competitive, why would you raise taxes? Granted, it is possible for world oil prices to fluctuate below the more or less fixed price of this new method of production, but on the whole over the last few years, oil prices have exceeded what this company claims their projected production price would be.
Instead of taxing "bad" dino fuel more, why not give more tax breaks on "good" biofuel? Let's remove the federal tax on biofuel for 5 years, and then phase it back in if necessary. At the start, biofuels will make up such a small percentage of all fuel sold, the tax loss would be negligible. At the end of that 5 years, the biofuel industry hopefully will have matured and gained marketshare. At that point, I would expect it would be able to stand on its own, and federal fuel taxes could be phased back in as biofuel comprises a larger part of the fuel market in the US.
Not every model that is successful in Europe (or that they manage to endure) is the right solution in the US.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
> 5kwh per m^2 per day
That's 208 watts/m^2. Say so.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> Yes, your fuel may soon come from a genetically engineered non-algal microbe.
They'll be banned in Europe. Ain't natural.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Recycling is wonderful. This is a rejected submission from 2 years ago:
According to Flight Global: "The US Air Force intends to certificate its entire aircraft fleet to run on synthetic jet-fuel blend by 2011, and began on 8 August when the Boeing B-52H became the first to be approved. The eight-engined bomber finished testing earlier this year with fuel produced from natural gas using the Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) process. "Each time the price of fuel goes up $10 a barrel, it costs the USAF $600 million", says air force secretary Michael Wynne. "It causes angst to know that we're faced with a commodity that some might use against us," he says, pointing to the potential of F-T to convert domestic coal and natural gas to jet fuel." The snag in a complete switch-over could be building a plant with the capacity needed for the USAF's needs. It would cost US$1 billion. However, Syntroleum and Tyson Foods have teamed up and claim they could build the plant for only US$100 million, using a simpler, cheaper and cleaner process than the F-T, starting with a major product of Tyson's: chicken fat. If this comes about, there may even be a chicken-burning car in your future."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
http://www.joulebio.com/why-solar-fuel/how-it-works/
It's hard to imagine using millions of barrels of oil without moving a whole lot of carbon from the ground to the atmosphere. If you believe there's a significant human component to global warming it makes sense to encourage a carbon-neutral fuel technology like biodiesel.
500k barrels per day OPEC imports, $120B per year in conservative costs for the Iraq war and foreign aid to Iraq comes to ~$21/gallon.
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Yes, petroleum derived gasoline SHOULD be the loser for a whole host of reasons (environmental impact, peak oil, national security, alternative uses (plastics and medicine)).
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It's a global economy buddy, the USA consumes 378 million barrels per day. Increasing oil prices in the middle east affect our prices too even if we import 500k per day.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
The OP Mentioned Iraq War 1 and 2, that's a nearly 20 year timeframe to look at.
Tax breaks don't work because they can't bring the $/gallon of this or any currently researched technology down to $25 which is the production cost floor of dino fuel.
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Huh? Please 'splain to us dumb 'Muricans
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
Ok, how about the ~2.5M barrels a day Iraq produced before the invasion, that comes out to ~38B gallons a year, or more than $3/gallon just in military expenses. If that oil was gasoline and was free it would hardly be a bargain.
P.S.
Try more like 20M barrels a day consumption for the US, how can you link to that site and get the numbers so far off?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Your rule of thumb is broken. Convert the same square mile of farmland to some other use, such as building automobile manufacturing plants in the 70s or 80s, and you get a rate of return that dwarfs what you dismiss as "too good to be true".
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
38 billion barrels = 1.596 Trillion gallons.
20 million barrels = 378million gallons.
Simple mistake really, but you're doing unit conversions worse than NASA.
My Mistake too though in the post you quoted, I wrote 378 million barrels, I ment gallons since we are talking about the price per gallon.
The Europeans are behind in clean coal because clean coal is stupid. The only reason anyone invests in it is to protect their existing coal industry. That's why Australia leads the world in clean coal research, because we have a huge coal industry and since coal makes money the right doesn't want to piss off the owners, and since coal miners are generally union, the left doesn't want to piss them off. Investment in clean coal isn't about making the right environmental choice. Clean coal involves somehow magically stuffing all the bad stuff back into the ground and keeping it there forever, and in all likelihood it's not going to work, particularly since unlike nuclear waste, the bad stuff is a gas.
Over here we have European style gas taxes, and substantially higher prices, and we've got more clean coal research than the US. It has nothing to do with the tax system and everything to do with local economic interest.
2,500,000 (barrels/day)*365(days/year)*42(barrels/gallon)=38,325,000,000 or ~38B gallons/year.
$120,000,000,000($/year)/38,325,000,000(gallons/year)=$3.13/gallon.
Can you point out where my unit conversions are wrong please?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
These sort of biofuels are basically solar energy.
So I'm curious to how these compare to "Solar Thermal Energy" in terms of cost per kWh.
Assuming about 34 megajoules per litre of biofuel, and thus about 289 MJ per gallon, Google[1] gives me:
((289 megajoules * 20000) per acre) per year = 45.2600835 watts per (square meter).
So it's pumping out on average about 90 watts per square meter on average during the day (ignoring night time).
Assuming the average insolation to produce the 90 watts was 300 watts per square meter, that means about 30% efficiency in conversion. Not bad if the assumptions and calculations are correct.
Just wonder how much that biofuel's infrastructure costs to build, and costs to maintain. And how efficient they are in use of land area once you add in the necessary support infrastructure.
Solar thermal reflectors cost $$$ too (build, repair, cleaning etc). But I believe the systems involved are not so complicated, have fewer dependencies, so they should be cheaper.
Now the other difference is the main end product of this is a liquid biofuel. Whereas the main end product of solar thermal energy is electricity.
If this energy is going to be used for cars, the efficiency drops even more for biofuels - higher losses due to fuel distribution, fuel cell conversion, or combustion engines. Electricity distribution loss is about 7% and both batteries and electric motors have quite low losses in comparison.
[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=((289+megajoules+*++20000+per+acre)+per+year+)+in+watts+per+square+metre&btnG=Search&meta=
Your rule of thumb is broken. Convert the same square mile of farmland to some other use, such as building automobile manufacturing plants in the 70s or 80s, and you get a rate of return that dwarfs what you dismiss as "too good to be true".
Ok, first, imagine an infinite amount of demand for American cars...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
"Bio fuel" is the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time. Utterly retarded. Crops should be grown for food not to power bloody cars.
We should be directing as much of our efforts as possible into tapping solar power. Imagine every roof in the world with an efficient solar panel on top. With some sort of shared storage capacity we'd have practically limitless, practically free, clean power for all for as long as good old Sol shines.
Oh but wait a minute, then there's nobody making a huge profit off everybody's energy use and, more importantly, they're not in control of your power requirements. Silly me. It'll never happen.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
All new cars made here in Brazil already run in both gasoline and ethanol that is totally clean. All our gas stations sell ethanol. Biodiesel is just a way americans found to deny they are behind in green fuels and avoid using not invented there technology. Ethanol is widely used for decades here, the cars are mostly made by GM, Ford, Fiat and VW, not some strange brazilian company like you may be thinking. This biodiesel is a pointless bullshit, pushed just to protect a market that wouldn't be able to compete with our ethanol.