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Commercial Fuel From Algae Still Years Away
chrnb sends along this quote from a report at Reuters:
"Filling your vehicle's tank with fuel made from algae is still as much as a decade away, as the emerging industry faces a series of hurdles to find an economical way to make the biofuel commercially. Estimates on a timeline for a commercial product, and profits, vary from two to 10 years or more. Executives and industry players who gathered at the Algae Biomass Summit this week in San Diego said they need to push for breakthroughs along the entire chain — from identifying the best organisms to developing efficient harvesting methods. ... So far on the list: finding the right strain of algae among thousands of species that will produce high yields; designing systems where the desired algae can multiply and other species don't invade and disrupt the process; and extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well."
Give them a Nobel prize, it will encourage them.
so this is like fusion but only 10 years away instead of 20 !
Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa and Predator drone maker General Atomics are teaming up to try to turn algae into jet fuel. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/12/darpa-general-a/ well they were still at it towards the end of 2008.
The more there are pie-in-the-sky technologies out there that have been researched over many years, the more promising and immediately useful (if currently marginally feasible) technologies there will be on hand to frantically improve at the last minute when ever-growing demand for energy peaks and readily available oil has become unaffordable for less important applications. Algae is particularly promising because it relies on a billion years of evolution focussed on minimal-energy solutions to extracting power from sunlight, and because it has relatively little background pollution associated with it (as compared to the array of toxic chemicals used to manufacture solar cells, for example). Plus, understanding of genetic engineering can only improve greatly.
I still strongly prefer nuclear energy (safe fission designs for now, fusion later if that ever gets off the ground), but the political controversy surrounding nuclear power plants appears set to make nuclear energy a minor part of future energy provisions. Algae looks to be uncontroversial and usable everywhere there is decent sunlight, with almost no toxic chemicals or proliferation concerns.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
The last few bits at the end of the article seem to be the most important...
"It's going to take the right engineering solution with the right species to make it commercially viable,"
In other words, it it's not "perfect" (for varying degrees of perfection), we're just not going to do it.
I find it interesting that they want to find the perfect organism first, rather than get close first, and then refine the process.
And seriously, "extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well"?
What is their core operation? Getting the oil, or merchandising the left-overs?
Do the first, well, first; THEN work out the second.
"It's never going to get off the ground without a helping hand,"
translation: we're shell companies set up by multi-billion corps. Give us tax money.
Yeesh... It's no wonder people home-brew this stuff.
I attended a presentation hosted by an Exxon exec last week (for business school). He compared Exxon to BP. BP has been pursuing all sorts of energy alternatives (wind, solar, etc). Exxon's position, in short, is that they are an oil company so that's what they worry about. They don't pursue other energy sources because they are only viable now with subsidies, and they don't want to base their business on that (seems reasonable). BUT, the one alt fuel they are pursuing (ignoring natural gas) is algae. They seem to think it has a real future, and I believe they know what they're talking about.
(And an interesting aside... we often think of BP, Exxon, Shell etc as being these scary, large influential corporations. And maybe they are, but this exec described how truly small they are compared to the Saudi, Iranian and Qatari national oil companies. Exxon and BP combined produce less oil than the Nigerian national corporation)