Is DIY Algae Farming the Future?

hex0D points to this "interview with Aaron Baum explaining why people growing algae at home for food can help the environment and their health, and what he's doing to facilitate this. 'We'd like to create an international network of people growing all kinds of algae in their homes in a small community scale, sharing information, doing it all in an open source way. We'd be like the Linux of algae – do-it-yourself with low-cost materials and shared information.' And one of the low-cost materials is your household urine."

Comments

Accidental agriculture...

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

Yay! The pool I don't clean is the FUTURE!

Re:Is progress that makes life worse really progre

[Shark]

We could use extreme environmentalists as fuel. Since most of them are also vegetarian, they'd even be carbon-neutral!

Re:Looks like people are starting to see the benef

[Khyber]

You would think that, but I've been working on systems to produce far more while consuming far less.

http://imgur.com/TOgCX.jpg

As another example, an acre of barley grass takes about 100,000 gallons of water to produce on regular land, and about two weeks for usable animal fodder harvest. Newer systems I work on cut that down to about 1500 gallons, it happens in 7 days, and we don't even need ANY source of light. We grow it in completely dark sheds.

http://imgur.com/TYJUR.jpg

And we have these already in production for growing biofuel-producing algae, so your assumption would be somewhat wrong. The Middle East is one of my bigger clients.

Re:Looks like people are starting to see the benef

[drinkypoo]

Once we get the infrastructure for hydrogen in place
it would be a viable transition between these two methods.

Why bother? We have the fueling infrastructure for biodiesel right now, and mechanics who know how to work on diesels. Diesel fuel is less dangerous than gasoline, while hydrogen is arguably moreso, or at least in the same ballpark. Batteries are gaining quick charging technologies that are setting them up to rival the speed of hydrogen refueling, and they are already approaching the best-case energy density of hydrogen while currently providing superior efficiency in giving up their energy as opposed to hydrogen through a fuel cell. Hydrogen in cars is stored at extremely high pressures necessitating an extremely costly storage and distribution network that is simply not necessary with diesel fuels; meanwhile we have an adequate power grid for nighttime charging of MANY electric vehicles before ANY changes need be made. Indeed this would improve the overall efficiency of the grid system because of our currently wasted nighttime base load.

There are zero compelling reasons to use fuel cells. Give up on them already: that means giving up on hydrogen, too, which has its own special set of problems that we simply don't need on the road. Biodiesel from algae grown in our deserts on seawater (and optionally coupled with saltwater aquaculture of other food that people actually want to eat!) has the potential to replace our entire diesel fuel consumption and then some, and profitably, too.

Re:Looks like people are starting to see the benef

[TheRaven64]

Batteries are improving faster than fuel cells, though.

But methanol still has 15 times the energy density of the best Lithium-ion batteries, and about 5 times the energy density of LiS batteries (which currently die after so few charge cycles that they're not in use anywhere outside military UAVs).

Except that practical methanol fuel cells are seemingly even further away than the hydrogen ones.

The first functional cells were produced in 1990. They've been refined significantly since then and they are commercially available.

Also, a methanol leak is immediately hazardous: the bad things in it can be absorbed through the skin and make you blind

You need to consume 10ml to make you blind. Absorbing this much through your skin would be very difficult. It's volatile, so a small leak will disburse into the air, making it only dangerous in confined spaces.

I'm just not seeing this EVER being allowed on public transportation, nor should it be.

Better check the law. They've been allowed for a few years. Quoth Wikipedia (complete with citations, if you want to follow them):

However, the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) Dangerous Goods Panel (DGP) voted in November 2005 to allow passengers to carry and use micro fuel cells and methanol fuel cartridges when aboard airplanes to power laptop computers and other consumer electronic devices. On September 24, 2007, the US Department of Transportation issued a proposal to allow airline passengers to carry fuel cell cartridges on board[4]. The Department of Transportation issued a final ruling on April 30, 2008, permitting passengers and crew to carry an approved fuel cell with an installed methanol cartridge and up to two additional spare cartridges