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A Different Approach To Making Alternative Fuels Practical
First time accepted submitter overmod writes "Browsing on a completely unrelated subject, I came across this New York Times description of Solazyme. From the article: '...in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.' What I find interesting is the model they've adopted for short-term growth, which I would not have seen coming from a technology oriented toward biofuel production. Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital, rather than relying on donations, grants, or nebulous save-the-planet goodwill."
i have looked at about half a dozen biofuels investments. the companies never grasp the scale of the fuel industry. you'd think that a rational person would spend 15 minutes looking at the ethanol organized crime syndicate, in which our FedGov is a major co-conspirator, and would conclude that this is madness.
I've got a farmer friend who has hundreds of filthy sows that he rules over.
because even if you burn ethanol ( clean burn ) you still need millions of hectares to grow corn, hectares which otherwise would go to food production. Plus, It's a bad sort of energy conversion: instead of using solar panels, you use corn to harness the energy of the sun.
Having said that, it seems that what this company does is worse; it produces some sort of "oil" which i highly doubt would burn a clean fashion like ethanol or hydrogen.
...is that you can pretty much sell ANYTHING as a beauty product if you can say it has "unique properties" and not giggle while you do so.
Maybe it's because I'm sitting on the potty, but did anyone else read: "the feces of women worried about their aging skin?"
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
"Growing algae..." " compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days..." am I crazy, or is this the plot of Primer?
Where it made alternative fuels practical...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Yes, indeed, you might speed up the conversion *time* but you're still not going to get any more *energy* than what is provided by sunlight and starter chemicals. Period. End of story. Physics wins. Investors lose, unless the end business is in skin care products, where it might be profitable.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Leads me to wonder something else... whether the product is yet another con fake "miracle" for women, so they can get enough money to keep their con fake environmental biofuel dream alive.
" Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital, rather than relying on donations, grants, or nebulous save-the-planet goodwill.""
The answer is yes, there are many. I am willing to consult on this subject, at my usual substantial but eminently reasonable rates.
Ahh yes... if you have trouble selling something for it's intended purpose for an economic price, put it in a bottle and say it makes you look younger. This idea isn't new. Maybe we should call the algae-oil salesmen now....
If it *WASN'T* profitable, would Big Oil be buying up all the Ethanol Farms and Refineries down in Brazil in order to export said ethanol elsewhere in the world?
Slashdot had a piece on this a few years back. It's now being exported for use in fuel mixes elsewhere in the world, and the particular story it seems to me involved BP doing the purchasing.
Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.
How is that supposed to be a road to "practical alternative fuels", unless you first use the oil on the skin of aging women...and then shove them into a furnace? That's the most fuely scenario that would make sense. At least around Salem, that is.
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe they can market it as a "mail enhancement" drug as well. If you have something that women thing will make them look younger and men thing will make their dicks bigger you might have a good source of funding to solving real problems.
That word you keep using doesn't mean what you think it means!
Whenever algae comes up I like to cite a noted expert from the area for 50 years:
Benneman
Look the main problem with algae is that it is really a new form of agriculture. And everything people tout as an advantage cuts the other way. At best it is carbon neutral. Now tell me how many desert ponds are located by a source of CO2?
Don't get me wrong, I think Solazyme has nailed it, there are a lot of great things we can do with algae. It can be a food for example; chemical feedstock.
As a fuel...for the infrastructure of ruining vast desert landscapes we'd do far better pumping coal gas CO2 back into salt mines.
use as a fuel additive finds its way into vodka bottles.
Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital,
The day they figure out how to make cars run on boner pills will be the day oil subsidies stop and fucking subsidies start!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The problem is not all in the extraction, the problem is in the growth. I had a buddy that worked on a algae oil business project, and they found that it is not economical because of the costs in building\maintaining the ponds and water ect. They found it was barely economical if you could find an existing pond, like cooling ponds found in many industries. Like all bio tech stuff, even if we could make it economical, we would have to destroy other ecologies (and farmland) to make room for biofuels and convert massive amounts of land. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/biofuels-arent-really-green
What more do you need?
Solar panels started as very expensive niche products about 50 years ago with satellite power, then for calculators, then for no-wire yard lights, then for off-grid homes and things like supplementing generator power for portable traffic lights for road construction. Now solar panels have dropped so far in price they are going mainstream with "grid parity" in various places including India (and maybe in a few years almost everywhere including the northern USA).
In the 1980s, people were talking about exactly this sort of progression for solar panels, and it has played out pretty much as outlined.
So, yes, this strategy can make a lot of sense for other things like biofuels, especially in a society that otherwise has become very risk adverse or incapable of making long-term investments. But even in a society willing to take risks, an incremental path can still make a lot of sense.
With renewables, the first most cost effective step was almost always to become more energy efficient (like insulating a home and replacing low-effeciency appliances). Then, renewables have an easier time handling the remaining load, and the money saved by the energy efficiency improvements could be used to fund that conversion. So, another incremental approach.
Still, what the solar industry wanted more than anything was a "level playing field" where coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear would pay their true costs up front. Those "externality" costs include pollution, health damage, defending long supply lines militarily, meltdown risk, and even the politically corrosive effect of large centralized power systems on a democracy. If those costs had to be paid up front for those other technologies, renewables (as well as energy conservation like passive solar homes) would have probably been cost effective since the 1970s. See the book "Brittle Power" and similar writings by the Lovins for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Unfortunately, the renewable industry lost hope for that in the 1980s Reagan years especially, with the push there to allow companies to privatize gains but socialize costs. So, the renewable industry was forced to turn to this incremental strategy even though they should have won in a fair market decades ago.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The example that comes to my mind is Tesla. The electrification of transportation is a green technology. It won't save the world, but it'll be a damn sight better than the internal combustion engine and its associated petroleum infrastructure. Tesla didn't start out trying to make a million electric vehicles per year: their tech wasn't ready for that scale, their production ability definitely wasn't ready, and the consumers weren't. So, instead, they aimed at a niche, high-margin place to develop and prove their technology: sports cars. Now that the company has some legs under them (i.e., a seasoned workforce, proven core technology, operational supply chain and production facilities, experienced workforce), they are working their way down to the consumer. I think they'll get there, which is a start contrast to the many other electric car companies that have tried to jump into the consumer market feet-first, only to end up with broken legs.
Generally, the problem is a lack of appreciation by the developers of the scale needed.
It seems to be that it's only such 'boutique' oil uses that can support the sort of futzy little edgy-concept developments and their costs. To become at all interesting to the petro-industry, you're talking a scale-up of perhaps a half-dozen orders of magnitude (they're probably not even interested in LOOKING at your idea until you're credibly within at least three orders of magnitude of their operations).
-Styopa
They stole this idea from a teen aged girl! Those bastards.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/06/17/1945215/teens-biofuel-invention-turns-algae-into-fuel
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
1. You need adequate distribution. (existing infrastructure for petroleum isn't useful for other biofuels.)
2. It has to scale usefully to all locations. (ethanol could be a local alternative with economic benefits for the "local" economy. But, it doesn't scale.)