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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."
If you looked at TFA, you would notice that what the company has is a way of tailoring long chain hydrocarbon manufacturing through algae production. It can be longer chains like cooking oils, it can be shorter chains like fuel oil. The tech is interesting is that they can actually manipulate the algae well enough to change the final product without resorting to high pressure / high temperature methods like seen in an oil refinery.
What they can't do yet is produce the products in oil refinery-like quantities. That's something they need to do in order to sell it as a fuel, but they've figured out there is potentially a market in smaller quantities of different oils.
Whether or not that happens commercially remains to be seen, but it's a different play on building up to the next Exxon.
I don't think they will ever get there, but who knows?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I wish Slashdot had a edit feature.
To clarify, the government subsides kick in when crude oil falls below the $60 to $80 dollar range.
That word you keep using doesn't mean what you think it means!
Now you're just being difficult for the sake of being difficult.
It's not "something from nothing". Oil is pretty just just Hydrogen and Carbon + Energy. The algae in this instance takes in Air (CO2), Water (H2O) and Energy (Sunlight). Take a look at a corn plant though. How much of that corn plant is oil? A teeny tiny portion. It needs leaves and a stalk and then produces a tiny little fruit by comparison a couple times a year. Compare that to Algae which is a continuous growth process and is genetically engineered to invest almost all of its energy into producing oil and you can exponentially increase your yield every year.
We've already improved the yield of corn by about 600% over the last 50 years. But we're still constrained by the biology of growing something and then extracting oil from it through an incredibly indirect route. Remove the intermediary steps and start with an organism whose sole purpose is oil production and not food and that 600% increase will look like child's play. Algae can quadruple in mass in a single day. Ever seen heads of corn do that?
Algae already can produce more than 10x the amount of oil per acre than corn.