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."

Comments

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[SJHillman]

However, it's using algae to produce it rather than corn. Even if it doesn't burn as cleanly as ethanol, it has a number of potential advantages:

1) Algae doesn't require chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc to the scale that corn does. All of those chemicals have a HUGE environmental impact, comparable with burning fossil fuels
2) Algae has the potential to be much more space efficient... much higher output per acre, so fuel/transport costs to harvest it is significantly lower
3) Algae is much easier to produce closer to where the fuel will be consumers, such as near cities (related to #2), again lowering transport costs
4) Algae can be produced in places that are otherwise undesirable and doesn't compete with food crops, such as deserts, oceans, salt flats, etc. Many of these undesirable locations might still be close to where it's needed, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the transport costs mentioned above.
5) Less risk of a typo accidentally telling people that you need to go pick up porn for you mother.

We might not be to that point yet, but we might have been past it by now if we put the same money into it that goes into corn.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[wbr1]

ethanol does not burn clean. It is carbon neutral in that the carbon released was adsorbed by the plant when growing (not counting inefficiencies in transport, refining, etc). Any -living- source of fuel (IE bio-fuel) is carbon neutral in this fashion. Fossil fuels are not because the carbon released in their use is carbon that was stored by organic matter of ginormous geological time-frames, in essence releasing -more- carbon than the earth currently adsorbs from the atmosphere.

So, a pound of carbon released from burning regular gas, oil, coal etc, is a pound of carbon from who knows how many billions of years ago, it was trapped. A pound of carbon released from any bio fuel is a pound (mostly, lets say 75% of a pound), that was adsorbed very recently from the atmosphere by whatever biological process made the fuel, corn, switchgrass, sugar cane, my after burrito night methane fest.
Hydrogen is clean in that it release no carbon when making energy, but it costs energy to make the hydrogen. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, there is still a net carbon increase, even if there is less due to hydrogen production being more efficient than an internal combustion engine.