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

scale

[enricohale]

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.

Re:scale

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. If you take *all* current global production of canola oil, peanut oil, palm oil, and every other vegetable oil you can think of, they amount to less than 10% of daily consumption of petroleum. And we are already using most of those vegetable oils for food, so it's not like we could divert that much to displace petroleum use anyway. Expand the production? Sure, great idea. If you think you can figure out a way to double the arable land used for vegetable oil production so that it doesn't cut into the production for food, then you've still managed to displace less than 10%, and goodness knows what you've done to the landscape to do it.

Algae has some potential to change things a bit, because theoretically you can grow them in parts of the world that aren't otherwise agriculturally useful, such as desert environments. But you still need plenty of water and vast geographic areas covered with "algae farms" and processing facilities, and it is still in the experimental stages. Doing it at industrial scales is trickier than it seems (e.g., parasites and competing microbes getting into the monospecific algae ponds and killing them off). It's not surprising that these guys are resorting to niche markets first, because that's probably all it will ever be as a fuel.

Re:scale

[im_thatoneguy]

Coincidentally algae already is about 10x as efficient at producing oil as corn. So hypothetically if we converted all of our agro-oil space into algae space, that 10% == 100% of our daily demand. Also you need to take into account that many of our plants for oil production are even less efficient than corn.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[alexander_686]

Maybe, but not inherently so.

Brazil, if I understand correctly, makes ethanol profitably for 2 reasons. First, equatorial cane makes a better feedstock then corn. Second, when the price of oil cratered Brazil did not yank the subsides from ethanol. This allowed long term research, development, and capital project to go forward during the slump. Normally I am against subsides but this might be the exception that proves the rule.

I have seen interesting R&D plus novel ethanol plants that could make the whole thing viable, even factoring in food displacement.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[icebike]

1) Algae doesn't require chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc to the scale that corn does.

So something from nothing then?

Algae still requires a food source, and you still have to protect your crop, if not from grass hoppers, then from other forms of pests, perhaps other algae.

2) Algae has the potential to be much more space efficient... much higher output per acre,

I see not a shred of evidence for this. Unless you go vertical and introduce artificial sunlight at great expense, which you could also do with corn.

We still have very little understanding of what the byproducts of massive algae production might be. We see green, and immediately think benign. But that might be more magical thinking than science.