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

[icebike]

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.

In spite of rising population, we use an ever smaller percentage of arable land for food production. We've reduced our use of marginally arable land, and we use an increasingly more stringent definition of what constitutes "arable". You need only drive thru the mid-west, south, and even the north east to see farmland reverting to forest, or prairie.

Corn or seed-oil is not the most productive crop for bio fuels. Probably switch grass is, because it will grow almost anywhere and is widely adapted to different climates. In the long run, no single crop would be the best solution.

Using marginally arable land for fuel crops still might not come close to half the need for commercial oil production, at least not in an economically viable way. But that speaks more to the cheapness of oil than to the sustainability of bio-fuels.

imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[etash]

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.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[ColdWetDog]

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?

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".

[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".

[etash]

I did (vertically) read the article. Yes they can produce different kind of "oils" and that's exactly the problem: it's OIL. no kind of oil burns in a clean fashon. you need ethanol or hydrogen for that.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[alexander_686]

It currently competes with oil, even after you pick apart the affects of Brazil’s agriculture policy.

IIRC the effect kicks in around $60 to $80 a barrel. These have only played a factor 3 times. The first was when the industry was getting off the ground in the 1970s. The other 2 times were short periods (3 to 5 years) when oil prices collapsed. If it were not for the subsides the infrastructure that supports ethanol.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[alexander_686]

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.

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.

Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad".

[im_thatoneguy]

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.

Double take

[Chewbacon]

Maybe it's because I'm sitting on the potty, but did anyone else read: "the feces of women worried about their aging skin?"

Re:Another lesson learned here...

[SJHillman]

"This hydrochloric acid is guaranteed to rid your skin of blemishes. They'll simply... burn away"

Virtually all of the comments miss the OP's Query

[NEDHead]

" 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.

"Practical alternative fuels"?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Adsorb?

[Anonymous Coward]

That word you keep using doesn't mean what you think it means!

Re:And *still* there's no such thing as magic

[b4upoo]

Pythons may be the answer. We have too many humans being born. If we feed new born children to pythons they do not waste energy. Pythons sun bathe. They eat and every now and then they mate. Pythons are efficient. We get great looking boots and jackets from python skins. We can feed the meat and guts to hogs. Nice fat hogs produce great amounts of oil and hog poop can be used to make methane. We can also feed out convicts, drug addicts and alcoholics to the hogs in chunks. We can use many of the off spring of the hogs to feed the pythons in times where demand for fuel is low. Rendering hogs for oil could replace our entire energy needs. We can use the python poop to make compost for earthworms. Earthworms can be use to feed fish on fish farms. Fish flower can make bread for people. The compost could be used on mushroom farms. Windmills could be used to pump a stream of water in doughnut shaped ponds used to raise mussels and oysters which would purify the water. The purified water could go to the algae and fish farms. The meat from the mussels and oysters could be used to feed more hogs.
                            There are no problems at all. Proud Americans must put on their jack boots and teach the unwilling to comply or be fed to the pythons. Notice that i have bypassed the usual ovens used to silence those that disagree. why cook people when you can feed the to the hogs and dogs?

Solar panels were exactly this example

[Paul Fernhout]

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.