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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.