I see your point, but I'm not sure it would be worth paying the guy to drive the truck (you should obviously be able to fuel the truck) compared to just buying processed oil on the market (in the event that algae oil becomes practical enough to do in the backyard, energy from it should become very available).
It very well could be worth paying the guy to drive the truck, but I think it is a question that would need to be answered in situe, not something that could be predicted.
Gilbey's and Gordon's generally come in glass for ~$8. The glass is stocked right next to the plastic.
If you were drinking it with OJ or lemonade, you were probably drinking a huge amount of it, so I guess you would be able to sniff out the nuances to the hangovers.
(of course, I'm still skeptical, maybe you were bitter that other people bought cheap shit and drank more, etc., but there really isn't any reason to take the point further, there is no good way to tell short of a huge carefully designed study, and I don't care that much)
I'm sorry, I was speculating on how much it might cost to grow $4 of oil per year.
Anyway, if they can sell an old milk jug to somebody for $1, yeah, that would work fine, but I, personally, based on a speculative opinion only, do not expect anybody will be paying $1 for milk jugs full of algae detritus.
You haven't proved anything more than I have. Until somebody makes it work at scale, no one can claim that it is working for anybody.
The facts that used vegetable oil still goes to dumps, and other rendered fat simply gets disposed of indicate that there is currently some minimum amount of energy that is necessary for gathering it to be worthwhile; I would not be surprised if a similar situation took hold.
Does making my argument "I don't think it will work for fisherman" work? (I would attribute any deviation from this in my posts to sloppiness, go ahead and call it backpeddling if that's what you think it is)
We can bet a nickel and wait 20 years to see who was more right (I would say you are more right if such an industry arises and the collective contribution of participants making less than 0.1% of the fuel in the market is greater than 1% of the market. Hundreds of micro producers or a dozen small producers).
I don't see that I have been proven wrong. You may have demonstrated that we were talking past each other, but as far as I can tell, you started by arguing that it would be a really good idea for third world fishermen to farm oil, and I then pointed out that it wouldn't really be a cottage industry, and you said, yes it would, and I said, no, it would be an industrial industry, and then you said, so, it would still be an industry.
So the way I have been reading things, you abandoned your original point (~algae farming could invigorate the third world) to argue that algae farming is economically feasible. In my second reply, I said something like "I'm not saying it won't work" which is fairly compatible with algae farming being economically feasible...
Using the lies, the trade deficit is only about 6% of U.S. GDP.
It would hurt to have the goods cut off, but it wouldn't hurt that much (and it may well be good for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, all of the sudden there would be more demand for low skill labor inside of the U.S. Prices on junk would go up for everybody else though).
The peanut mill allows women to spend time doing things other than shelling peanuts to feed their families. They don't sell the peanuts to markets.
But several hours a day not shelling nuts is a huge quality of life improvement.
There is no such thing as a cash crop subsistence farmer by the way, subsistence means that they grow what they eat. If they are growing something to sell, the aren't just subsistence farming anymore, they are running an agribusiness.
2kg is more than I would want to look through on any sort of regular basis. Not going to law school (I considered it, for patent law no less) is not something that is often regretted, I get to enjoy most of my reading.
It is odd when people have vehement emotional commitments to corporations. Perhaps he thinks that he will drive $100's of business from the many billion dollar corporation.
I'm saying that someone with capital can 'harvest jugs' (by which I mean run a mega sized aquaculture refinery) at such a low price compared to the farmer that the farmer won't bother, because buying the damn jug would cost more than he would make in 5 years of operating it. A durable container large enough to produce a worthwhile amount of oil is not going to be cheap. Portably harvesting or transporting the container is not going to be cheap.
Putting yams in a field takes yams and time. Farming oil in the ocean takes a boat, containers, fuel and time. They aren't all that similar.
I understand economics fairly well, I'm just not blinded by enthusiasm for making the 3rd world a better place. I am all for helping people make their lives better, but the concrete peanut mill did more than ocean-algae-farming ever will.
I'm saying that someone willing to spend $10 million or $10 billion to wrangle plastic jugs in the ocean is going to be a lot better at it than someone who only has $10,000 to spend, and that they aren't going to bother wrangling them, they are going to install them and run a refinery (all this is assuming effective biological processes emerge).
Your snide blathering about what I must or must not understand isn't really contributing much.
The logistics problems are not in the complexity of one vat. They are in the complexity of producing, tracking and gathering millions and billions of gallons of oil.
If you have a boat that can process a vat in 15 seconds, and you gather 10 gallons each time you process a vat, you only need 17 boats working all day every day to produce...1 million gallons a day. Note that such boats would need to be able to hold 50,000 thousand gallons of oil, and that you would need to do something with 50,000 gallons of oil every 24 hours.
Slow each boat down to 1 vat every 5 minutes and 5 gallons per vat and you only need 694 boats to produce 1 million gallons a day, and each boat only needs to hold 1500 gallons of fuel.
The infrastructure required for fishermen to produce millions of gallons a month would be hugely significant. You can hand wave it away if you want, but that's all you are doing, hand waving it away. And millions of gallons a month isn't even a dent.
It is much more likely that a capital intense organization (like an oil company) would simply build an enormous algae farm out in the middle of the ocean (or in a desert) and drive the price down to the point where people with less capital and more labor intensive operations were unable to compete.
I wasn't trying to make it sound unreasonable. I don't have a problem with it. I just find it an interesting scope to use in examining energy solutions (because we are going to need at least 20% of that energy as transportation fuel for a long time).
Re the productivity estimate, if 4 gallons a year is low, 100 gallons is probably high, so the issue is still hundreds of millions of gallons of production vats.
Re your numbers, a pit 8 feet deep is probably going to be less productive than a pit that is 4 feet deep. I don't know enough about algae to go much further than that, but the area of a pit that is 1 foot deep is a lot scarier than a pit that is 8 feet deep.
I'm not saying it can't work, I'm simply pointing out that the logistics start at "complicated" and that the amount of fuel used in this country is rather...enormous.
Current gasoline consumption in the United States is 390 million gallons per *day*.
You would only need 3.5 billion specially designed 100 gallon containers to meet 10% of that demand. Go all crazy and you could use 350 million containers to meet 1% of that demand.
Golly that's a damn near unimaginable number of containers.
Out of Microsoft, Big oil and Ma Bell, only Microsoft makes "ungodly" profits. Big oil and telecoms make ~10% profit. Microsoft makes better than 25% profit.
For reference, Coca-Cola makes about 20% profit, Proctor and Gamble makes about 13% profit and evil mega-corporation Walmart makes about 3% profit. Anheuser-Busch makes a 13% profit.
Hopefully you can turn the algae oil into plastic, as they are going to need a lot of jugs. Millions or billions of them to give us any sort of 'breathing room'.
So how often did you drink Smirnoff? 1 in 5, or 1 in 100? If it is 1 in 100 times, how the hell do you separate it out from how much you drank? I suppose you might have been the guy who measured 250 ml into a flask and only drank that, and did it every night, but I sort of doubt it.
You could do a blind test. Have someone else prepare two equal amounts of vodka and then have a Saturday bender with each one. Maybe do it with 20 bottles that you have no idea what it is, and record the Sunday hangover. If You consistently felt worse with Smirnoff (without knowing you drank it), then fine. If you drank it twice a year and happen to remember it poorly, well, whatever.
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I see your point, but I'm not sure it would be worth paying the guy to drive the truck (you should obviously be able to fuel the truck) compared to just buying processed oil on the market (in the event that algae oil becomes practical enough to do in the backyard, energy from it should become very available).
It very well could be worth paying the guy to drive the truck, but I think it is a question that would need to be answered in situe, not something that could be predicted.
Gilbey's and Gordon's generally come in glass for ~$8. The glass is stocked right next to the plastic.
If you were drinking it with OJ or lemonade, you were probably drinking a huge amount of it, so I guess you would be able to sniff out the nuances to the hangovers.
(of course, I'm still skeptical, maybe you were bitter that other people bought cheap shit and drank more, etc., but there really isn't any reason to take the point further, there is no good way to tell short of a huge carefully designed study, and I don't care that much)
Go ahead and do it, no one will mind.
If you are going to refer to *the* editor of Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder is probably a better choice than Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a contributor.
How bout you show me what a valid comment is supposed to look like?
I'm sorry, I was speculating on how much it might cost to grow $4 of oil per year.
Anyway, if they can sell an old milk jug to somebody for $1, yeah, that would work fine, but I, personally, based on a speculative opinion only, do not expect anybody will be paying $1 for milk jugs full of algae detritus.
I'm superficially aware of the several things you mention.
If the drums cost $50 (this seems like a reasonable estimate to me), how are they going to afford them?
You haven't proved anything more than I have. Until somebody makes it work at scale, no one can claim that it is working for anybody.
The facts that used vegetable oil still goes to dumps, and other rendered fat simply gets disposed of indicate that there is currently some minimum amount of energy that is necessary for gathering it to be worthwhile; I would not be surprised if a similar situation took hold.
Does making my argument "I don't think it will work for fisherman" work? (I would attribute any deviation from this in my posts to sloppiness, go ahead and call it backpeddling if that's what you think it is)
We can bet a nickel and wait 20 years to see who was more right (I would say you are more right if such an industry arises and the collective contribution of participants making less than 0.1% of the fuel in the market is greater than 1% of the market. Hundreds of micro producers or a dozen small producers).
I don't see that I have been proven wrong. You may have demonstrated that we were talking past each other, but as far as I can tell, you started by arguing that it would be a really good idea for third world fishermen to farm oil, and I then pointed out that it wouldn't really be a cottage industry, and you said, yes it would, and I said, no, it would be an industrial industry, and then you said, so, it would still be an industry.
So the way I have been reading things, you abandoned your original point (~algae farming could invigorate the third world) to argue that algae farming is economically feasible. In my second reply, I said something like "I'm not saying it won't work" which is fairly compatible with algae farming being economically feasible...
Using the lies, the trade deficit is only about 6% of U.S. GDP.
It would hurt to have the goods cut off, but it wouldn't hurt that much (and it may well be good for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, all of the sudden there would be more demand for low skill labor inside of the U.S. Prices on junk would go up for everybody else though).
The peanut mill allows women to spend time doing things other than shelling peanuts to feed their families. They don't sell the peanuts to markets.
But several hours a day not shelling nuts is a huge quality of life improvement.
There is no such thing as a cash crop subsistence farmer by the way, subsistence means that they grow what they eat. If they are growing something to sell, the aren't just subsistence farming anymore, they are running an agribusiness.
2kg is more than I would want to look through on any sort of regular basis. Not going to law school (I considered it, for patent law no less) is not something that is often regretted, I get to enjoy most of my reading.
It is odd when people have vehement emotional commitments to corporations. Perhaps he thinks that he will drive $100's of business from the many billion dollar corporation.
I'm saying that someone with capital can 'harvest jugs' (by which I mean run a mega sized aquaculture refinery) at such a low price compared to the farmer that the farmer won't bother, because buying the damn jug would cost more than he would make in 5 years of operating it. A durable container large enough to produce a worthwhile amount of oil is not going to be cheap. Portably harvesting or transporting the container is not going to be cheap.
Putting yams in a field takes yams and time. Farming oil in the ocean takes a boat, containers, fuel and time. They aren't all that similar.
I understand economics fairly well, I'm just not blinded by enthusiasm for making the 3rd world a better place. I am all for helping people make their lives better, but the concrete peanut mill did more than ocean-algae-farming ever will.
I was thinking that prior to his pledge, maybe they would have sent 200kg of documents, so he could be keeping with his word.
I'm saying that someone willing to spend $10 million or $10 billion to wrangle plastic jugs in the ocean is going to be a lot better at it than someone who only has $10,000 to spend, and that they aren't going to bother wrangling them, they are going to install them and run a refinery (all this is assuming effective biological processes emerge).
Your snide blathering about what I must or must not understand isn't really contributing much.
The logistics problems are not in the complexity of one vat. They are in the complexity of producing, tracking and gathering millions and billions of gallons of oil.
If you have a boat that can process a vat in 15 seconds, and you gather 10 gallons each time you process a vat, you only need 17 boats working all day every day to produce...1 million gallons a day. Note that such boats would need to be able to hold 50,000 thousand gallons of oil, and that you would need to do something with 50,000 gallons of oil every 24 hours.
Slow each boat down to 1 vat every 5 minutes and 5 gallons per vat and you only need 694 boats to produce 1 million gallons a day, and each boat only needs to hold 1500 gallons of fuel.
The infrastructure required for fishermen to produce millions of gallons a month would be hugely significant. You can hand wave it away if you want, but that's all you are doing, hand waving it away. And millions of gallons a month isn't even a dent.
It is much more likely that a capital intense organization (like an oil company) would simply build an enormous algae farm out in the middle of the ocean (or in a desert) and drive the price down to the point where people with less capital and more labor intensive operations were unable to compete.
I wasn't trying to make it sound unreasonable. I don't have a problem with it. I just find it an interesting scope to use in examining energy solutions (because we are going to need at least 20% of that energy as transportation fuel for a long time).
Re the productivity estimate, if 4 gallons a year is low, 100 gallons is probably high, so the issue is still hundreds of millions of gallons of production vats.
Re your numbers, a pit 8 feet deep is probably going to be less productive than a pit that is 4 feet deep. I don't know enough about algae to go much further than that, but the area of a pit that is 1 foot deep is a lot scarier than a pit that is 8 feet deep.
I'm not saying it can't work, I'm simply pointing out that the logistics start at "complicated" and that the amount of fuel used in this country is rather...enormous.
Yes it does. Hundreds of bags come from one pound of plastic. Dozens of pounds of plastic would go into a single hundred gallon container:
http://www.bascousa.com/store/index.aspx?DEPARTMENT_ID=73
Sorry for the double reply, link to gasoline consumption number:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
Current gasoline consumption in the United States is 390 million gallons per *day*.
You would only need 3.5 billion specially designed 100 gallon containers to meet 10% of that demand. Go all crazy and you could use 350 million containers to meet 1% of that demand.
Golly that's a damn near unimaginable number of containers.
Out of Microsoft, Big oil and Ma Bell, only Microsoft makes "ungodly" profits. Big oil and telecoms make ~10% profit. Microsoft makes better than 25% profit.
For reference, Coca-Cola makes about 20% profit, Proctor and Gamble makes about 13% profit and evil mega-corporation Walmart makes about 3% profit. Anheuser-Busch makes a 13% profit.
Hopefully you can turn the algae oil into plastic, as they are going to need a lot of jugs. Millions or billions of them to give us any sort of 'breathing room'.
So how often did you drink Smirnoff? 1 in 5, or 1 in 100? If it is 1 in 100 times, how the hell do you separate it out from how much you drank? I suppose you might have been the guy who measured 250 ml into a flask and only drank that, and did it every night, but I sort of doubt it.
You could do a blind test. Have someone else prepare two equal amounts of vodka and then have a Saturday bender with each one. Maybe do it with 20 bottles that you have no idea what it is, and record the Sunday hangover. If You consistently felt worse with Smirnoff (without knowing you drank it), then fine. If you drank it twice a year and happen to remember it poorly, well, whatever.