Those pansy-ass journalists with their sugary treehugging hippy theories can speak for themselves.
I downloaded it from the wrong place for free (rather than from the right place for free) beacuse that's the best way I know to feel that I'm hurting people, and that makes me feel all tingly and eeeevil inside.
Oh Lordy, the number of posts so far NOT involving spankin' duh monkey can be counted on one hand. Which is GOOD because my other hand is entirely busy at the moment.
While reading slashdot? Wow, there really _are_ some real nerds here...
Look, we mock _everything_, OK? And we accept your right to mock us back (doesn't mean we won't answer, though). You think you or some particular behavior of yours should be exempt from mocking? The answer is no and will be no. Get over it.
I feel quite confident that they would lose the competition against more energy-efficient natural organisms. You know, the ones who use their captured energy to make sugar for their own ends, rather than throwing out high-grade fuel for free.
Probably more of a challenge to shield our crippled 'noble' algae from savage warriors from the outside. I can just picture how Monsanto saves the day in the middle of the mysterious algae-blight of 2024. Maybe better to base it on something exotic in the first place. Take some dead-sea bacteria and implant the H2 thing in them, then you can use salt in stead of roundup.
I'm sorry, It's OK. I just don't buy into the whole "Hydrogen is Cool/The Answer/Better" story. It's simply not very convenient, if nothing else; high pressure is energy intensive and has some safety issues, cryo is energy intensive and opens up a whole other can of worms.
Ah, you havn't been following. Suffice to say none of these are among the generally suggested ways of keeping hydrogen in a car. Go do your homework.
IF you can get bio-diesel out of algae (or anything for that matter) I think it's a much better use of the little critters.
All that acreage and you lawn needs glass warehouses built over them. Big huge warehouses, made with lots of glass.
No warehouses. Just transparent pipes/canas.
And how do you make glass? Sand and lots of heat, which would probably come from oil or natural gas.
No need to use glass. Plastic is fine.
Or, you could use plastic bags instead of glass. But that comes from oil again,
_coming_ from ois is not what makes fossil fules bad. As long as you don't burn the damn things on a massive scale, or pollute too much in other ways along the way, making stuff from oil is just fine.
algae will not be used in cars, not in spacecraft.
Spacecraft will continue to be best served with solar cells for electricity, if they are near enough the sun, nuclear otherwise.
The best you can hope for is that the ones who come ready-loaded with chemical rapid-propulsion fules get theirs from these algae.
There might appear craft that generate h2 from solar (for more concentrated blasts than they would have power to from electrical engines), but they still have to bring along water to make it from. I suspect the necessary systems needed would outweigh the benefits of just launching with H2 and O2 in stead of water, even for solar cell electrolysis, and especially for biological H2 generation.
The best you can hope for is that the h2 they bring along is generated in a friendly way, but looking at the total energy consumption of a space mission, it scarcely matters.
Well, the good news is you only need money for the research. Once a suitable strain of algae (or whatever we plant the capability into) is there, the horizon for profit should draw near enough for private enterprise to waltz all over corn-ethanol i the marketplace in a matter of years.
Not in cars first of course. Single factories and other businesses burning fuels today, seeing they can save money by switching to hydrogen, leading to a rudimentary backbone distribution network gradually built, then some die hard enthusiasts and insiders arranging side-outlets for smaller uses for hackers an idealists, then small buinesses seing savings, densening the distribution network, then some asian company lauching hydrogen cars _and_ consumer "gas"(literally) stations at the same time, killing the American automobile yet again.
Or "farmland", for that matter. While I appreciate that some may see the aesthetic qualities of dumping great big bio-hydrogen production plants on top of farmlads, I doubt if it would make any economic sense in the long term.
Instead of thinking entirely in terms of big honking swaths of farmland covered in algae,
Will people stop saying "farmlad" all the time? Yes, conventinal biofuels require farmland, and that is aming its greatest weknesses, but this here is a green soup that bubbles out hydrogen if you give it sunlight. It doesn't need soil at all, but it does need large areas. It would make no sense to place such a facility on valuable farmland.
Having said that, if you could find a way to economically grow these algae in water tanks in the dessert or something, then you might have a fairly decent energy source, thou I suspect it would just be a very inefficient solar plant.
Well, what effieciency the actual organisms will reach is as yet completely unknown (as yet it's awful but the premise is that it can be improved though breeding or manipulation), but in any case: Probably inefficient per area compared to solar cells, for a good while. But if we're talking desert or other low-value land, it's really efficiency per investment that matters for both of them.
The cost of solar cells is still huge, while H2 bioreactors could be done in dirt-cheap extruded plastic canal sheets like those used in greenhouses and for solar water heating. The organisms would build themselves, just feed them nutrients and sunlight (and circulate the gases they need).
It's not a matter of how much farmland we have, it's oceans
It's neither. For there to be any point you need to capture the generated hydrogen, so the soup needs to be enclosed; you can't just throw the little buggers into the ocean.
Sure, you could make offshore h2 plants of this kind, but it's a lot of extra running costs, and the only benefit would be free 'land' to keep it on. The first decades of viable plants like this would be on land. But not farmland. It doesn't use the soil, so why pay for it. The best places would be desert, barren mountain, and rooftops. The latter has convenient infrastructure in place, and includes new roofs where none has been required before, like over parking lots.
I don't think we need to calculate the CO2 input now
I know this was your point, and I agree, but just a few minor comments:
Translate "yard" to "rooftop or other available area", and suddenly 40m2 isn't that much of a deal. in addition, as with solar cells, the best efficiency is obtained when angling the surface at a right angle to the incoming light (or an unmoving angle that optimizes that angle for the best-yield hours of the day). Unless you are near the equator, the footprint on the ground can be significantly lower than the effective area.
Biodiesel doesn't contribute to global warming. At all.
That's not entirely true. Yes, the binding of carbon in fossil deposits is ultra-long-term, and in biomas it is not, but htta does no mean it does not have an impact.
If we assume that the fuel extraction results in most of the captured carbon from the plot ending up in the fuel (or in the atmosphere during processing), that means that the only carbon bound up "by" that land at any point in time is that which is in the crops currently growing there, or any fuel generated from it and still not used. Most likely not all that much.
In contrast, the carbon bound up by, say, a similar patch of forest binds all the carbon in all the biomass on it, decaying on it, and transported out of it (for example for lumber) but not yet burnt or decayed. Quite a lot.
For farmland it is a similar proposition: sure, the turnover rate for food is faster than for lumber, but it still takes longer for the carbon in harvested for food to return completely to CO2 than if you just burned it straight away, and the rest of the plant is typically not burnt straight away, but decays slowly too.
Just burning the entire amount of captured carbon more or less immediately (which is sort of the idea of biofuels) short-circuits the cycle, bypassing this reservoir of resident and decaying biomass.
So although yes, biomass fuel is a lot better than burning oil, converting other carbon-binding biotopes into biomass-farms for fuel does indeed free up more carbon into the atmosphere.
It is a one-time per-land-area cost, as opposed to the per-energy consumed cost of fossil fuel, so it is of course far superior to that. But it is not zero. Very far from it if we envision biofuels becoming a global energy contender.
It is reversible, if it ever becomes economical to revert the area to heavier growth and slower decay, but it takes many decades to get a plot of farmland back to anywhere near the carbon-binding ability of, say, old-growth forest.
SO: a lot better than fossil fules, but solar is still significantly better, and when bio-H2 comes of age it will be way superior too (probably much better, since there is less high-energy manufacturing involved).
But the article did have kilograms of hydrogen per acre per day. If we accept the assertion that 1kg of H2 is roughly equivalent to 1 gallon of gas (for automotive use), you are really only some very simple arithmetic away from a fair comparison with gas.
As for water usage, the algae live _in_ the water, not on the ground, so the water will be enclosed, probably in transparent pipes or covered pools. There would be no evaporation, and ground conditions would be largely irrelevant. So farmland would be too valuable and not competitive. Water consumed form actual conversion to hydrogen would be a barely noticable expense, and absolutely tiny compared to agriculture.
Comparison with other direct electric is fruitless, because this _isn't_ a technology for generatring electricity, it produces storable and transportable _fuel_. It will compete with stuff like refined gas/diesel, biodiesel, hydrogen electrolysed from solar electricity, or batteries charged with solar electricity.
Yes, producing H2 this way in order to burn it for electricity would be dumb, just like using electricity to synthesize fuel would.
Haven't done the math, but my guess is the inefficiency of solar cells coupled with the extra cost of conversion when you're not using the electricity directly, means it can be beat quite easily the second we get our hands on some reasonably efficient hydrogen-generating critters. But not before. Breeding them may take time, but maybe soon we will understand enough about photosynthesis to manipulate the circuitry in a directed way, and produce only enough sugar to keep the cell alive and make hydrogen from the rest.
Publishing bomb-making instructions has been considered wrong (and often illegal) for ages -- even if the general principles (nor even actual designs) aren't particularly secret.
Bollocks. Any decent encyclopedia contains everything a moderately interested engineer needs to produce conventional bombs as long as he can obtain the ingredients.
Wow, an actual spelling flame without a single spelling error in the response! I thought those were purely mythical. (yes, the double "of" is in fact correct)
In other news, the Home Office are working to make "traffic congestion cameras" mandatory in every room of every home. They promise not to use them for anything at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Those pansy-ass journalists with their sugary treehugging hippy theories can speak for themselves.
I downloaded it from the wrong place for free (rather than from the right place for free) beacuse that's the best way I know to feel that I'm hurting people, and that makes me feel all tingly and eeeevil inside.
I hardly think I'm the only one.
That would have be the INN-Economics prize.
INN's Not the Nobel foundation.
[the prize] is awarded by the ... Swedish central bank... ...the socialist Swedish central bank... ...Their awards are biased...
Anyone who can say any these things with a straight
face is a very POORLY informed commentator indeed, and could profitably shut the fuck up.
Oh Lordy, the number of posts so far NOT involving spankin' duh monkey can be counted on one hand. Which is GOOD because my other hand is entirely busy at the moment.
While reading slashdot? Wow, there really _are_ some real nerds here...
But, being slashdot, I ...
Hi, slashdot. Nice to finally meet you.
So: philosophically uninteresting.
On the contrary, what we have here is a philosphical can-of-worms:
A tin-foil hat that actually performs mind control!
The mind boggles.
Look, we mock _everything_, OK? And we accept your right to mock us back (doesn't mean we won't answer, though). You think you or some particular behavior of yours should be exempt from mocking? The answer is no and will be no. Get over it.
I feel quite confident that they would lose the competition against more energy-efficient natural organisms. You know, the ones who use their captured energy to make sugar for their own ends, rather than throwing out high-grade fuel for free.
Probably more of a challenge to shield our crippled 'noble' algae from savage warriors from the outside. I can just picture how Monsanto saves the day in the middle of the mysterious algae-blight of 2024. Maybe better to base it on something exotic in the first place. Take some dead-sea bacteria and implant the H2 thing in them, then you can use salt in stead of roundup.
I'm sorry,
It's OK.
I just don't buy into the whole "Hydrogen is Cool/The Answer/Better" story. It's simply not very convenient, if nothing else; high pressure is energy intensive and has some safety issues, cryo is energy intensive and opens up a whole other can of worms.
Ah, you havn't been following. Suffice to say none of these are among the generally suggested ways of keeping hydrogen in a car. Go do your homework.
IF you can get bio-diesel out of algae (or anything for that matter) I think it's a much better use of the little critters.
Now that actually has some merit.
All that acreage and you lawn needs glass warehouses built over them. Big huge warehouses, made with lots of glass.
No warehouses. Just transparent pipes/canas.
And how do you make glass? Sand and lots of heat, which would probably come from oil or natural gas.
No need to use glass. Plastic is fine.
Or, you could use plastic bags instead of glass. But that comes from oil again,
_coming_ from ois is not what makes fossil fules bad. As long as you don't burn the damn things on a massive scale, or pollute too much in other ways along the way, making stuff from oil is just fine.
algae will not be used in cars, not in spacecraft.
Spacecraft will continue to be best served with solar cells for electricity, if they are near enough the sun, nuclear otherwise.
The best you can hope for is that the ones who come ready-loaded with chemical rapid-propulsion fules get theirs from these algae.
There might appear craft that generate h2 from solar (for more concentrated blasts than they would have power to from electrical engines), but they still have to bring along water to make it from. I suspect the necessary systems needed would outweigh the benefits of just launching with H2 and O2 in stead of water, even for solar cell electrolysis, and especially for biological H2 generation.
The best you can hope for is that the h2 they bring along is generated in a friendly way, but looking at the total energy consumption of a space mission, it scarcely matters.
Well, the good news is you only need money for the research. Once a suitable strain of algae (or whatever we plant the capability into) is there, the horizon for profit should draw near enough for private enterprise to waltz all over corn-ethanol i the marketplace in a matter of years.
Not in cars first of course. Single factories and other businesses burning fuels today, seeing they can save money by switching to hydrogen, leading to a rudimentary backbone distribution network gradually built, then some die hard enthusiasts and insiders arranging side-outlets for smaller uses for hackers an idealists, then small buinesses seing savings, densening the distribution network, then some asian company lauching hydrogen cars _and_ consumer "gas"(literally) stations at the same time, killing the American automobile yet again.
Will people stop saying "farmlad" all the time?
Or "farmland", for that matter. While I appreciate that some may see the aesthetic qualities of dumping great big bio-hydrogen production plants on top of farmlads, I doubt if it would make any economic sense in the long term.
Instead of thinking entirely in terms of big honking swaths of farmland covered in algae,
Will people stop saying "farmlad" all the time? Yes, conventinal biofuels require farmland, and that is aming its greatest weknesses, but this here is a green soup that bubbles out hydrogen if you give it sunlight. It doesn't need soil at all, but it does need large areas. It would make no sense to place such a facility on valuable farmland.
Having said that, if you could find a way to economically grow these algae in water tanks in the dessert or something, then you might have a fairly decent energy source, thou I suspect it would just be a very inefficient solar plant.
Well, what effieciency the actual organisms will reach is as yet completely unknown (as yet it's awful but the premise is that it can be improved though breeding or manipulation), but in any case:
Probably inefficient per area compared to solar cells, for a good while. But if we're talking desert or other low-value land, it's really efficiency per investment that matters for both of them.
The cost of solar cells is still huge, while H2 bioreactors could be done in dirt-cheap extruded plastic canal sheets like those used in greenhouses and for solar water heating. The organisms would build themselves, just feed them nutrients and sunlight (and circulate the gases they need).
It's not a matter of how much farmland we have, it's oceans
It's neither.
For there to be any point you need to capture the generated hydrogen, so the soup needs to be enclosed; you can't just throw the little buggers into the ocean.
Sure, you could make offshore h2 plants of this kind, but it's a lot of extra running costs, and the only benefit would be free 'land' to keep it on. The first decades of viable plants like this would be on land. But not farmland. It doesn't use the soil, so why pay for it. The best places would be desert, barren mountain, and rooftops. The latter has convenient infrastructure in place, and includes new roofs where none has been required before, like over parking lots.
I don't think we need to calculate the CO2 input now
I know this was your point, and I agree, but just a few minor comments:
Translate "yard" to "rooftop or other available area", and suddenly 40m2 isn't that much of a deal.
in addition, as with solar cells, the best efficiency is obtained when angling the surface at a right angle to the incoming light (or an unmoving angle that optimizes that angle for the best-yield hours of the day).
Unless you are near the equator, the footprint on the ground can be significantly lower than the effective area.
Biodiesel doesn't contribute to global warming. At all.
That's not entirely true. Yes, the binding of carbon in fossil deposits is ultra-long-term, and in biomas it is not, but htta does no mean it does not have an impact.
If we assume that the fuel extraction results in most of the captured carbon from the plot ending up in the fuel (or in the atmosphere during processing), that means that the only carbon bound up "by" that land at any point in time is that which is in the crops currently growing there, or any fuel generated from it and still not used. Most likely not all that much.
In contrast, the carbon bound up by, say, a similar patch of forest binds all the carbon in all the biomass on it, decaying on it, and transported out of it (for example for lumber) but not yet burnt or decayed. Quite a lot.
For farmland it is a similar proposition: sure, the turnover rate for food is faster than for lumber, but it still takes longer for the carbon in harvested for food to return completely to CO2 than if you just burned it straight away, and the rest of the plant is typically not burnt straight away, but decays slowly too.
Just burning the entire amount of captured carbon more or less immediately (which is sort of the idea of biofuels) short-circuits the cycle, bypassing this reservoir of resident and decaying biomass.
So although yes, biomass fuel is a lot better than burning oil, converting other carbon-binding biotopes into biomass-farms for fuel does indeed free up more carbon into the atmosphere.
It is a one-time per-land-area cost, as opposed to the per-energy consumed cost of fossil fuel, so it is of course far superior to that. But it is not zero. Very far from it if we envision biofuels becoming a global energy contender.
It is reversible, if it ever becomes economical to revert the area to heavier growth and slower decay, but it takes many decades to get a plot of farmland back to anywhere near the carbon-binding ability of, say, old-growth forest.
SO: a lot better than fossil fules, but solar is still significantly better, and when bio-H2 comes of age it will be way superior too (probably much better, since there is less high-energy manufacturing involved).
how many joules per m2 of sunlight area
You need a unit for time as well.
But the article did have kilograms of hydrogen per acre per day. If we accept the assertion that 1kg of H2 is roughly equivalent to 1 gallon of gas (for automotive use), you are really only some very simple arithmetic away from a fair comparison with gas.
As for water usage, the algae live _in_ the water, not on the ground, so the water will be enclosed, probably in transparent pipes or covered pools. There would be no evaporation, and ground conditions would be largely irrelevant. So farmland would be too valuable and not competitive. Water consumed form actual conversion to hydrogen would be a barely noticable expense, and absolutely tiny compared to agriculture.
Comparison with other direct electric is fruitless, because this _isn't_ a technology for generatring electricity, it produces storable and transportable _fuel_. It will compete with stuff like refined gas/diesel, biodiesel, hydrogen electrolysed from solar electricity, or batteries charged with solar electricity.
Yes, producing H2 this way in order to burn it for electricity would be dumb, just like using electricity to synthesize fuel would.
Haven't done the math, but my guess is the inefficiency of solar cells coupled with the extra cost of conversion when you're not using the electricity directly, means it can be beat quite easily the second we get our hands on some reasonably efficient hydrogen-generating critters. But not before. Breeding them may take time, but maybe soon we will understand enough about photosynthesis to manipulate the circuitry in a directed way, and produce only enough sugar to keep the cell alive and make hydrogen from the rest.
This reasearch has been going on for years, BTW.
So do homosexuals
It's either sodomites or homosexuals. Sodohomosexuals is redundant.
o Far away in space
o Far away in time
o Far away in space and time
o Hollywood
o killed off by global disasters before they could develop interstellar travel or establish viable off-homeworld societies in which to develop them.
Maybe we're even a fluke to have lasted this long, and the only other ones fall into the catgories above?
which will require me to purchase not only the subscription, but also the data plan
You have a subscription without data traffic? What sort of developing country are you in?
Publishing bomb-making instructions has been considered wrong (and often illegal) for ages -- even if the general principles (nor even actual designs) aren't particularly secret.
Bollocks. Any decent encyclopedia contains everything a moderately interested engineer needs to produce conventional bombs as long as he can obtain the ingredients.
Wow, an actual spelling flame without a single spelling error in the response! I thought those were purely mythical.
(yes, the double "of" is in fact correct)
In other news, the Home Office are working to make "traffic congestion cameras" mandatory in every room of every home.
They promise not to use them for anything at all.