Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.......
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Posted on 03/14/2007 9:08:48 AM PDT by APRPEH
Israeli firm Seambiotic Ltd. has unveiled a technology to produce commercial quantities of fuel from seaweed, Ha'aretz reported. The technology - demonstrated at an international conference on marine biotechnology in Eilat - allows the industrial cultivation of seaweed through the use of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Instead of allowing the polluting gas - one of the main contributors to global warming - to escape into the atmosphere, the gas passes through a filtration process and enters a pool, where it feeds microscopic seaweed. The seaweed is used to produce fuel. According to the scientists who developed this technology, it is possible to produce a liter of fuel for every five kilograms of seaweed. The technology was developed in the experimental farm set up by Seambiotic Ltd. three years ago in the compound of the Ashkelon power plant, with the support of the Israel Electric Corporation. The seaweed pools are situated several hundred meters from the power plant smokestacks, and are filled with sea water that is used to cool the plant's turbines. The seaweed used is found in the Mediterranean in small concentrations, but the carbon dioxide allows it to grow in the pools at a concentration of one million times greater. Last week, the company filed a technology patent in the United States.
Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.......
If you want on or off the DIESEL "KnOcK" LIST just FReepmail me........
This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days......
Renewable Energy PING?
This will ... ah ... devastate the oceans ... causing mass extinctions ... um ... and .... ummm ... kill the whales. And ... and ... the ice caps will melt ... and the seas rise ... and we ... ah ... we shouldn't let them do this. [/Green activist]
Now, since that seaweed does nothing else but photosynthesis, how would it differ in principle from harvesting weeds like kudzu vines and turning them in the fuel? To become important it would have to become seaweed harvesting in open sea, and not in a small size pool. And carbonizing open sae is an iffy proposition.
Sounds like exactly the same thing as algae, using the CO2 to enhance the stuffs growing ability. I wonder which has more energy per pound, seaweed or algae.
Dunno about this particular development, but I'd laugh my ass off if it turned out to be somebody in Israel who invented something that made oil obsolete.
In related news another Israeli firm has been able to produce enough energy to power a small city by attaching a complicated series of strings and pullys to the man pictured above.
I don't think this qualifies for "reducing the dependence on middle east fuel". :)
Inserted into the story as if it were settled science.
-PJ
Thank gawd for that "polluting gas"--we'd be a frozen ice ball otherwise.
Every bit of the CO2 scavenged photosynthetically by the seaweed will be released again if it is burned.
One of those stories that tells half the story, because the second half cancels it.
Seaweeds essentially are algaes, only bigger.
http://www.oilgae.com/
The plant "keeps" the C and releases the O2. When burned, the O2 is re-combined with the C that is used as fuels (oils, etc) . There would be a slight improvement in CO2 levels, as not all the C that goes into the plants' structure would be turned into fuel...........
The point of it is, this is a really cheap scrubber for stack emissions from power plants. And biodiesel is a byproduct.
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