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Posted on 07/05/2008 7:54:19 AM PDT by ovrtaxt
Remember the optimist's creed, "If life gives you lemons, make them into lemonade"?
Well, ConocoPhillips and the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels are trying to do one better in a new, $5 million research partnership:
"If life gives you pond scum, turn it into alternative fuels. And while you're at it, fight global warming."
OK, trying to cram two good ideas into one slogan may make it too long for bumper stickers. But it is a classic example of the creative thinking that promises to reshape Colorado's future while creating jobs in the new energy economy.
Making fuels from pond scum isn't a new idea. Nature thought of it millions of years ago when it covered layers of algae and other organic matter with millions of tons of rock to produce today's deposits of oil and natural gas. But soaring energy prices have encouraged researchers to speed up that natural process.
Algae is very efficient at converting sunlight into oil, so much so that researchers say algae can produce more oil in an area the size of a two-car garage than an entire acre of soybeans. Best of all, in water-short regions like Colorado, algae fuels don't compete for scarce fresh water resources but can use seawater or wastewater to make biodiesel, biogasoline and other biofuels.
That means algae can be grown in areas where human food can't be grown, according to Al Weimer, executive director of the center. And how's this for a kicker: carbon dioxide from power-plant emissions can be used as a feedstock for the algae.
So instead of spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from a coal or natural-gas fired power plant, we can recycle that greenhouse gas into algae-based fuels for cars and trucks — fighting global warming and the OPEC oil cartel at one stroke.
Maybe it's time to stop using "pond scum" as an insult and start using it to save our wallets and our planet.
Ending Our Oil Addiction: Reality Check http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/kraft/r_kraft.htm
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
clinton is pond scum
obama is too inexperienced to be pond scum, I think of him more like a primordial oooze...
I’d guess that pond scum quality would be less but growing enough to make a real difference is going to be difficult.
Making oil is easy, making enough at reasonable costs isn’t and scaling a small scale project wayyy up has another set of problems.
Algae oil cultivators could be put in plastic tubes on a roof top or extra room in the backyard. With the proper processing equipment, sewer waste from your toilet and CO2 from you heating system, you could have fuel grade diesel fuel for your car. Of course, your car would be a plug in variety that you would run to work on the battery power and on long trips, run on your home grown diesel.
Of course, the cost of all of this might be out of reach for most of us.
The Valcent production method is talking about 100,000 gallons of fuel grade diesel per acre.
-Can you imagine how laborious and energy intensive it will be to dry out that pond scum enough to be processed (refined) into petroleum byproducts
Lots of enthusiasm just won’t do it. Valcent has a good system but try covering millions of acres with it.
I would think these projects are better suited to regions with a year round growing season.
Algal Fuels and Massive Scales
Guest post by John Goetz
I keep an active watch of the news for progress being made in the areas of renewable and alternative energy sources. One area that has caught my eye is algal fuel (biofuel produced by algae). One company that has been in the news lately is Sapphire Energy, which claims to be able to produce ASTM compliant 91-octane biogasoline. Sapphire Energy says their technology “requires only sunlight, CO2 and non-potable water – and can be produced at massive scale on non-arable land”.
I am not trying to pick on any one solution or Sapphire Energy in particular. I simply wondered how massive a scale of CO2 and non-arable land is needed to make a noticeable dent in our gasoline demand.
First, how much CO2 do we need? The IPCC guidelines for calculating emissions require that an oxidation factor of 0.99 be applied to gasoline’s carbon content to account for a small portion of the fuel that is not oxidized into CO2. To calculate the CO2 emissions from a gallon of fuel, the carbon emissions are multiplied by the ratio of the molecular weight of CO2 to the molecular weight of carbon, or 44/12. Thus, the IPCC says the CO2 emissions from a gallon of gasoline = 2,421 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) = 8,788 grams = 8.8 kg/gallon = 19.4 pounds/gallon.
Now let’s assume Sapphire Energy simply reverses the process and consumes the CO2 to produce gasoline. In other words, we take 19.4 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere for every gallon of gasoline we produce. This seems like is a nice “carbon neutral” process.
What is the cubic volume of atmosphere required to make 1 gallon of gas? Let’s assume for the moment an efficiency factor of 100%, meaning our process will consume 100% of the atmospheric CO2 it is fed. This is unrealistic, but it is unrealistic on the “optimistic” side. According to the EPA, one cubic meter of CO2 gas weighs 0.2294 lbs. At an atmospheric concentration level of 385ppm, one cubic meter of atmosphere contains 0.000088319 lbs of CO2. Thus, 19.4 / .000088319 = 219658 cubic meters (yes, I am ignoring the atmospheric density gradient as one moves from the ground upward, but hang with me). This equates to roughly 4553 gallons of gasoline per cubic kilometer of air.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, US gasoline consumption is currently averaging (4-week rolling) 9.027 million barrels of gasoline per day, or about 379 million gallons (42 gallons per barrel). Thus, to completely replace US gasoline consumption, Sapphire Energy would need to “scrub”, at 100% efficiency, just over 83000 cubic kilometers of air per day. Certainly there is plenty of air available - this volume represents less than 0.02% of the volume of air in the first 1 km of atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is an enormous amount to process each day.
Of course, Sapphire Energy’s near-term goals are much more modest. As CEO Jason Pyle told Biomass Magazine, “the company is currently deploying a three-year pilot process with the goal of opening a 153 MMgy (10,000 barrel per day) production facility by 2011 at a site yet to be determined.” Using my fuzzy math above, that equates to a minimum of 92 cubic kilometers of air a day. Still seems like a lot.
So where will all of the CO2 come from?
Presumably the answer is coal-fired power plants. But let’s see if that makes sense. According to Science Daily, the top twelve CO2-emitting power plants in the US have total emissions of 236.8 million tons annually, or 1.3 billion pounds per day. Now, if that can be converted completely to gasoline, it would amount to 67 million gallons per day, or roughly 1/6 of the daily gasoline consumption.
(Science Daily refers to the twelve as the “dirty dozen,” which I found somewhat humorous given that CO2 is colorless and odorless, and is presumably needed to sustain some forms of life. But then again, so is dirt.)
Sounds great, except that a lot of land is needed to grow all that algae. According to Wikipedia, between 5,000 and 20,000 gallons of biodiesel can be produced per acre from algae per year. Assume for the moment that biogasoline can be produced at the same rate per acre. If we attempted to produce 67 million gallons of gasoline from our “dirty-dozen” every day, we would need between 1.2M and 4.9M acres of land to do this on. The low-end of the scale puts the area needed at more than that of Rhode Island. The high-end adds in Connecticut.
I kind of doubt there is that much land around each of the dirty dozen facilities. This means the gas would have to be sent by pipeline to a giant algae field. Given our ability to pipe oil and natural gas all over the place, sending CO2 across the country via pipeline is probably doable. There may also be plenty of unused or abandoned land (think abandoned oil fields) available to produce the gasoline. Nevertheless, the production scale and transportation logistics required to make this a viable alternative do indeed look massive.
So while the technology holds promise at the micro-scale, it remains to be seen what can actually be done at a scale that matters.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/algal-fuels-and-massive-scales/
Just thinking here.
Could ocean plankton, and things like the “red tide” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide - be harvested and used?
Actually, algae have far higher "fat" content than oilseeds. That, plus their much faster growth cycle leads them to be far more productive of "bio" fat than soybeans, sunflowers, rapeseed, and others.
Lots of enthusiasm just won’t do it. Valcent has a good system but try covering millions of acres with it.
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Can you imagine the capital costs of building all these outdoor vertical algae rigs??? That’s why one has to recognize the genius of mother nature. Nature accumulates all those aquatic swampy plants millions of years ago and compresses and ages them into carbon and hydrocarbon
Good luck processing that wet goopy slimy algae in petro byproducts
No I can’t and cost seems to be the word that no one wants to utter.
The original oil industry was based on turning saltwater algae into biodiesel and it was successful for thousands of years. Only whales did the harvesting and man just harpooned the resulting blob of energy. So your hypothesis has already been proven wrong. Whaling is obsolete technology now but it had a much longer run than drilling for petroleum.
70% of Earth's sun absorbing surface is saltwater free for the taking and we only need to use a few percent of it to fully replace the petroleum industry. Farming bioengineered super-algae in the open ocean is a very promising direction. And because it forms a CO2 closed loop we can use it without altering the atmosphere.
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