Posted on 08/09/2008 6:52:41 AM PDT by LomanBill
[It will take more, much, much, more than a ray of hope for algae to account for even a tiny percentage of fuel usage in the U.S.]
The longest journey begins with a single step.
[unless one thinks that a thousand square miles of land will be devoted to algae growing in the near future.]
Ever been to the Mojave?
How near that future is depends upon the motivation to make it happen.
How about a thousand square miles of open ocean? It's free, algae floats, there are fewer clouds far from land, and fish are willing to harvest it. Rather than going for optimum greenhouse conditions which is capital intensive, it makes sense to go for volume. This is really how traditional farming works. Let mother nature do most of the work. Farmers deal with weeds and disease in the open successfully. We're giving up on the open algae farm approach too quickly. Petroleum could be completely replaced using about 3% of Earth's ocean surface.
People for the
Ethical
Treatment of
Algae
“There are three things which are required..”
Your “three things” are dead Jim.
Lurking’
After removing the oil, we can eat the rest.
It’s the new Soylent Green.
>>It’s the new Soylent Green.
I’d rather eat Hodges ;-)
Not impossible or improbable at all. A thousand square miles is really quite a small area. Given what the US did during World War II in expanding production, all that is lacking is focused political will.
Hodges? I don’ got to munch on no stinkeen Hodges.
Nah--the writer's main job is probably writing MSDS sheets.
I am big on algae, because it beats all other alternatives hands down.
To start with, very little about it needs to be “high tech” or expensive. Using microorganisms is extremely efficient. Think beer and bread and red tides.
It is tremendously accelerated by adding expensive-to-dispose-of-otherwise “waste” gases that are produced everywhere: carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides. So right off the bat you make a lot of money instead of spending it.
South of the Mason-Dixon production is almost year around. I would like to point out that the algae plant shown is far more technical than it has to be.
About 50%, by weight, of some algae is vegetable oil. If you just mechanically squeeze it, you get out most of the oil. Then you use the squeezed algae for high quality animal fodder, *lowering* the price of animal fodder and thus, milk and meat.
The vegetable oil is heated to about 120F, which cooks off any water in it, then it is mixed with some alcohol, either ethanol or wood alcohol, methanol, and lye, which is a catalyst. Then filter, and bingo, you get biodiesel, ready to put in a biodiesel engine.
Oddly enough, it helps to add 1% petroleum diesel to biodiesel, as a preservative.
Diesel engines are scalable, which means that they can be made from small size to large enough to power ships. The technology is here and perfected, and there are lots of diesel vehicles throughout the world. They need minor modification to run on biodiesel, but that’s about it.
Diesel engines are also powerful. They are strong engines with good acceleration. So to heck with cars made of recycled beer cans, deathtraps only large enough for a short person under a hundred pounds.
So using algae to make fuel means that we can make a lot of money doing it, use existing technology and engines, lower the cost of pollution controls, milk and meat, make biodiesel on small or large scale.
And the most important thing is that we can have more, with better lives and greater prosperity, and to heck with those sniveling nannies who want us to do with less, pay a lot more, and suffer. “For our own good”. Yeah, sod them and their socialist religion.
The enviro-whacko libs would go ballistic.
Go a little beyond the oil fields and you've solved the illegal immigration problem too. Brilliant!
Give me liberty or give me algea? No, my great hope is that we Americans will be allowed to use our own natural resources(drill for oil).
[South of the Mason-Dixon production is almost year around...
{snip}
So using algae to make fuel means that we can make a lot of money doing it, use existing technology and engines, lower the cost of pollution controls, milk and meat, make biodiesel on small or large scale.]
Thank you for the informative post.
Sounds like you have some first hand expertise - are you involved in production?
>>The enviro-whacko libs would go ballistic.
Good. Maybe their heads will explode on impact.
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