Posted on 08/09/2008 6:52:41 AM PDT by LomanBill
A modern society such as that in the United States requires personal transportation — cargo trucks, planes, and cars — to make a market economy work. Any serious effort to move our country to mass transportation, such as trains and buses, for everyone and everything all the time — or even most of the time — would destroy not only our economy, but the American way of life. To provide our personal transportation for the foreseeable future, the United States needs oil or an oil substitute.
Electric vehicles, the proposed solution by many for America’s transportation problems, have serious drawbacks generally ignored by a pliant news media. Besides being automotive weenies, their batteries don’t hold a sufficient charge for many everyday trips, and require hours to recharge — unless you want to charge them quickly (thus shortening their life span) and pay the $3,000-5,000 price for replacement batteries. One might also ask: “Where is the electricity to come from if electric cars become ubiquitous?” It is estimated that it would require a dozen 1,000-megawatt power plants to replace the petroleum fuels in Los Angeles alone.
The “hydrogen economy” is a total farce. Hydrogen-powered cars are about as practical as licorice submarines.* Their only reason for being is to prove to a naïve public that the manufacturer is in on being “Green.” No, we need oil or something like it for the foreseeable future.
President Bush, with the backing of many Republicans and most Democrats, claimed to answer this need by requiring the use of billions of gallons of ethanol and biodiesel. Made by a laborious distillation process from corn and soybeans, they are on the market solely owing to mandates and subsidies. In fact, because making ethanol is so energy intensive, debates are still ongoing over whether ethanol creates more energy when it is burned than is used in its creation. Of course, burning our food supply is proving (as we, and most everyone who knew anything about the topic, predicted)† not to be a solution either. While any positive energy output from ethanol production is still hotly debated, the resultant higher prices and food shortages are not in question, as evidenced by the “tortilla riots” in Mexico over the past year.
Having been burnt by the ethanol fiasco, which has caused great misallocations of resources that will come to haunt farmers and entrepreneurs who have invested in ethanol plants, one tends to be cautious when another bioscheme becomes the rage. And algae production is fast becoming just such a rage. There are, however, major differences.
• Algae can thrive in fresh, brackish, or seawater — and very little of that is required.
• There is no need for any soil, much less good soil, as algae grow hydroponically.
• With more than 20,000 known varieties of algae, species can be chosen for high lipid content (e.g., for diesel fuel) or high sugar content for distillation purposes.
• In desert climes it can be harvested on a day-by-day basis because it grows so quickly.
All it takes is sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to provide the energy for arguably the most complex process we see in nature: photosynthesis.
In its most elementary depiction, photosynthesis is a process where light energy converts carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and carbohydrates such as sugars, starches, and cellulose. It, in effect, converts the electromagnetic energy of sunlight into chemical energy that can be used as food to sustain the animal world, or as a fuel such as wood to provide warmth or for other energy requirements.
Nature isn’t in a big hurry to carry out this process, nor is she particularly worried about efficiency. As Howard Hayden points out in his very readable and informative book The Solar Fraud, New England forests convert only about 0.06 percent of the incident solar energy into chemical energy. Corn fares a bit better. Iowa, with an average insolation (the rate at which the sun’s radiation strikes a surface) of 170 watts per square meter, produces about 150 bushels of corn per acre per year, with an energy content of 404 megajoules (MJ) per bushel if you burn the corn directly as fuel. (Gasoline, by comparison, has approximately 121 MJ per gallon.) This works out to a sun-to-corn efficiency of 0.28 percent — unless you make ethanol out of it. Then you only convert 0.14 percent of the incoming solar energy to usable chemical energy.
Fortunately, the soft-energy folks are right in thinking that there is a lot of solar energy beating down on planet Earth, else there would be precious little plant or animal life. In Albuquerque where the average insolation is 240 watts per square meter, the equivalent of the energy in 254,000 gallons of gasoline falls on each acre over a year’s time. Yes, there’s plenty of sunlight; utilizing it economically is the problem.
It seems obvious that a major problem in obtaining chemical energy from plants is raising the percentage of solar energy that is converted to a form we can use for something other than working on our tans. Indeed, this is what the proponents of growing algae as a feedstock for biofuels have in mind. The first to develop an efficient and reliable process to grow algae at super-fast rates is likely to win a multi-billion-dollar prize, along with the gratitude of millions of Americans. Let us take a look at the present state of affairs as pertains to the conversion of algae into products that can be used for transportation fuels.
To create diesel fuel or gasoline from algae, the oils must be extracted from the algae — it is one of the major cost factors in the production of algae-based fuels. Three processes are under consideration:
• Pressing with an “expeller,” a process that can extract 70-75 percent of the oil.
• Use of hexane as a solvent to leach out the oil, which, along with pressing can extract more than 95 percent of the oil; however, there are inherent dangers here due to the volatility of hexane solvent.
• Supercritical fluid extraction — the use of liquefied CO2 under pressure to act as a solvent to extract the oil. Almost all of the oil can be extracted using this process alone, but special equipment is necessary to maintain pressures and temperatures.
Oils from the algae are then “cracked” in a manner similar to petroleum whereby hydrogen is used to break the long hydrocarbon chains, creating what is called “green crude.” The end product is crude oil that is almost chemically indistinguishable from light, sweet crude oil, except that it is green in color.
This green crude does not have the drawbacks of biodiesel, which needs special care in its storage, transport, and use (being no more than high-grade plant or vegetable oil, it solidifies when it gets cold), and ethanol, which, too, cannot be transported using traditional pipelines, along with its numerous other problems.
The production of this product is also carbon neutral — the outcome that is sought for by worried environmentalists in biodiesel and ethanol production. Except for possible carbon dioxide created by the production of hydrogen for the cracking process (depending on what energy source is used in the hydrogen’s production), the carbon dioxide created by burning the products formed from the green crude — gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, methane gas, etc. — cannot be greater than the carbon dioxide yanked by the algae from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.
The main sticking point in creating green crude from algae lies in producing enough high-energy-content algae to feed our country’s energy appetite. Can companies overcome the obstacles? You be the judge.
Growing algae in and of itself is no trick; varieties of it will literally grow in almost any type of brine or even wastewater. However, growing, or culturing, a single, desired alga variety is more difficult. If algae are grown in open ponds, they are susceptible to being killed off by invasive algae and bacteria. In open ponds, fluctuating temperatures and pH levels also can kill off algae. Strains of algae that can fend for themselves in an open pond may not be strains that have optimal energy-producing qualities. Closed growing systems also have their problems: electing and “domesticating” superior species is proving to be difficult, as is introducing enough carbon dioxide (plant food) into the enclosed systems.
Even once the algae are grown, commercially viable amounts of available green crude are not a done deal. None of the proposed processes has undergone the rigors of commercial/industrial production. Economical methods to harvest the algae and extract the lipids or other carbohydrates have not been developed, and factors influencing any resultant fuel quality and properties are not yet well understood.
The obstacles notwithstanding, a survey of the literature indicates that there is a great deal of activity among those who believe the pros outweigh the cons in the development equation. Indeed, one commentator observed that companies are springing up on a near-daily basis, driven by both the ultimate prize and the fact that the capital investment for a start-up company is low as compared to wresting oil from shale formations or converting coal to liquid fuel. Examples of companies active in developing algae-to-fuel technology are noted below.
Using triangular containers termed “photobioreactors” (PBRs), inventor Jim Sears brings together algae, water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight in order to “farm” his crop of biofuel feedstocks. Sears, of Ft. Collins, Colorado, has already learned that this simple formula isn’t quite as simple as it may initially appear. The high-oil-content algae species his company has selected is finicky about water temperature, and the normal amount of CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t sufficient to achieve maximum growth. He thinks algae farms will have to be located near power plants — although the problem of separating CO2 from other stack gases has proven to be a sticky one. At least there shouldn’t be any shortage of CO2, as a 1,000-megawatt coal-fired plant produces 360 pounds of the gas every second.
Solix CEO Doug Henston predicts algae would produce 10,000 gallons of oil per acre, per year. Currently soy produces some 50 gallons of oil per acre; canola, 150 gallons; and palm, 650 gallons. As vegetable oil typically has 94-95 percent the heat content of diesel fuel, 10,000 gallons would produce some 1.4 million MJ of energy per year — a whopping 4.5 percent of the incident solar energy and some 75 times the conversion rate of an oak tree.
Henston reports that his company is still in the development mode and plans a larger research project to be completed late summer 2008, which will tap into the New Belgium Brewing Company as a source of growth-enhancing CO2. Solix is financed by private equity, with $5 million having been raised and plans to raise another $10 million during 2008.
In his “vertical greenhouse” near El Paso, Texas, plant physiologist and Valcent Products CEO Glen Kertz has developed a unique method of exposing algae to sunlight in order to produce the greatest amount of biomass in the shortest period of time. The device, known as a High Density Vertical Bioreactor (HDVB), or “VertiGro” system, uses a series of transparent horizontal chambers (reactors) connected in series so the algae solution is exposed to sunlight while flowing down after having been pumped up from a reservoir. The process is then repeated. Being a closed-loop system, almost no water is used except that required to feed the algae. Kertz maintains that algae is the fastest-growing plant on Earth, and in some species as much as 50 percent of the “body weight” is vegetable oil (lipids). Moreover, he claims that by selecting the right species of algae, Valcent will be able to tailor the carbon chains for those most effective in producing a menu of transportation products such as diesel or jet fuel.
Kertz is even more enthusiastic than Henston in his estimation of yields: 20,000 gallons of oil from an acre of pond, ostensibly much more from the VertiGro system. He calculates that an area one-tenth the size of New Mexico in algae production would meet the fuel demands for the entire United States.
Scottsdale-based PetroSun, already a player in the oil and natural-gas industries, plans to open a 1,100-acre saltwater open-pond system with 94 five-acre and 63 10-acre ponds. Located on the Texas Gulf coast, it plans to extract oil on-site and then barge or truck the raw oil to a biodiesel refinery.
The company plans additional algae sites and extraction plants in Alabama, Arizona, and Louisiana.
The interest in algae-to-oil is certainly not limited to the United States. Prototype production is underway in Israel and New Zealand, with the aforementioned PetroSun planning facilities in Mexico, Brazil, and Australia. At this point in time all of these plants have one thing in common: they are not yet producing any fuel. It may well come to pass — and there is certainly “a lot of attempting going on out there” — but the process may well prove to be more difficult than it seems to be at first glance.
One very encouraging sign, however, is the lack of interest the federal government is showing in algae-to-oil production. The energy legislation of the federal government — particularly with Democrats in control of the House and Senate — is focused on those technologies that don’t have a chance of producing significant energy. The politicians are buying off special-interest groups that can’t legitimately compete in the energy market. In light of this, it may well be that algae could play a key role in our energy future.
Great post bookmark, thanks! And thanks for working in the “evil” oil industry so I can enjoy a modern and independent lifestyle.
Yes, when I was in SD a couple months ago, I listened to farmers in a cafe talking about how some of the community members had been talked into mortgaging their property to “Get in on the boom”.””
I live in a farming community and no farmer I know did that when most of the shares sell at 10K/.
Get rid of the Federal mandate / subsidy and Ethanol demand goes “poof”.
Let the free market decide.””
Problem is that every business with more than 50 employees receives incentives from either the feds, state or local governments. Check into local manufacturing in every small to large city across the nation and you find incentives have been paid to attract and retain businesses. Why do you want to single out the capturing of solar energy by corn famrers as the source of evil incentives unless you have middle east oil interests?
[I live in a farming community and no farmer I know did that when most of the shares sell at 10K/.]
Yep. From the sound of it, some folks had apparently been talked into literally betting the farm on ethanol.
I hope it doesn’t end badly for them; but Leadfield picks and shovels is what it brought to mind.
Not today but China and India are growing and upsetting the oil demand curve and pollution output. It is strategic to develop new cost effective emission neutral replacement technologies. I want to preserve the American way of life.
The reason America is the wealthiest country is because of our investments in new technologies. This is usually driven by military spending because initially only the military can afford new technologies like $100/gallon algae jet fuel. We should cut back on the social spending money pit and invest more in new energy technologies without waiting for a loaded gun to be pointed at us.
We're still riding the technology wave from WWII which brought America great wealth but that wave is 60 years old now. Will it take war with China before we get off our duffs and get serious about our developing oil problem?
[Why do you want to single out the capturing of solar energy by corn famrers as the source of evil incentives unless you have middle east oil interests?]
Because it makes both gas and food more expensive?
Even before ethanol, I never cared for the subsidization of Corn when that meant corn syrup was dumped/hidden in foods to utilize the excess productivity.
Also, the incentives to keep business local is usually absorbed by the community in which the business exists - the community receives a direct benefit there.
Federal mandates and subsidies are not local. I’d be happy if there were NO Federaly mandated subsidies.
The free market should be allowed to work.
Only if it's transparent, and has a large sun-facing surface area relative to its size.
Here's my imaginary version. In the the raised center a field is a sealed algae production unit. This will need to have a fairly significant surface area to produce a significant quantity of algae, but the production there will only be a small fraction of the total.
Algae from that plant will be continuously harvested live, mixed with water, and piped to the end of some spiraling troughs. Similar to what you suggested, the troughs would have CO2 bubbled through them.
There would be a slow but continuous flow of water through the troughs. The diluted algae would grow in the sun and thus become more concentrated when the reached the outer edges of the troughs were they could be harvested. The water flow would have to be fast enough to keep the algae flowing, and the troughs would probably need periodic cleaning even so, but if the algae were only in the trough for a day, I wouldn't think foreign algae would be too much of a problem; they would just get swept up and processed along with all the other trough algae.
I take you think CO2 will be a problem sometime in the future. If so, why?
Right now the technologies we already have are not being fully utilized such as: reprocessing nuclear fuel, using sewage to produce methane gas for electrical generation, solar hot water heaters to provide space heating and hot water. Each one of these would reduce really harmful emissions and reduce (not eliminate) the need for more power plants. These are proven technologies that are available today and would also free up more coal and CNG to be used for motor fuels.
Research into new energy technology is going on and some of it will prove to be impractical or only practical and economical under some circumstances, like wind power.
So I’ll ask: What advantage will algae oil offer in the foreseeable future that is not available already by other means and at lower cost?
Turning coal into gasoline is a far more difficult and expensive process than squeezing fat out of algae. Yes, there will be some economies of scale for coal and oil shale, but algae farming is technologically much simpler "Even sewage to methane gas/oil has the benefit of turning a waste stream into several usable products and there is no shortage of feed stock."
Actually, there is a huge shortage of raw material. Sewage to methane is useful for places like feedlots, where the amount of "raw material" is high, and the need for enery low--and even then it is marginally economical.
"Can you think of one advantage algae oil has that does not exist at lower cost in the use something else?"
Doesn't add fossil CO2 to the atmosphere.
(Law of the Sea Treaty)
Even better, put it inside pipes running vertically in old warehouses. You could use the CO2 from an ethanol plant, and the food source from digested manure outflow.
The methane could be used to provide heat and light for the algae. The ethanol could be used to transesterify the algae oil to fuel.
See post 17 and 60 for examples.
Hello fellow Iowan. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Given that the Valcent process is completely experimental, I suspect that the error bars on the estimate are far larger than for "coal-to-fuel".
"True, the process is more complicated than squeezing algae but we do have a supply of coal on hand for hundreds of years and a process with a proven track record."
I'm not opposed to coal-to-fuel, by any means. I favor ANYTHING that increase the energy supply. But eventually we "will" run out of coal. If we run out of sunlight, we've got a bigger problem.
"Sewage, as in human wastes, might be in short supply around feed lots but the cities have a constant supply and plenty of volume. Probably cheap if anyone wants it."
Sorry, but here I AM skeptical. Exactly how much methane production can be gotten from, say, Pittsburg??? I frankly doubt that it is enough to matter.
"If low CO2 production is only advantage to algae oil then there is no advantage as CO2 is a fine fertilizer for our crops and forests. And the plants that became coal took lots of CO2 from the atmosphere so turning coal into fuel is just returning CO2 from whence it came. More CO2, more plants for food for animals and humans, greener earth, all good."
You asked for an advantage, and I gave it. The people pushing the "global warming agenda" don't buy any of the above. I happen not to be one of those.
"If you think algae oil is the coming thing PetroSun’s stock just shot up to $.15 from $.14/share. And Valcent’s stock is a whopping $.50/share. Do you suppose there's a reason investor aren't snapping up these bargains?"
See my first point about the overall uncertainty about costs and profits.
>>>Only if it’s transparent,
Yep, that’s what I had in mind.
>>and has a large sun-facing surface area
>>relative to its size.
I had in mind large clear tubes which rotated.
>>We won’t have to imagine it; we will live it.
That’s the spirit ;-)
Thumbs Up!
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