[count-your-change]

Having been in any industry, and the oil and gas industry in particular, you know income is only half the story. The other half is production costs. A $14,000 or $140,000 income per acre is meaningless if the costs of obtaining that income is equal to or larger than the income itself.
Farmers can earn a profit on low income crops when their costs of production are low too so comparing hay or poppies to algae really doesn't work if algae oil production costs are unknown.
No one discusses the cost of production of algae oil because it is going to be so high in comparison to production of oil from other sources that it isn't a serious competitor.
Like the 300 mile/gallon carburetor the “algae will replace imported oil” process just needs a little tweaking to work, tweaking like vastly reducing production costs.
Then there is opportunity costs, the same amount of money going into oil shale and/or coal would produce more oil at less costs and the country has plenty of both. Short and long term.
Algae is like opera, it's even worse than it sounds.

[LomanBill]

[Farmers can earn a profit on low income crops when their costs of production are low too so comparing hay or poppies to algae really doesn't work if algae oil production costs are unknown.]

 

Larry, you seem to have addressed some of the issues raised by CYC?

[muffaletaman]

Well, growing algae is not much different than farming catfish or crawfish. Water plus sunlight and food. The sun and nature do all the heavy lifting. We do have the up-front infrastructure costs, but if implemented on a cookie-cutter massive scale, these costs plummet, and being what should be long-lived assets, payback will be much less than service life.

This is an element of transitioning from purely fossil to fossil and reasonable renewable. We have plenty of oil - gas - for at least a century (not to mention coal), BUT this is the century to make the transition for these liquid / pipeline fuels...

By 2100 or so, we ought to be in a different, secure, long-term balanced source-sink energy production mode, taking that off the table for the balance of mankind’s tenure - as long as it may be.

Live long and prosper!