Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished..... 
If you want ON or OFF the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST jut FReepmail me..... This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days.....
Plus, a couple of ironies: Government research investment truly seems to have paid off, developing a potential process to free us from the Mideast and, secondly, this does nothing to reduce our so-called 'carbon footprint' (its product is hydrocarbons, regardless its source).
Another irony: They seem to have set out in 2009 to develop an 'algae-to-natural gas' process and discovered 'algae-to-oil' as an unexpected byproduct.
If they can get the cost down, refineries can go full cycle on-site, water being the only real raw material (if I understand it correctly). "Byproducts" & "waste" yet to be determined. Hopefully this stuff has the energy of petroleum-based gasoline.
I'll leave the rest of the speculation to others here.
Peak oil? Yeah, right; so much for that. Peak lithium? Absolutely.
Rust Belt cities on the Great Lakes have access to a lot of fresh water.
Turning “pea soup” into oil sounds like a good use for pea soup. I wonder if they will have to exclude ham from the recipe?
algae — it’s green energy.
It’s better than burning corn and driving up the cost of livestock feed and tacos.
Now to produce enough algae to make it economically doable — that’s the question.
If not will kudzu work???
To make this feasible on any significant scale,,,,how big are the algae ponds going to have to be? What’s the growth/turnover rate of the algae?
“In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.”
So in this process more potential energy from oil is produced than energy consumed?
I wonder what the EROEI on algae is.
What investment of man hours, raw material and energy has to be put into each barrel of oil from this method?
I could get my 13 year old to power the house with a stationary bike generator, but then I would have to feed him. Not worth it.
Well, is this cost-effective (or could it be made to be) with shale oil?
If not, then it stands little chance of replacing that source. No matter how “green” the biological source of petroleum may be, there is a cost-benefit ratio that has to be respected.
This is an interesting way of turning solar energy into a usable fuel.
Tens of millions of acres of algae pools to produce significant amounts of oil, not likely to be competitive with drilled wells.
Thanks FO the post.
By th way, this wouldn have to be excepted.
Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished..... If you want ON or OFF the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST jut FReepmail me..... This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days.....Not true.
While I am not suggesting truth in the global warming / carbon output scam, the algae to oil plans result if far less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
The end product is essentially the same, but to grow the algae, it removes CO2 to grow. So what is released is carbon that was already in the air, not captured underground.
This isn’t activism.
Maybe this is proof that during the dinosaur age oil was created from huge amounts of algae that grew during that time were covered over and buried while other plant growth turned to coal.
The US Dept of Agriculture currently pays BILLIONS out via the Crop Reduction Program (CRP). This program pays farmers with land that could be farmed, to not farm.
I am of the opinion, that a significant reduction of our foreign oil dependence along with an improvement in the cash flows for farms could be achieved if the USDA would require the production of X numbers of gallons of algae in order to qualify for Y number of acres in the CRP program.
Further, tax breaks could be provided to ag co-ops that build algae collection and process to oil facilities that could then be shipped via trains to refineries.
Growing algae can be done in tanks, in ponds, etc. Farmers might even be able to process the algae into bio-diesel for their own farm equipment thus reducing their costs. The algae can then be sold to the co-op, the co-op collect and process into oil and the oil sold to refineries. In essence, boot strapping a whole ag industry that would be a whole lot more efficient that trying to turn food (corn) into fuel (ethanol).
This may explain Abiotic oil theories that have long been laughed at by enviromentalmidgets.
Good. Now make several million gallons of it per day. Oh, and keep the price per gallon at $2.50 or less.
Good news everybody.
But I do have a few questions:
1. What are the resource requirements and energy inputs into growing the algae?
2. What are the resource requirements and energy inputs into reacting the algae into oil?
3. Does the energy output from burning the oil exceed the energy inputs into the total process?
4. Is the growth and reaction processes expandable and sustainable?
5. Are there any undesirable byproducts of the growth and reactions processes?
That is all.
Bump for later