Ultimate oil resource?

Yup, this is the next wave...and maybe the right way instead of the knee-jerk(ethanol) way.

100,000 gallons of algae oil per acre which must then be refined. Wonder how much diesel that actually translates into.

The other thing that worries me a little is having the patents in the hands of one company.

Still... it looks like it's worth perusing.

Interestingly, this idea could be implemented very quickly, and would not take decades.

I could live with the Canadian patent at least until I start seeing Canadians flying airplanes into our buildings and, in my estimation, we are now dealing with an emergency situation. Prices for gasoline and diesel fuel have gone over the point which will shut the American economy down.

If it can actually become economically feasible, it seems like a good idea to me.
dad, are you saying that the company that did the research, did the work to create the process, and actually created the process should not be allowed to profit from their work?

Ethanol is meant as an oxygenate for the benefit of the Californians. My own view is that air pollution is now something like a 90-10 or 95-5 proposition with five or ten percent of the cars causing 90% of the pollution and at least on the East coast we don't have millionaires driving old 60s cars around with Holley carburators because they think it's "cool".

**** California; there's no possible way to justify putting corn in our gasoline for their benefit while people in the world are starving.

Moreover the food situation in the world can and likely will get massively worse than it is and American should stand ready to feed the entire world if necessary. Particularly in China with its paleolithic agricultural practices, there could be a food system collapse in the near future. Those red sunsets now seen on the American west coast are basically Chinese topsoil in the air.

Sounds like a feasilble way to produce biodiesel. Weve been making our own with an esterification setup in one of our equipment buildings. However , weve been using all wste oil (mostly cooking) and now even those sources are being apportioned among several producers. So, Im for any new feedstock ideas.

So according to the production rate, (100K bbl/acre/YEAR)this would never become a major percentage of our daily needs but every little trick helps.

Im gonna go out and superfertilize our pond so it becomes anoxic with lingulae.

Actually gunga, this reproduces the entire environmental sequence of the Jurassic period

This is very interesting technology.

How much of the research is government funded?

There a are a lot of different possible scenarios.
I was thinking of a situation where one company holds the whole country to ransom. Which is basically what the saudies are doing now anyway so...

Its probable that there will be many patents for usable algae

Its also probable that several companies could do the research so there may be several firms with available licenses.

This is more "proof of concept" than entirely new research> Creating an ester from a fatty acid is very old technology, as is growing pond scum. Im sure that this application is but one of a multitude different ways to produce these algae. I could see using a "salt pan lake' like we do out near San Francisco or they have in Turkey to produce salt. They use large (almost estuary sized) salt lakes that develop their own unique algae which grow like crazy until a certain salinity is reached. Well all those could be skimmed of algae using micropore technology and it would be like sucking **** from you septic tank. Then the stuff could be ground, heated and esterified .

Everyone who develops new concept tech is always at risk of having a better, simpler way of doing it.

Don't see where or how you get that or why anybody would bother with corn at 30 gallons per acre/year if that's the case. What it sounds more like is that if we put this project on a war footing involving large areas of desert in the Southwest, it could likely supply all of our needs.

Water access might be a problem in desert areas.

Although water loss within a closed system would be minimal there would still need to be some top up.

there are several companies jumping into this already... one of the biggest is Solix....it's the wave of the future IMO if the big oil people and their lackeys in Washington don't do something to squash it... this corn bio diesel nonsense is just that.... and it's already driving food costs up...the brazilian sugar cane model is more efficient... but algae is a real practical and cheap solution we can start farily quickly.... gungasnake and i agree on something 100%....wow...

I'd like to hear more opinion from farmerman...

I was listening to an NPR show devoted to this technology and one of thing mentioned was that in order to begin refining the thicker crude that apparently is about to be all that's left... the refineries would have to be retro fitted to do this and the expense would be tremendous but by mixing regular crude with algae produced oil it would "thin it out" and the need to retro fit the current refineries would be eliminated, saving the oil companies literally billions and so it is thought that the big ol companies might be supportive of this technology since it might be good for their immediate profit model.

another useful feature... and this is from the Solix website....


Algae thrive on a high concentration of carbon dioxide. And nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant of power plants, is a nutrient for the algae. Algae production facilities can thus be fed exhaust gases from fossil fuel power plants, and even breweries, to significantly increase productivity and clean up the air.

See how a concept can quickly morph into something else? Thats neat Bear. Yeh, agreeing with gunga, whod ever guess. well, lets not get too far


!00 000 barrels per acre per year divide that into our present kero and diesel requirements, were gonna need a lot of area. Also you can reduce the plastics from crude requirements in feedstock, because algae fatty acid to ester can also be used as a feedstock for many plastics. (Except for the vinyl chloride based and styrene based ones),

I just dont, from a gut level believe that this production can serve our full needs without some other means of production such as using actual estuaries in tropical and desrt areas.

Also, a production need for this is
1heat at about 130C
2A methoxide (an alcohol and hydroxide reactant)


To produce the diesel is gonna take a fixed titremetric reaction of the alcohol based alkali hydroxide. So it takes about 1/3 amount of methanol (which, as a coal derivative, isnt food robbing . It could also use ethanol from garbage or switchgrass or almost any biological wste material )
I agree that the corn ethanol is unwarranted and more energy intensive. dadpad was looking at the yearly tree clippings as a form of ethanol feedstock. In MAine, they shred entire apruce trees to make pellets for heaters . ALcohol can be maded from these trees also. All the alcohol needed will IMHO, limit the production of the diesel as much as the low production rate of the algae. HOWEVER, none of these are insurmountable we can adapt. We have the technology.

AS long as we get our heads out of our asses and quit building all these corn ethanol plants. I feel that they are a scam

gunga

I think that weve missed a couple zeros, you dont mean 30 g/A/yr, you mean about 3000 gal/acre/crop we now have short season corns and ryes so youd get 2 crops a year(so wed have 6000 gal /acre/yr I believe I could be short on that though because they use the whole corn plant for ethanol stock) . Fertilizer needs and transportation needs have been factored in and thats where some of the costs of ethanol begin to escalate.

farmerman at the risk of appearing like a dumb ass you're talking over my head. plain stupid musician english please. I'm very interested in what you have to say.

to make the diesel, youve gotta take the algae "mayonnaise" and separate out the waxy ****, which is glycerine. They do this by mixing the whole "algae shake" with a very hot solution of alcohol and "lye" (A very good comparison of this rectant is JAnitor in a Drum)

SO you heat the mix and add the janitor in a drum, and that will, under agitation , cause the waxy **** to rise to the top in a separate layer. Then you separate the two fractions and the bottom is the "Complex algae ester" (Thats the diesel fuel) and the top is a glycerine (which can be used in making soaps, candles, KY, you name it)

The chemistry is pretty strait forward. You could probably burn the filtered algae mix directly but youd need some kind of badass filter in nthe diesel engine, (like those green -hippie buses where they burn straight french fry oil).

SO the whole point is that you need abot 1/3 of the mix to be an alcohol anyway.
Im dead set against corn based alcohol cause its so fuggin stupid. It interferes with all kinds of food chains, its more expensive than petroleum, it is water intensive, and it wont really help much. If alcohol has gotta be made it can be made out of friggin garbage and tree branches and switchgrass. Even Brazil doesnt use whole sugra cane, they use the second press stuff where thers a huge amount of sugar and cellulose in the cane and , after drying the pressed cane is used to fuel the distilleries. Thats waaay smarter than corn ethanol. Why didnt we even consider using sugar beets or mangles or sorghum or switchgrass?

Wait until the people from PETA (People for the Ethical treatment od Algea) hear about this. They will raise one heckuva fuss. Killing all that algea just so Bush can ride in his plane...