Algae fuel, impressive, it seems.

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D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

MSimon wrote:
D Tibbets wrote:About a year ago there was a reference (from PhysicsNews?) where on a small scale, alge was grown with waste heat and CO2 from a coal plant. The alge was dried and fed back into the incinerator. This has to be substantially cheaper since the apparently expensive oil extration step can be eliminated. This operation does not yield a transportation fuel (except through batteries), but if the alge farming process can produce biodesel at an energy profit, then direct incineration at a coal plant should be scalable (especially with vertical farming) to such an extent that eventually the coal could be eliminated from the plant entirely.
The capital and maintance costs of the farming portion of the plant might significantly increase the cost over that of mining and transporting the coal.

How much land would be needed to replace the coal in a 500 MW plant?
No idea, except, if you can grow 20,000 gallons of alge oil per year, it might be reasonable that you could grow 50,000 gallons of dried alge biomass (all burnable) per year/ acre. If a typical coal power plant is surrounded by ~ 1 square mile and most of that land area was used to grow alge, then ~ 30 million gallons could be produced. Convert that to dry weight, enter the difference in BTU per ton... One thing that might help in this application is that the waste heat could be used as process heat to help frow the algee and dry it.

Concerning the cost, I don't know how difficult it is to extract the vegitable oil from alge comparred to corn oil or soybean oil, but there is certainly alot more oil per pound of feedstock (or is it just that there is alot more feedstock?), so I assume it would be comparable if not cheaper per pound of oil extracted ( once production was scaled up). Biodesel from soybeans is already highly competative with petrolium desel.

Dan Tibbets
Dewatering is going to cost you. Unless you want the capital expense for land for air drying. And don't forget you have to store enough to get you through the winter.
I edited my original post to change some of the numbers and some of the spealling, err...speling, spilling,.. some of the goofs!

The growing of the algae would be in verticle greenhouses like that proposed in the original post link. That would greatly increase production year round, and also probably increase cost considerably.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

Well I know from the coal plant arround the corner here. They are basically offloading the coal directly from the train into the incinnerator. The first wagon load of coal is already burned before it reaches the bottom. So I think you can get an idea how many tons a year this thing burns.

joedead
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Post by joedead »

Robert Rapier has covered this issue extensively. His conclusions (which I mostly agree with) are skeptical and only slightly hopeful.

Check out the first two blogs here:

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/search/ ... 0biodiesel

OneWayTraffic
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Post by OneWayTraffic »

MSimon wrote:
Skipjack wrote:Yikes 32 USD per gallon?
That is insane! In order to be somewhat successful it would have to come down to at least 4 USD per gallon. That would still be quite pricey. Otherwise it would not be economic, even with lots of government subsidies.
So I hope that their research will help reduce the cost to 1/8th of the current. I do have a very strong believ in the power of genetic engineering, so I do think that it could be possible.
It has to do a lot better than 1/8th if it is going to include road taxes.
One possibility is that with plug in hybrids reducing fuel consumption, the overall cost of driving plug in hybrids with algae fuel would be similar to current expenditure. And all the money can stay in the country, adding to current accounts.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

The growing of the algae would be in vertical greenhouses
There is no way to beat the 1 KW/sq m (peak) number. And your efficiency goes down from there. Day/night. Variations over the day. Cloudy days. Absorption bands. Conversion efficiency. Capital costs. etc.

Can it be done? Maybe. Soon? (the next 10 years) NBL. (a Britishism).
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

I've got no problem with working on it. If we get Polywells working to take care of the fixed power demands, and got enough commuter vehicles running as electrics, you might meet remaining demand for motor fuel with something like algae. The first place to try it is little third world countries where they already can't afford to import much fuel and know how to get by with a trickle.

Even if it does not supply enough fuel demand, the basic approach can provide feedstock for other useful things, and probably clean up rivers and estuaries in the process. Soylent Green, anyone?

kurt9
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Post by kurt9 »

Naw, if we get polywell fusion, it would be cheaper to make motor fuel by thermal processes rather than biological processes (algae).

Scupperer
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Post by Scupperer »

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... el-problem

Latest info on large-scale algae fuel production.

Not sure if I can believe the article's numbers: $2/gallon of oil +1$ to turn it into jet fuel. Also, they say 1 acre can produce 1,000 gallons of oil, but don't give a time reference... I presume it's better than per year, or they wouldn't report the next line:

They're predicting 50 million gallon/year production capacity by the end of next year, which is large scale enough to say it's scalable, at the very least. While it's only a drop in the bucket of the some 350 million gallons of fuel used/day in the U.S., if it can scale up that fast from basically a zero start... imagine if they commercially licensed the tech.

It'll be interesting to see what happens (politically and globally) if this tech can go commercial.
Perrin Ehlinger

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

3 USD/gallon is still pretty expensive, but I guess it can be made cheaper once the technology matures and gets more efficient (engineers ;)).

kurt9
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Post by kurt9 »

DARPA is claiming $3 per gallon (including refining cost) of algae based hydro carbon fuels.

http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/darpa-bi ... gallon215/

There is still much work in scale up and other engineering issues before this can be realized, however.

Helius
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Algal Energy is a red herring.

Post by Helius »

kurt9 wrote: There is still much work in scale up and other engineering issues before this can be realized, however.
Back about 1972 Exxon was doing commercials about Solar. It gave everyone warm fuzzies regards them. Now Exxon - Mobile is touting Algal Biomass. Glad *you* got the warm fuzzies about it.

Do you really expect they'll tout *anything* that could compromise their targeted markets? Exxon-Mobile will not extol *anything* that might compete with oil, so clearly they know algae won't.

Algal Energy will require huge infrastructure, and energy inputs to bring liquid fuels. It is a system of lower power densities, which means it is another red herring to ensure we don't search for solutions that have higher power densities.

Why isn't it clear to people? If you want to do more with less, then consider higher power densities. Low power densities will only allow you to do LESS work with more infrastructure or fuel, depending on if you're considering the power density of the system or fuel being consumed.

kunkmiester
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Post by kunkmiester »

Exxon would probably be more than happy to extol algae, provided they will be making profits off of it. :roll: While there will inevitably be institutional resistance, to assume that all big companies are evil is stupid. Only some of them are. :evil:

Regardless of what Exxon might like, political pressure among other things is going to limit mineral petroleum availability and profitability in the future. If you can get in on the first floor for the replacement, you can keep your business up.
Evil is evil, no matter how small

Scupperer
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Post by Scupperer »

Just feeling a little insecure tonight, but it seems every time I post something on these forums someone comes right behind me and posts or says near the exact same thing...

Back on topic, I just hope I'm not allergic to algae fuel, like I am to molds and pollen.
Perrin Ehlinger

vankirkc
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Post by vankirkc »

The fly in the algae-for-biofuel ointment is nitrogen. Althought the stuff grows 10,000 times faster than, say, corn, it basically needs to be fed nitrogen fertilizer just the same. Where does that come from? Petroleum at the moment, generated by the fuel refining process. Not exactly a long term-viable exercise.

I'm beginning to think that fission is our only real hope, which is nasty because the waste byproducts from that are essentially eternal.

MirariNefas
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Post by MirariNefas »

Diazotrophs will never provide nitrogen as easily as fossil fuels, but they will be more efficient in algal systems than they would be for biofertilizer schemes with corn.

When bacteria fix nitrogen, they keep the lion's share for themselves. The rest that trickles out into soil, or into the roots of legumes, is just the excess. So an algal system incorporating diazotrophs (or even better, a monoculture of oil-making diazotrophs), shouldn't be half bad at it. I don't have numbers though.

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