Commercial Fuel From Algae Still Years Away 134
chrnb sends along this quote from a report at Reuters:
"Filling your vehicle's tank with fuel made from algae is still as much as a decade away, as the emerging industry faces a series of hurdles to find an economical way to make the biofuel commercially. Estimates on a timeline for a commercial product, and profits, vary from two to 10 years or more. Executives and industry players who gathered at the Algae Biomass Summit this week in San Diego said they need to push for breakthroughs along the entire chain — from identifying the best organisms to developing efficient harvesting methods. ... So far on the list: finding the right strain of algae among thousands of species that will produce high yields; designing systems where the desired algae can multiply and other species don't invade and disrupt the process; and extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well."
DAPRA still trying. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Plants make their bodies from cellulose. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see how much would be cellulose. The fatty acids can be up to 40 percent which is very good. http://www.oilgae.com/algae/comp/comp.html [oilgae.com]
Also algae is not a plant and they've removed cyanobacteria from consideration as algae.
Re:Need it be commercialized? (Score:3, Informative)
That said, need the process be commercialized? From what I can gather, having followed this a bit, is that they are looking for ways to mass-produce fuel from algae. Is 'microbrewing' not possible, or is it just not profitable for energy companies?
About 90% of questions from non-engineers on slashdot seem to revolve around scalability.
The problem with doing this small scale, is that everything "chemical plant-like" is less efficient when its small, or for stuff like catalysts there is a workaround to make big stuff more efficient. "Stuff" is going to get pumped, and big pumps are more efficient than small pumps. Real estate scales as "square" and process tanks scale as "cube" so you always get more "stuff per square foot" from a big tank. The growth tank probably will be a different temperature than the environment, again big tanks win.
Then there are the non-scalable costs. The light bulbs in the plant ceiling draw the same power no matter the working volume. A set of tests to measure the quality of the product might cost $20 per batch, no big deal if you brew a million gallons at a time, not so good if you only brew one gallon at a time.
The only way to win on the small scale is to ignore pollution and regulation. I can, and have, simply dumped yeast from wine brewing on my compost pile. That doesn't scale so well for a billion gallon process plant. Of course, if a plant is big enough, it could be worthwhile to purify and sell "brewers yeast" to farmers and supplement companies, the big guys win yet again... And a really profitable plant can simply purchase the government and government regulation that it wants.
Re:Plants make their bodies from cellulose. (Score:2, Informative)
...though they are still colloquially (and erroneously) known as blue-green algae, they are not bacteria either, although they are prokaryotes.
Re:Time to get some good advice ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:so this is like fusion but only 10 years away i (Score:4, Informative)
A little reality... (Score:3, Informative)
For a number of years, I've been putting together an extensive spreadsheet including everything ... and I mean everything... that goes into the bottom line profitability of converting the US's total CO2 effluent of fossil fuel power plants into marketable products from algae. It took me a few months back in 2005 to convince myself that it wasn't worth looking at algal biodiesel [youtube.com].
For starters, here is a direct quote from a researcher in algae metabolism made to me in a private communique:
This guy has devoted his life to maximizing the photosynthetic efficiency of algae. In reality your are doing amazingly well to get 5% conversion. And, no, it doesn't matter what you do to the algae or which algae you choose. You aren't going to get better numbers.
Do the net present value calculation on this and try to figure out how you are going to pay for the photobioreactor OR raceway pond's amortization as well as the operating costs. The number just aren't there.
I don't know who is investing all this money but they should fire their advisers.
The only way I've found to convert that much CO2 to algae profitably is to sell the algal protein at the price equivalent of alfalfa protein.
Only problem is, this produces such an abundance of protein, at the price equivalent of alfalfa, that there would be little point in doing agriculture anywhere. The US's fossil fuel CO2 alone would create so much broad-spectrum amino acid protein that if it were directly consumed by humans, everyone in the world could have a diet richer than the US in protein. Oh, sure, you can run it through a couple of trophic layers to get some high grade predator fish farmed out in the ocean desert or something, but then the "environmentalists" who seem to prefer turning the rainforests into soybeans and can't tell the difference between ocean desert mariculture and near-coast mariculture would have a fit, and we can't have _that_ can we?