Actually, most of what I’m hearing is that the algae would NOT be grown on water. With at least 60,000 species, it’s too easy for cross contamination — important if you’re growing a specific species for say jet fuel. Also as algae grow so fast, that they quickly cover the surface, blocking out sunlight further down than say an 1 1/2 inches or so.

Valcent grows algae on semi-arid land with water. Solyzyme even eliminates sunlight in a process they’re pretty ‘mum’ about.

Also people seem to be very narrow minded about how Biofuels can be made.

In fact on company, Amyris is claiming that they may have found a way to make a cleaner gasoline. By creating bugs. They are secretive about the process for now, but said it works. All I know is that these guys are using sugarcane and E. colyi and and unknown process. Anyways this year they are doing test in a test pilot facility and they’ve got 70 million dollars for research and things. They claim that within three years there Biodiesel will hit the market followed by their Jet fuel and Gasoline all derived from bugs and sugercane. This is one option in the way to make Biofuels even more efficent.

I do not understand the doomerism of this problem we face. People who hold pessimistic views never changed the world. Those with optimisim have changed our world. I hold hope. And as Oil begins to decline, hopefully Biofuels will be ready to take a big chunk away from shortages.

Let’s start digging now: one EV at a time

Emil M

“Land-Grown” biofuels are bad. No matter where they are grown. Maybe some algae thing might work… buy my bet is it would kill off ocean ecosystems if done on a planetwide scale.

Now compare that to solar power, which can truly provide sustainable energy for the planet… and biofuels were not only a waste of time, but they diverted precious activist and investment resources away from legitimate renewables at a time when we desperately need them to be invested correctly.

I generally find that those who bash biofuels are really talking about corn ethanol, which admittedly gets a lot of the headlines.

However with hydrocarbons increasingly more expensive, we’ll need some viable form of biofuels or a breakthrough battery technology (and we first heard about EEStor on this great blog), for tomorrow’s transportation.

One area that I think has potential: algae. The world’s oldest plant can reproduce itself in 24 hours, doesn’t need land to grow and sequesters CO2 in the process. Add sunlight, stir in water and away we go…well kind of.

Two companies I’ve come across have some interesting approaches. Valcent produces algae in their closed loop “bioreactors” — initial test runs were at 33,000 gallons an acre — on semi-arid land in Texas that can’t be used for food cultivation. To put that in perspective, soy, used to make biodiesel, only gets 20 to 40 gallons an acre.

They claim that if 1/10 of the state of New Mexico were used for algae production, they could meet the energy demands for the entire United States.

Go here for a great video interview: http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/11/15/glen-kertz-valcent-vertigro-algae-biofuel/.

Also intriguing is SF-based Solyzyme. They’re a bit more secretive, but they claim not to even need sunlight to make algae. If that’s true, they just solved one of the major obstacles to industrial production of biodiesel from algae.

Chevron seems to be impressed. America’s number 2 oil producer just signed an agreement with the (unfortunately) private company.

They claim they their “oil” can be used to make anything that currently comes from a convention hydrocarbons. After all, they remind us, oil itself is essentially fossilized algae.

Hmmm…

0_o

Umm… that’s a lot of petroleum. The danger isn’t that we’ll run out of petroleum, it’s that we’ll run out of economical, sweet, light crud (which we will).

The amount of money that it costs to buy oil is directly linked to the amount of energy you can extract from it. Different types of oil take different amounts of energy to extract. Here’s a comparison:

1) Sweet, Light Crud from Saudi Arabia gives 30 times as much energy as it takes to extract it.

2) The Tar Sands in Alberta give 1.5 times as much energy as it takes to extract it.

That means not only do you have to charge 20 times as much money per unit of energy extracted from the Tar Sands, but that unit of energy also used 20 times as many units of energy to be extracted (greatly diminished energy returns on that stuff).

We’ll have to (slowly) convert to using heavy crud, more sour crud, and tar sands type stuff. Once that happens oil prices will jump so high that you’ll see basic things like food (which is grown, shipped, and stored using oil) jump in price by orders of magnitude.

I don’t know about you, but if they start charging 50 bucks for a loaf of bread I’ll starve to death. If that happened we’d see the world economy collapse. No one could afford to ship things from china to the North America, or even from city to city. And since the fuel for our power plants is shipped from halfway around the world… well, it’d be hard to fuel them. And stuff like cars.

But actually running out of oil? Not for a long long time. If we were willing to pay any price whatsoever and we were willing to extract the really tough stuff at an energy deficit we’d have something like a 500 year supply at current usage levels. (My dad works for a company that does R&D for submersible pumps that are used in deep water wells and high pressure extreme condition oil wells (lots of sulphur and stuff), and I’ve seen the information they’ve collected on optimistic, likely, and pessimistic remaining reserves. Not much easy stuff left, but lots of hard to extract oil).

The danger is that, since our entire economy RELIES on really cheap oil, we’ll be unable to sustain our civilization. It’s happened to others in the past and it could happen to us. It’s not a matter of running out of a resource, it’s a matter of uneconomical extraction. And that is a real, but not necessarily insurmountable, danger.

Darklamp

big business seeing the light

- Andy Grove

- Vinod Khosla

- Shai Agassi

- Elizabeth Debold

- Micheal Porter

- Ad van Wijk

Ask them to team up with big picture and the elders to get a taste of a Manhattan Project II

This time it’s our space ship itself. So some priority would be expedient.

A proposed sequence:

- EV’s for the masses

- RES for the masses

- water for the masses

- livable cities [and here]

To find ourselves..

Emil M