A Different Approach To Making Alternative Fuels Practical 90
First time accepted submitter overmod writes "Browsing on a completely unrelated subject, I came across this New York Times description of Solazyme. From the article: '...in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.' What I find interesting is the model they've adopted for short-term growth, which I would not have seen coming from a technology oriented toward biofuel production. Leads me to wonder what other nominally-green technologies that would otherwise be slow if not impossible to scale to workable businesses might have 'niche' applications, with high perceived marginal value, that could be used to boost capital, rather than relying on donations, grants, or nebulous save-the-planet goodwill."
Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad". (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it's using algae to produce it rather than corn. Even if it doesn't burn as cleanly as ethanol, it has a number of potential advantages:
1) Algae doesn't require chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc to the scale that corn does. All of those chemicals have a HUGE environmental impact, comparable with burning fossil fuels
2) Algae has the potential to be much more space efficient... much higher output per acre, so fuel/transport costs to harvest it is significantly lower
3) Algae is much easier to produce closer to where the fuel will be consumers, such as near cities (related to #2), again lowering transport costs
4) Algae can be produced in places that are otherwise undesirable and doesn't compete with food crops, such as deserts, oceans, salt flats, etc. Many of these undesirable locations might still be close to where it's needed, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the transport costs mentioned above.
5) Less risk of a typo accidentally telling people that you need to go pick up porn for you mother.
We might not be to that point yet, but we might have been past it by now if we put the same money into it that goes into corn.
And *still* there's no such thing as magic (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, indeed, you might speed up the conversion *time* but you're still not going to get any more *energy* than what is provided by sunlight and starter chemicals. Period. End of story. Physics wins. Investors lose, unless the end business is in skin care products, where it might be profitable.
Re:scale (Score:4, Insightful)
Expand the production? Sure, great idea. If you think you can figure out a way to double the arable land used for vegetable oil production so that it doesn't cut into the production for food, then you've still managed to displace less than 10%, and goodness knows what you've done to the landscape to do it.
In spite of rising population, we use an ever smaller percentage of arable land for food production. We've reduced our use of marginally arable land, and we use an increasingly more stringent definition of what constitutes "arable". You need only drive thru the mid-west, south, and even the north east to see farmland reverting to forest, or prairie.
Corn or seed-oil is not the most productive crop for bio fuels. Probably switch grass is, because it will grow almost anywhere and is widely adapted to different climates. In the long run, no single crop would be the best solution.
Using marginally arable land for fuel crops still might not come close to half the need for commercial oil production, at least not in an economically viable way. But that speaks more to the cheapness of oil than to the sustainability of bio-fuels.
Re:imho biofuels are stil "bad". (Score:5, Insightful)
So, a pound of carbon released from burning regular gas, oil, coal etc, is a pound of carbon from who knows how many billions of years ago, it was trapped. A pound of carbon released from any bio fuel is a pound (mostly, lets say 75% of a pound), that was adsorbed very recently from the atmosphere by whatever biological process made the fuel, corn, switchgrass, sugar cane, my after burrito night methane fest.
Hydrogen is clean in that it release no carbon when making energy, but it costs energy to make the hydrogen. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, there is still a net carbon increase, even if there is less due to hydrogen production being more efficient than an internal combustion engine.