Company Claims Potential Magnification In Bio Fuel Production 260
duanes1967 writes "A company called Joule Biotech claims to have a breakthrough in biofuel production. Their process can create 20,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year at a cost of about $50 per barrel. 'Algae-based biofuels come closest to Joule's technology, with potential yields of 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre; yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement. What's more, for the best current algae fuels technologies to be competitive with fossil fuels, crude oil would have to cost over $800 a barrel says Philip Pienkos, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Joule claims that its process will be competitive with crude oil at $50 a barrel. In recent weeks, oil has sold for $60 to $70 a barrel.'"
It's always a startup... (Score:4, Insightful)
... begging for money that comes up with these "revolutionary" breakthroughs. Did we not learn anything from the tech boom/bust?
Whenever there is a lot of government money flowing into an industry, there is never a shortage of snake-oil salesmen lining up to grab a piece of it. There really isn't a limit to what they will say they can do.
Re:It's always a startup... (Score:5, Funny)
Uhh, Heavily Bought Into By Oil Industry (Score:4, Interesting)
... begging for money that comes up with these "revolutionary" breakthroughs. Did we not learn anything from the tech boom/bust?
Whenever there is a lot of government money flowing into an industry, there is never a shortage of snake-oil salesmen lining up to grab a piece of it. There really isn't a limit to what they will say they can do.
You may want to inform Exxon Mobil that their recent six hundred million dollar investment [gas2.org] is snake oil.
Big oil's investing in this, I wouldn't write it off as snake oil:
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If it is, they likely already know, and consider it worth it to look "green" or to take advantage of some sort of incentive program.
Investment by big oil doesn't mean anything either way.
big oil is not stupidly evil (Score:4, Insightful)
They are greedy. they are in a for-profit business. Once we realize that green investments by most of the big oil companies is not some show to appear green, and really a strategy for them to continue operating refineries it all starts to make sense. If the big oil companies have to buy unprocessed biofuels from New Mexico and Arizona instead of shipping it from the Gulf of Mexico and the Middle East, who cares. As long as the fuel is good and cheap they can build or convert refineries to process it. Ultimately the big oil companies are in the business of refining matter to make it usable in an internal combustion engine.
Given the assumption that big oil wants to survive (and thrive) and continue profiting. The myth that big oil wants to suppress innovation because they have some sort of warped ideology where they hate the Earth and the environment. (sorry, capitalists are nothing like the villains on the Captain Planet cartoon from the 1990s)
While I have no proof, I think an argument could be made where big oil does suppress, or at least has motive to suppress, innovation that makes it easy for any individual or small start up to transport people and materials without the the use of products from big oil's refineries. This sort of conspiracy at least fits big oil serving their own self interests. The other conspiracies where big oil spends a billion dollars on "green" investments as a PR stunt seems far less likely, because it uses money so inefficiently.
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They are greedy. they are in a for-profit business. Once we realize that green investments by most of the big oil companies is not some show to appear green, and really a strategy for them to continue operating refineries it all starts to make sense.
This is woefully uninformed. They are in business to turn a profit *this quarter*. There is no commitment to "future shareholders", only current ones, so no the company has little incentive to do anything aside from very short term "investment". Think of it this way, if it boosts PR enough to avoid a public outrage that leads to a windfall profits tax being levied the next time oil gets above $100 a barrel, it will have been worth billions. Considering the current political climate, that is not a far fe
Re:big oil is not stupidly evil (Score:4, Insightful)
If they perceive a shortage of oil, which would lead to inflated prices, it would be in their best interests to determine a way of getting oil. If one path leads to profits now, but bankruptcy in 10 years, that's not good business. The most profitable path is the one that is sustainable for the company.
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The parent comment is not insightful as graded. Please downgrade to 1.
Reason is I have worked in the petroleum production business. Oil is here and there in certain strata under the ground. Sometimes like in the East Texas Oil field its a puddle 3,300 feet under the ground. Cheap to extract. Other wells cost upward of 20 million to drill so their associated costs are much higher. Even more so if the well is far offshore. Finally an oil company is in business to produce the stuff. They never ever hoard oil.
Re:big oil is not stupidly evil (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just silly. And wrong. If oil companies only cared about profits in the next quarter, how do you explain expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars on a new oil field? It takes at lest three or four years to bring a new field online, not counting exploration. And how do you explain drug companies researching drugs that won't hit the market for almost twenty years, if ever?
Companies have a commitment to future shareholders in the sense that what people think a stock will be worth in the future is the major determiner for what it's worth today. That's why Intel builds new fabs, drug companies research drugs, and oil companies spend money trying to insure they'll have a product to sell when they start running out of oil.
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Since this is not happening, I think we can conclude that (gee, wow!) even public companies have some ability to think long-term. Shareholders may want ROI, but don't forget that many of them also want ROI over a long term (this is what the t
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Mutual funds.
Most of the big mutual funds are designed for 10 - 30 year investments. Mutual fund managers will definitely consider long term plans and returns when they invest, and they have invested heavily in energy companies like Exxon Mobile.
And you don't think... (Score:3, Insightful)
And you don't think part of investing in your own future is buying and destroying any competing technology? Plus, you're ignoring the reality that every business on earth can only operate because sustainability is not a requirement for existence. Essentially, the cost for bringing the earth a little closer to disaster is zero, since the unborn generations to come have no vote in a market system tuned entirely for short term vision.
I do not believe in secret meetings where evil businessmen plot to destroy th
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If they are the most profitable businesses in the world then they aren't dinosaurs.
By that logic you would have no problem with Steve Jobs owning 60% of the wealth of the country. I mean, if he's rich, he's obviously doing something correctly. There's no way he's corrupt or engaging in anti-competitive business practices. His profit margin proves his innocence!
What a brilliant idea!
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Exxon? Investing in something? Never! Heck with what 10 billion a year in research investments, all you have to do is start a website saying you're doing bio-fuel research with a valid mailing address somewhere on the homepage, and more likely than not Exxon will just mail you a check for $2500.
Re:Uhh, Heavily Bought Into By Oil Industry (Score:4, Interesting)
Big Oil is investing in such tech because it will continue to squeeze revenue out of the distribution systems the oil companies have spent many billions creating.
They will do anything to keep people from switching to electrical grid/self-generation systems for their energy needs. They really don't care WHAT they are selling as long as they can do it at a profit and do it from the existing stations. There is an entire industry based simply on the middle-man aspect of distribution. People make money from it, so it remains. But it also cost the consumer more, in the long run.
The electrical grid already exists, is in the public realm for the most part, and the middlemen have no part in it. Granted, the electrical grid needs some improvement in order for everyone to switch to it for ALL our energy needs, but it is not, by any means, impossible.
Biofuels do NOT solve many problems. In fact, they simply create new ones.
And, yeah. Snake oil. Hrmm...now that I think about it...I wonder what the energy storage of a snake is...
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Granted, the electrical grid needs some improvement in order for everyone to switch to it for ALL our energy needs
You sir, are a master of understatement. It would take dramatic increases in both electrical production and distribution to move everything to electrical power. Without using nuclear power it won't happen.
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My personal belief is that if we LEARNED from Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl and made the NEEDED modifcations to nuclear facilities--high-level redundancy, human error modification/compensation, etc., that nuclear energy is probably the way to go for supplementing renewable resources. Until we find something better.
One thing you may not be taking into account is that small-scale energy production(solar, wind) can be located closer to where it is used, requiring far less infrastructure to move the energy ar
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I still say solar is better then anything else.
If we can build a platform into space or beam the energy down from space based collectors, The worlds energy needs will be met. That is a huge, very huge if though.
Also I do see many wars being waged if this does get close to happening. There is too much money tied up in oil for a war over switching away from oil to not happen.
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Three Mile Island demonstrated that the safety systems in place were effective. That doesn't rule out learning from the incident, but it was not a catastrophe, it was a successful containment.
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Because some bureaucrat in at NStar is going to shortchange the training and operations budget in the end, and we'll have TMI all over again.
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We did learn from TMI and Chernobyl. What we haven't done is build any new reactors.
this statement is paradox. the fact that no new reactors have been build definitively proves that _nothing_ has been learned aside from the knee jerk reaction of fear, and that isn't really learned, its instinctual. Congratulations America, you've shown how base and intellectually retarded you have become. Consumer society breeds stupidity, stupidity breeds fear, fear breeds oppression and oppression breeds revolution. fortunately for you consumerism also breeds complacency, and in this rock paper scissors
Re:Uhh, Heavily Bought Into By Oil Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
Biofuels solve two major problems, they are carbon neutral and they are not dependent on the middle east. Are the problems they create worse than those?
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It depends on whether you consider all the unintended consequences (e.g., the price of all foods having risen dramatically since the reduction of corn available for human consumption and as feed for animals) from promoting corn-based biofuels to be "worse" or not.
Since biofuels cost much more than gasoline per unit of energy provided, a better strategy would be to tax gasoline until it matches that cost, and hand that extra tax money to the corn growers to not sell their corn to biofuel production facilitie
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Umm. No.
Further Corn subsidies are a bad idea, from my point of view.
Grow what people need, not what you want to sell them.
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Re:Uhh, Heavily Bought Into By Oil Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Food shortage is another. You need to take into account-- at least in the US-- that biofuels compete with food production. This is partially due to entrenched political interests. Again, in the west, this probably didn't affect you (unless you were, say, in the cattle feed market or a small beer producer), but I've read that the grain shortages (and resulting high prices) in Asia last year were the direct result of a double-whammy of biofuel production and crop disease.
Now, I personally don't think that the two things above rule out biofuels as a viable alternative for the future. We just need to be aware that they are not without their consequences; they solve some problems, and introduce new ones.
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No. When you burn them you are releasing carbon into the atmosphere, but when you grow the algae they remove an equal amount of carbon from the atmosphere. No net gain of CO2, that's the definition of carbon neutral. Oil is not carbon neutral because burning it releases carbon into the atmosphere which was previously sequestered in the ground.
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Re:It's always a startup... (Score:5, Interesting)
... begging for money that comes up with these "revolutionary" breakthroughs. Did we not learn anything from the tech boom/bust?
Are you saying we were supposed to learn that revolutionary breakthroughs are ALWAYS snake-oil?
Re:It's always a startup... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did we not learn anything from the tech boom/bust?
Invest early?
Sell often?
No seriously, if you could have invested in Google's IPO you would have been a rich man today.
The problem with the tech boom is that people were investing in bad ideas, not good ideas with bad results. You know... Like Pets.com
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Saw that myself.
My inner cynic reminds me that:
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"Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies."
What kind of microorganism? Is the result ethanol or hydrocarbon? These are two wildly different metabolic pathways. The organisms excr
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Re:From TFA (Score:4, Informative)
We simply need to tax fuel enough to establish a price floor that will encourage alternative investments. The Europeans are already there so now the US just needs to start increasing the tax rate
Why?
Why do you automatically assume that if the Europeans do something it must be right for every place on earth?
If this breakthrough is for real, and it was developed in Cambridge Massachusetts USA, with the tax structure we have today, and nothing like it has appeared out or Europe with all its horrendous taxes, then where is the basis for your euro-centric view?
How will pouring more tax dollars down social rat-holes help solve an energy crisis?
Do I necessarily believe this announcements? No, not yet. Does that mean I should run to Europe and adopt every tax-grab they dream up? Of course not.
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Btw I said nothing of pouring tax dollars down a social rat-hole, I actually advocated increased taxes in one area with an offsetting credit in another which is tax neutral to some level of consumption and tax positive above that level (ie discouraging the unwanted behavior while not disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged.)
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What part of "Price" do you not understand?
These people created this and the price point at which it becomes economic may be higher or lower than the current price of oil.
So be it.
Price fluctuations are not evil. They are the market adjudication of supply and demand.
Price fluctuation are your friend. Static or legislated prices totally screw up economies. Do we really need to replay the downfall of the soviet union again just to drive home this point.
The amount of fossil fuels left in the ground exceed by
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why not save all the time and confusion (Score:5, Funny)
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Dubious Maximus (Score:2, Informative)
Variant of algae? (Score:3, Interesting)
As best as I can tell, their process is likely using genetically engineered algae that perform better than the best existing "natural" algae for biofuels production. There aren't really any other candidates for genetically engineered organisms for this particular goal.
The problem is that to be so efficient at biofuels production, such algae are at a severe competitive disadvantage to other less suitable species. Based on what I've seen so far, one of the biggest problems with algae biofuels production has been contamination of bioreactors with species that grow more easily but are not suitable for biodiesel production. If someone engineers algae to be even better at biofuels production, it'll likely make the contamination problem even harder to solve.
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Or to put it another way, the effort to create the fuel is the effort removed from its pursuit of survival, and therefore is at a competitive disadvantage to other naturally occurring organisms.
Not when man is a significant predator.
Any organism that doesn't make enough fuel would be selected against a lot more heavily.
Re:Variant of algae? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideally, while they are engineering it, they will build in a tolerance/requirement for, say, growth in a high-ph environment. Then, it will have a hard time contaminating us, and we'll have hard time contaminating it.
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As best as I can tell, they've only done this in the lab, probably in closed reactors. So long as they stick with closed reactors, they should do fine. The problem then becomes getting CO2 into the mix; algae normally just gets it from air. But, until you filter it down to one micron, maybe less, air might contaminate your water.
The USDOE already determined that the best you could do with open ponds is to just let the local algaes drift in on the wind... but that doesn't tell us anything about closed reacto
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No, I just suspect that their system is more snake oil or will fail to deliver on promises as it's more susceptible to the main current barriers to microorganism-based biofuels.
They claim they're not using algae, which is interesting as bacteria that perform photosynthesis are pretty rare (and IANAB but I thought that in general, if a single-celled organism is capable of photosynthesis that it was considered algae.)
If this works (Score:5, Funny)
What about water? (Score:2)
I've been hearing that these ethanol energy plans would use more water than we have available. While that's certainly true in California (there's a drought here), I wonder if it's true in the rest of the US. If water becomes scarce, it's gonna get expensive, and it will no longer be feasible to use it to produce ethanol.
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There's no shortage of water close to a big river like the Mississippi or Missouri.
If only (Score:2)
My idea is even better!!!! (Score:2)
I have an idea that is 10x their idea!!!!.... Mine promises infinite energy for all (free in fact), and the best part is that it will be ready next week if you just give me $100 million dollars immediately... In fact, after the wire transfer goes thru, everything (at least for me) will be wonderful...
In short... Anytime you see a company talk about the next great thing, but they have not done it yet is just marketing for dollars... If their idea was so good, then why are they having to tell everyone about
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They're trying to build a manufacturing plant and hire a staff to operate it, those things cost a lot of money, money that needs to be spent between now and when they actually are able to make money selling stuff.
Of all the possible things to point as as being suspicious, that one probably sucks the hardest.
I suspect (Score:2)
The "secret recipe" has, as one of it's ingredients, just over 20,000 gallons of gasoline.
BTW, have you seen how E85 cuts engine performance? The EPA milage numbers for a late model E85 burning Suburban show 16 MPG on regular gas, and 12 MPG on E85, or put another way, it would take 1 1/3 gallons of E85 to travel as far as one gallon of fuel, more than eliminating the "savings" of using E85 in the first place.
1.333 of 0.85 gasoline equals about 1.13 gallons of gasoline to travel as far as one gallon of gaso
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I'M WRONG.
My BAD.
E85 is 85% Ethanol, not 15%...
I'll wear my Emily Litella ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3FnpaWQJO0 [youtube.com] ) moniker with shame for the rest of the day.
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Engines designed to take advantage of ethanol can perform very well indeed on it (not that this makes bioethanol a good idea, considering land use and all).
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You'd probably want E96 (i.e. 4% water, which iirc is what Brazil ran).
There's a massive jump in the energy required remove the water when you get into the really high proofs. 96%/192 proof is (or was) the sweet spot between purity and energy required.
a factor of 3 is NOT an order of magnitude (Score:2, Interesting)
> yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement.
Nope.
6,000 to 20,000 is somewhere around a factor of 3. An order of magnitude is a factor of 10. Or as wikipedia puts it:
"An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is 95 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth. Order of magnitude differences are called decades when measured on a logarithmic scale."
Still impressiv
or I should have said.... (Score:2)
Ok.... 2,000 (taking the low) to 20,000 is an order of magnitude. However.... when the range is 2,000 to 6,000 well
thats a pretty big range. There is a factor of 3 between the low and high water marks for the previous tech. Does it seem fair to judge the new tech based solely on the low water mark for the old tech?
So essentially its anywhere from a factor of 3 to an order of magnitude. Which is, at least in my mind, not really as good as saying its "an order of magnitude"
-Steve
My goodness. (Score:2)
First snakeoil... now algaeoil! What's next?
Good and Bad (Score:2)
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Photosynthesis in a colonial atmosphere, with no green shift.
Wikipedia:
Why is it the plants reflect the most energy intensive portion of the visible light spectrum? Maybe they can't handle the heat?
Regarding this thread as a whole, why is it that scepticism is so o
It isn't Algae... (Score:4, Informative)
It does say that the closest thing out there to what they do are ones that use algae.
When the first cars were built, the closest thing to them was the carriage, but automobiles didn't use horses to power them.
As to the people questioning as to whether they are using genetically engineered organisms, the article clearly states that they are.
Yes, your fuel may soon come from a genetically engineered non-algal microbe.
Sure, fine and all that, but I still want man portable fusion cells... Or maybe pocket antimatter. >^_^
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Sure, fine and all that, but I still want man portable fusion cells... Or maybe pocket antimatter. >^_^
I'm not sure I like where this is going:
Woman: "Is that pocket antimatter or are you just happy to see me?"
Me: "Why yes it is poc..." *cue large matter-antimatter explosion*
Frankenfuels! (Score:3, Funny)
> Yes, your fuel may soon come from a genetically engineered non-algal microbe.
They'll be banned in Europe. Ain't natural.
Am I the only one? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who doesn't even bother to read these "revolutionary energy breakthrough" stories? Seriously, I read them for a year or two back in the day, but stopped after that, and for the last 5 years I don't feel like I missed anything.
The only thing that makes me pay attention is when it's revealed these new startups are headed by the brother-in-law of some eleceted official who then attempts to get them a sweetheart deal on real estate, tax breaks, regulations, permits, etc.
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The US has the production capacity of over 2.5Billion gallons a year of BioDiesel [biodiesel.org] with another half billion gallons a year coming online in the next year.
So, if you pay attention, you are frustrated, because it doesn't seem to be coming fast enough, and if you go away for a few years and come back, you don't notice the differences, because they are baked int
$50/barrel (Score:2)
Remember that in the unlikely circumstance that this project goes to actual production, the most important ongoing cost of this project is going to be financing the capital investment which is proportional to the amount of capital going into this. So it isn't just the cost of the plastic or glass bioreactor megastructures, it's that cost times x. The numbers might pencil out at $50 minus costs of financing (though without seeing their
Comparable units please!!! (Score:2)
Produces 20,000 gallons per acre, at $50/barrel.
I got a car with a 18Gallon tank that gets 3.5L/100km. Oh, wait.. that makes no sense..
Comes with FREE ecological disaster potential (Score:2)
Hydrocarbon producing algae escaping into the environment....
.
Whole ecology destruction, anyone? Anyone? Any takers? You! With the gas guzzler? You don't give a flip about some ocean life do ya? Well, here's your algae oil/gasoline. Now go home and don't upset the government/financial speculators. We know what we're doing....
don't ridicule (Score:2, Offtopic)
algae-based fuels MUST work, and MUST achieve greater efficiency
or we must learn to master fusion
but fission won't last forever, and fossil fuels won't last forever, and currently all renewable sources (including algae) are tiny boutique niche sources that won't satisfy our huge energy demands
civilization will go into decline unless we master alternative energy sources. civilization already funds the enemies of civilization in order to dig on their land (wahhabi islam is an obscenity... to hell with your mo
Let's do the math... (Score:5, Informative)
- They can actually generate 20,000 gallons per acre per year
- 1 gallon of biofuel will get you the same mileage as 1 gallon of gasoline
US gasoline usage = 378,000,000 gallons/day = 137,970,000,000 gallons/year
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html [doe.gov]
Area needed: 137,970,000,000 gallons/year / 20,000 gallons/acre/year = 6,898,500 acres = 10,779 sq.mi.
Comparative area: Massachusetts is 10,555 sq.mi.
So, we'd need an area slightly larger than MA to generate the needed biofuel. This may seem like alot, but...
Farmland in US: 922,095,840 acres = 1,440,774 sq. mi.
Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm [usda.gov]
Percent farmland to convert to biofuel: 10,555 sq. mi. / 1,440,774 sq. mi. = 0.73%
This isn't much, if you ask me.
Now, for the financial incentive to do so:
Value of 20,000 gallons of biofuel at $50/barrel: 20,000 gallons = 476 barrels * $50/barrel = $23,000
Corn yield of one acre: 162 bushels/acres (Iowa)
Source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a1-14.pdf [iastate.edu]
Value of 162 bushels of corn: 162 bushels * $4.77/bushel (Estimated 2008 Calendar Year Average) = $772.74
Source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a2-11.pdf [iastate.edu]
So, converting one acre of corn farmland to one acre of biofuel farmland will increase the revenue from $773 to $23,000, a nearly 30-fold increase.
So, this looks like it might be worth it depending on the cost of conversion and cost versus revenue. It'll certainly be interesting to watch.
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Those numbers seem to ignore the cost of producing corn vs. oil. What the farmer's interested in is profit, not gross revenue. Still, assuming it costs $50/barrel to produce and sells for, say, $53/barrel, you're still at $1428 profit per acre.
Or if OPEC opens the floodgates and drops the price to $35/barrel, you're out $7140/acre. But I suppose that's what the futures market is for.
Re:Let's do the math... (Score:4, Informative)
gallons, acres, miles, bushels.. ye gods man, don't you know the rest of the world is metric.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
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5kwh per m^2 per day? At what latitude? If that is on the high side, they are back on the theoretical impossible part of the field. In good old days we had simple perpetual motion machine inventors who attempted to violated the second law of thermodynamics. Not these snake oil men.
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5kwh per m^2 per day? At what latitude? If that is on the high side, they are back on the theoretical impossible part of the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg [wikipedia.org]
In southwest texas, 5 KWH per sq M is wildly pessimistic by around a factor of two. In western Washington state, it is wildly optimistic by a roughly equal factor of two.
Taking a wild guess based on my vast real world experience, a marketing weasel might just possibly use the "best obtainable" number available, and maybe round up all figures, giving around "ten" KWH per day and rounding up to about 16 or so MM KWH per year.
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Your ballpark is right... (Score:2)
I did the same rough pencil and paper calculations, and the efficiency claim they are making is 10%+, which really would be amazingly outstanding if possible, but is so high I'd find it highly doubtful.
I'd be happy with 2-5% efficiency with such a scheme.
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Maybe they're somehow harvesting tidal forces too!
And uhh, maybe...wind! Yeah, Wind!
And do you know they haven't got some sort of hot, biotechy geothermal harvesting mechanism going?
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Seems to me you're presenting a land-use argument. That certainly appropriate in certain contexts, but it's a bit of a narrow perspective, doncha think?
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The article claims that they're making ethanol, not biodiesel (they compare their process to algae-generated biodiesel as the closest in terms of efficiency).
Given that, 20,000 gallons of ethanol x 76,100 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 446,000 kwh, or about 6% efficiency. Could still be a scam, but more plausible.
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> Don't believe the hype, especially when it's physically impossible.
Oh stop being so down on these guys. They are just trying to do the right thing, which is to ensure suckers don't keep their money. And Green is THE buzzword right now to part venture capitalists from sacks of cash, and if they won't fall for it the Government certainly will.
Every week or two Slashdot has one of these Green Energy Miracle stories. Because so many people want so hard to believe in Green Energy scammers will keep givin
Check my math (Score:2)
Gallons of oil in a barrel = 44
Barrels used per day in U.S. = 20,680,000 in 2007
Barrels user per year = 7,548,200,000
Gallons used each Year = 332,120,800,000
Gallons per Acre per year for this process 20,000
Acres required to meet U.S demand for a year = 16,606,040
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Size of Arizona = 72 million acres.
There is an article in Scientific American that estimates cellulose feedstocks could provide up to half of the liquid fuels used in the United States:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grassoline-biofuels-beyond-corn [scientificamerican.com]
And that is without building millions of acres of bioreactors.
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Gallons of oil in a barrel = 44 Barrels used per day in U.S. = 20,680,000 in 2007 Barrels user per year = 7,548,200,000 Gallons used each Year = 332,120,800,000 Gallons per Acre per year for this process 20,000 Acres required to meet U.S demand for a year = 16,606,040
Acres in the U.S. = 2 000 000 000
Part of U.S. acres needed to meed demand = 0.7%
Just throwing around big numbers does not an argument make
Re: (Score:2)
suppose that it is ethanol
With respect toward biofuel production, yeasts ferment ethanol in the dark, algaes photosynthesize oil in the light.
A direct photosynthesis route to make alcohol would be really cool. The longer the beer lays in the sunlight, the stronger it becomes...
Re: (Score:2)
Dang it! Surprise!
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7135308.html [freepatentsonline.com]
Process for the production of ethanol from algae
United States Patent 7135308
Abstract:
The present invention describes a process for the production of ethanol by harvesting starch-accumulating filament-forming or colony-forming algae to form a biomass, initiating cellular decay of the biomass in a dark and anaerobic environment, fermenting the biomass in the presence of a yeast, and the isolating the ethanol produced. The present invention furthe
Re: (Score:2)
Photovoltaic panels didn't have the constraint of having to develop replication and maintenance capabilities. They engineered humans to figure that out for them.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Scan to drive their stock up. Nothing more.
Let's assume for a moment that instead of "Scan" you meant "Scam".
From the company's about page: Founded in 2007 by Flagship Ventures, Joule is privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Last I checked, "privately held" == "no stock price."
Re: (Score:2)
"no stock price."
Yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not completely true. Privately held companies do stock issues to raise money. They generally set a price for their stock and then see who will buy it at that price. So a big press release right before an offering might let them set a higher price and sell less stock and make the same money or set a higher price, sell the same amount of stock and make more money.
Re: (Score:2)
So in that case, replace "drive their stock up" with "convince an idiot venture capitalist to give them money".
Re: (Score:2)
Just sayin'.