Teen's Biofuel Invention Turns Algae Into Fuel 113
Lasrick writes "Evie Sobczak won a trip to Jet Propulsion Lab for her biofuel invention: 'For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.'"
Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... (Score:3, Insightful)
to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies, or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.
Makes for a cute story though, as do all these biofuel stories. Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.
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Think of it as... an alternative to solar panels for those that don't get a lot of sun.
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Sun? What the fuck is that?
Signed,
a Canadian.
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East coast, nowhere near the freezing parts. We've had around 5 to 10C for the last three days or so. If it snowed I wouldn't even be surprised.
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Sun? What the fuck is that?
Signed,
a Canadian.
Hah damned if that isn't true, though people in Southern Ontario have had a pretty decent spring, and looking okay into summer. My sister out in Grande Cache, AB has had 3 weeks of straight rain. Today was supposed to be sunny, instead it was overcast.
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Sure it's all fine and dandy, right up until the point where the algae becomes sentient, and then you are trapped in the basement with a 400 lb blob of algae looking at you as it's next meal.
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Sure it's all fine and dandy, right up until the point where the algae becomes sentient, and then you are trapped in the basement with a 400 lb blob of algae looking at you as it's next meal.
Well we've all seen those before, that's what mutates and moves into public office.
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Just because so far we have not does not mean that others will not learn something along the way to lead to new discovery. Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well.
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Look, kid. I'm not trying to discourage this young woman. I *do* get irritated at repetitive, innumerate media stories which appear to be designed to quell a gullible populace rather than inform anyone about just what kind of an energy-deficit shitstorm is coming down in the pike at a much more rapid clip than I expected.
Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well. :) There are answers, by the way. Thorium nuclea
I'm pretty sure the laws of physics won't change in the medium term.
Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... (Score:5, Insightful)
You, sir, are an ass.
Algae can be grown in a desert, using raw sewage as input. Zero farmland is used up.
Also, deserts can be filled with solar power to molten salt plants, a proven technology that generates electricity 24 hours a day.
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But at least I have some education and can think things through. Did it occur to you that desert ecologies are worth preserving too? To think of them as wastelands suited only for humans is rather impressive arrogance.
Yes, you can use solar power to store the heat in salt. It's spiffy. It's great for local, small scale applications if you have the money. There's not enough desert to make it a practical alternative to current industrial scale power generation. Line losses getting it from point A to point B m
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As a retort to your first paragraph:
Yes, desert ecosystems are worth something.
So are all of the ecosystems that thrive on developed arable land, and forests, and swamps and marshes, and coastlines, and shorelines, and shallow water, and deep water, and brackish water, and...
Every sperm is sacred [wikipedia.org].
So what? Either we're more important than an existing ecosystem, or we're not, or we continue to burn fossil fuels and poison all of the ecosystems at the same time.
As a retort to your second paragraph:
There are
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Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert
The main problem with molten salt solar (and most other solar and wind renewables) is that every Wh of energy relies on man-made structures for collection and storage with associated on-going maintenance and operating costs which cuts into how large this can cost-effectively scale up to and how much of a transmission loss can be afforded at a given retail price point.
Long distances work well for (very) large hydro projects: Hydro-Quebec has ~16GW of production at James Bay, ~800km from the nearest major cit
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WIllfully ignoring any sense of an existing desert ecology in the process.
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That version of a Thorium reactor is broken because it was just a rehash of existing reactors. Read up on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors [wikipedia.org] to see what a state-of-the-art reactor can be. It solves MANY of the existing problem with solid fuel reactors.
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:... is that the energy they generate actually cost DOUBLE of what fossil fuel energy cost.
So you're saying that we just have to wait until the fossil fuel cost doubles?
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to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies
Plenty of cropland is already used for biofuel. If we can do so more efficiently, then more area will be available for food and/or nature.
or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.
Comparing biofuels to solar panels in area efficiency is silly. Solar panels cost hundreds of dollars per sq meter. Cropland does not. The important metric is not watts/area but watts/dollar. Also biofuels are liquid and can be used as transportation fuel in affordable vehicles. Solar electricity cannot.
Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.
TFA is completely devoid of any technical information, so I don
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Cropland doesn't generate electricity... And solar-thermal is much cheaper than PV panels, with the "panels" being simple mirrors. And it doesn't need anything as expensive as cropland... desert land is ideal.
Yeah, that's something to worry about, once our electrical grid is 100% renewable (and not a moment before).
And you'r
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Of course. EVs are still incredibly efficient. FAR more than ICEs.
Large power plants are at least twice the efficiency of small ICEs, and may be much better. Grid losses average about 7%, which isn't bad, but could use work.
And finally, hydro, wind, solar, etc., factor into grid power, but don't contribute anything to gasoline engines. EVs w
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Of course. EVs are still incredibly efficient. FAR more than ICEs.
Have you factored in that EVs are coal powered, since you're effectively a marginal consumer of electricity, so that you use the most expensive (which is the most polluting) electricity? And that coal releases far more nasty stuff into the atmosphere than petrol does? Did you know that the radioactive dose released into the atmosphere from coal power (carbon 14) equals one Chernobyl accident per year?
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Did you know that the radioactive dose released into the atmosphere from coal power (carbon 14) equals one Chernobyl accident per year?
I think you meant uranium and thorium. There's no C14 worth mentioning in coal.
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For the N-th time... YES. Go do your own damn research, instead of bitching and IMPLYING wrong info.
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You apparently are unaware of the quick chargers. It's still a very long time compared to filling up a gas car, but J1772 chargers are much faster than "8-12 hours to fully charge". You're talking about charging from a regular wall outlet.
I don't have a good time estimate, but the old article http://www.howstuffworks.com/rapid-charging-for-electric-car-batteries.htm [howstuffworks.com]
says "It can take an electric vehicle from dead to nearly full -- about 80 percent charged -- in under half an hour."
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30min to 80% is still a horrible joke. Even more so for a car with about 100 mile range. But "range" isn't the issue here. Time to getting that full range back is the real problem. (we used to drive around in cars that had 100-200 mile range, back in the era of heavy steel cars that ran under 10mpg.)
And rapid charging is very bad for batteries. If you rapid charge it to 80%, you cannot get it to 100%. It's a lot like packing a suitcase; you can get more stuff in there if you pack it slow and neat vs. j
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The current electric car may not meet everyones needs however I wake up around 6:30AM would consider 60 miles a lot of driving compared to my normal day {30 miles max} and have usually parked the car at home by 7:00PM for the evening. I have a two car family, my wife doesn't drive more than 60 miles a day in her car either. I could easily switch both of us over to electric and just rent a car when we go on that mythical vacation once every decade.
I would have no problem with a 10-12 hour charge time. I have
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100 mile range is FAR more than most people need for their everyday needs.
I don't have an electric car yet, but I'm virtually positive my next car will be one. (A Prius would likely be the _worst_ car I'd get, unless my current car dies and I need a car NOW.)
I too have 'range anxiety' a bit, but even the Leaf will go far longer than I need to in a day.
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Umm, no... Why would I? Why do you feel the need to play dumb?
Right now, plug-in hybrids are the way to go if you must have only a single vehicle. You get a reasonable range on electricity, and it automatically switches over to gas when needed. You get a lower purchase price, while saving substantial money on fuel, and also helping to pay for development of future all-electric
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And solar-thermal is much cheaper than PV panels, with the "panels" being simple mirrors.
Nope. Proposed solar-thermal projects in both California and Spain have been cancelled and replaced with PV. The price of PV panels has fallen dramatically in recent years.
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If supply doesn't go up, demand has to go down.
Let's say 3.5 billion people is more than enough.
To get there, I suggest a product made by the Soylent corporation.
But seriously. Reducing the world population would solve SO many problems.
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But seriously. Reducing the world population would solve SO many problems.
Well, maybe we could solve the population and fuel problem together? My next science fair project will be turning humans into bio-fuel.
Oh, but all you Slashdot know-it-alls will tell me that it's already been done . . .
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Soylent. The green alternative for people.
Remember that name: Soylent.
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Or just light the fat ones. They'll burn all night long.
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Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
In 5th grade, she figured out something obvious. In 7th grade, she figured out another something obvious. In 8th grade, she started thinking about something non-obvious, spent 4 years developing it and then used it to win an internationally renowned competition sponsored by Intel. The importance of the 5th/7th grade anecdotes is that interest and achievement in science isn't an immediate phenomenon...it has to be cultivated from an early age if you want to see results by high school or college.
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Shorthand for "she showed interest in basic science at school".... and now she has made an original discovery of her own.
Whew! That was close (Score:5, Funny)
One more invention, and she would have been disqualified [slashdot.org] from any further participation
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Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick.
Cue the mocking voice of GLADOS describing about everybody was turning in potato batteries for the fair.
Crap article. (Score:5, Insightful)
And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.
So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.
Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.
Now get off my lawn.
I had the same reaction (Score:2)
was disappointed when I couldn't find out anything about what she actually did that was interesting other than recreate existing processes
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I am still waiting for the wifi kills seeds follow up. Seems like that should have taken about 3 days for a proper lab to replicate. Heck every 4th grader in america (and their parents) should be working on replicating it. (Think of the lawsuits possible)
.
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Surely you mean baking soda volcanoes, right?
I originally meant this as a joke, but baking powder is apparently just a superset of baking soda... but to get the volcano to erupt on Marcia at just the right time, you need to have separate vinegar & baking soda... right?
comment saved my time (Score:2)
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In fact such transformation from algae to various energy products has been. Four years ago Dow partnered to do exactly this, and a year later it broke up the partnershi
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Presumably if you burned the product locally, you could recover almost all of the water and nutrients. Water is obviously necessary to provide the hydrogen in hydrocarbons, but you get water back when you burn it in oxygen. Solid macronutrients like potassium and phosphorous don't go anywhere; they're in the ash/residue/smoke.
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I googled for her paper on the project. http://algaetooil.weebly.com/ [weebly.com]
It's actually quite promising and her experiments are specifically geared at finding economical processes that scale. The first section of her experiments deal with increasing yields of the algae. Both in terms of the mass and the lipids that would convert to fuel. Basically she found that you could use Neon gas to filter natural light and controlling CO2 at various stages get a 20% bump over natural light.
The next steps
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wood === biofuel (Score:3)
Wood is a form of biofuel.
See what I did there?
Does "biofuel" still seem like a mysterious magical term.
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It's a buzzword. The media eat that shit up.
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And by your [idiot] logic, wheat is not a food, unless it's converted into a loaf of bread.
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Well "wood gas" is the product of heated wood typicaly piped directly to the engine. The wood merely stores the fuel (methane) in a stable medium. You might consider the methane product the actual fuel, but the "tank" is filled with wood.
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An AC posted this first but wood gas was (widely during WW2) and still is easily substituted for gasoline (with a severe loss of HP). It's a good part of any zombie apocalypse survival plan, but not a good part of a save the planet plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas [wikipedia.org]
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This is slashdot, and even now, by 2013, it's not too much to expect that the average person around here knows what a C-like language looks like.
That said, 3 equal symbols will make you look like a Javascript programer faster than you can point to any less widespread reference, like Prolog. And even now, with all the buzz around it, that's not a good image to have.
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Who said it was mysterious or magical? Everyone knows wood is a biofuel.
How does that devalue biofuels, or take away from the achievement of creating more useful and efficient burnable crops?
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Wood is a form of biofuel.
See what I did there?
Does "biofuel" still seem like a mysterious magical term.
Good point!
I was thinking of posting, "Wait a second.. Question: How much of Earth's breathable oxygen is transformed via algae? Will her next invention be something that generates power from water, transforming it into acid?"
Another story (Score:2)
Came into my mind... (Score:1)
she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick
A Clock Work with Orange? :)
Thread Recap (Score:2)
100 fat stupid big-mouth know-it-all towering assholes criticize working invention in a nasal smartass tone of voice while ramming another mom-prepared hot pocket into their distended fat neckbeard-encrusted sneering faces.
The only thing that makes threads like this tolerable is the certain knowledge that nobody will ever take any of you seriously about anything.
Genius! (Score:2)
What, can she (or her parents) actually read or something? Amazing! Seriously, nothing revolutionary here, all of these were invented by someone else.
"I call it a Wind-mill!"
"I call it biome-diesel"
next:
"I call it a photo-panel!"
Vapid reporting (Score:2)
There is nothing "invented" here. Its not like she woke up and thought that algae could be used to make fuel.
Companies have been researching this for decades, and the issue comes back down to the effort to grow algae often consumer more energy then what they produce. The real challenge is not that algae can product hydrocarbons for fuel, its about how to do it at the same or better efficiency then getting oil out of the ground.
Its a nice puff piece, but ignorant "science" reporters think this kid is brill
Whoooptie f'ing do. (Score:1)
Seriously are you freakin' kidding me? Yes... Yes.. YES everyone's child is a freaking super-genius. Right. Oh... and gads... this one can actualy READ [howstuffworks.com] by the 8th grade. How wonderfully miraculous.