What I recall reading is that A: they will be able to sell the fuel at $50/barrel… that’s after you deal with construction costs, and so on, and B: it’d take pretty much something the size of the Texas Panhandle to provide fuel for the entire US.
According to wikipedia, ethanol has 20E6 joules per liter, so say 80E6 per gallon. They claim to produce 15E3 gallons per acre per year, so 1.2E12 joules per acre per year.
Thats ~ 3E8 joules per square meter per year, or 9 watts per square meter.
So 4.5% of the average mean insolation in temperate climates derived from eyeballing this picture
To compare with growing crops to produce ethanol, this process seems to be a lot better; From 270 to 870 gallons per acre for Sorghum, corn, sugar cane, etc.
Here in South Texas we have the King Ranch. It’s almost 1300 square miles of undeveloped ranch land adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. In Corpus Christi their is a lot of refineries and chemical industries producing lots of CO2. This would be a good area for them to look at as well.
If they could produce fuel for $30 a barrel then they would be doing it yesterday.
Read the article…the process is still in development, and everything is an estimate. My guess is that they aren’t factoring into those figures the initial capital costs of a full up system, nor the further development costs to get the process to the point where it could be scaled up.
-XT
Not if the profits at $30/bbl would only pay back the infrastructure costs over decades. It’s a bit difficult to decipher the $30 claim. If they mean that production costs once a plant is operational would be $30/bbl, then they need prices very significantly higher than that to make investing in building a plant an attractive proposition. We really don’t have anywhere near enough information to make any definitive statements about this.
I looked at the website. They might as well have announced they have a cold fusion reactor.
True, though I’d say that this is more plausible. There aren’t enough details to know if it’s total bullshit, partial bullshit or completely on the up and up and simply still in development. I don’t believe that anything they are claiming is impossible or even improbable.
-XT
It’s pretty light on detail, and heavy on promises at the moment.
Put it this way… I’d love it to be completely true, but if they went public tomorrow, I don’t think I’d rush to my broker.
This certainly looks to be for real. People like George Church would not tarnish their reputations by sitting on the company’s advisory board if it were complete fantasy. On the other hand, it is probably still far from being economically viable, but hopefully on a rapid development trajectory.
Efficient biofuel production is currently the “Holy Grail” of synthetic biology. People like George Church, Craig Venter, Jay Keasling, and many others, with armies of graduate students and postdocs, are working hard at it. The goal is to harness enzymes from multiple organisms and build biosynthetic pathways that can subvert the function of a microbe to produce vast quantities of liquid fuel from solar energy. Ethanol is not the ultimate desired fuel. Pentane is pretty close to ideal, but they’ll settle for butane, which could fit nicely into the gasoline/automobile infrastructure, unlike ethanol.
This kind of technology could be great, but it is still in its infancy.
A statement like that implies $30 is the break-even cost of production using ordinary accounting rules for amortized capital investment. Unless they have a scalable model it’s just an internet fantasy in search of money.
It sounds remarkably like other biodiesel from algae websites. Theory is exciting but I’d love a university lab model that shows it working. We’ve already tested algae diesel on aircraft. It’s certifiable right now but lacks that important part of the marketing mix of cost. There are many micro-scaled facilities working on it now.
Exciting to read about but lets see a working model.
Oh, I wouldn’t call it bullshit. One major difference is that unlike this process, biofuel production from bullshit has actually been demonstrated.
I was very interested in using algae to produce bio-diesel at one time, until I read a simple calculation about the maximum amount of energy that could be produced per square meter by any process based on photosynthesis. Once you did the math. then most of the forecasts of energy production from algae or any other biofuel turned out to not be reality based.
That doesn’t mean that algae might not be a highly efficient to way to produce food. Algae farming could be a food source that could feed billions of people without requiring fresh water or arable land or any land at all if we can run our algae farms off shore. The algae farms could be used to process our own sewage, so we could feed ourselves with our own wastes.
Even if the algae was used to mostly produce and animal and fish food, that would free up a lot of land for food crops for people or reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to produce food.
It can be grown vertically so I don’t see square footage as even a remote problem. We’ve got VAST amounts of land that could be used. Pipe water in from the gulf to texas and let the little buggers grow. Same thing applies to this thread’s newest invention.
Growing it vertically doesn’t really help. If you’ve got a big tall vertical tank, then it’s casting big shadows, so you’d have to space your tank towers far apart. Net effect is about the same as if you’d just grown it flat on the ground (plus the expense of building your vertical tank towers).
that’s how their doing it now. It doesn’t mean building a WTC, it just means the water tubes are built vertically. The idea is to build them next to power plants so casting a shadow on a power plant isn’t a problem. If it is a scalable process then they can be built on building roofs and any location that has water. Co2 would be much more transportable than oil half way around the world.
If the tubes are made of clear acrylic and filled with water containing the algae, would they cast that much of a shadow?
Vertical grow systems increase the probability that any given photon will be absorbed, but it doesn’t increase the number of photons impacting any given square meter of the earth’s surface. The calculations are already based on 100% absorption and represent the theoretical outer limit. In the real world, the numbers would be much lower. The advantage algae has over solar cells is that it is orders of magnitude cheaper than any solar cell we can make in cost per square meter.