Alternative : Biofuels - Algae

I personally believe that cynobacteria is coming faster than you think. I just wish graphine, fullerines and other high-strength carbon based nano-materials can become commonplace someday soon and replace all the steel, plastic and aluminum in cars at much reduced mass. That seems to be ever too far away. Personally, I think, much to my chagrin as an EV enthusiast, that 10 years from now there'll be a plethora of oil generated in the United States due to engineered photosynthetic bacteria, probably enough to meet our future more energy-efficient needs by 2025. And it's likely an Oil company is going to own the patent on it. Of course, we've been studying cancer for more than half a century and we still don't have turn-key cure, so I could be wrong.

Either way, what I think we need most of all is an Affordable Electric Car NOW (and here!).

TimeHorse said:

I personally believe that cynobacteria is coming faster than you think.

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I've checked the whole algae biofuel thing in quite a bit of detail. I was bullish on some of the companies too. But I now believe it won't save us. Thermodynamics is unforgiving. So is evolution.

Yes, there are some niche applications where we can use them. But to ramp up on a scale that makes a dent in our stupendous oil use seems a pipe dream.

Robert Rapier's articles on them have been illuminating too.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7214

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2009/09/07/biofuel-niches/

As always, there is a lot of stupid money put into algae. Some unscrupulous promoters even promise more yields per acre than the solar energy falling per acre. And those apparently are the ones that get funded best ! If you are realistic and tell the truth, you won't get much money (Sapphire Energy is an exception).

We might not "organize ourselves" to effectively counter Oil, but if we do NOT, it (and the wars we wage over it) may well "counter" (bankrupt) us into a huge depression, making the small recession that we are seeing now ... appear really quite good.

garygid said:

We might not "organize ourselves" to effectively counter Oil, but if we do NOT, it (and the wars we wage over it) may well "counter" (bankrupt) us into a huge depression, making the small recession that we are seeing now ... appear really quite good.

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I think the last few years have already told us how our government has decided to tackle this issue - grab what is left using force rather than "organize ourselves" to effectively. Given that Cheney has talked about Peak Oil and Matt Simmons was an advisor to Cheney - there is little doubt Bush administration knew about peak oil quite well.

there is always a lot of discussion on how we will pay for emerging technology, but we need to understand how much we are paying for oil and what that same amount of money can buy.

single years oil bill; 350 to 400 billion. that is obviously going much higher.

a fully integrated high efficiency national power grid; 150 billion

high efficiency wind generators providing "up to 75% of our current power needs (average output would be around 40%); 300 billion

national high speed train system; 1.5-2.5 trillion. yea, that is a lot but still only a half dozen years of oil cost. add a trillion and we could reduce truck traffic on roads by 70%. no more long haul trucks. they would all be local, driving less than 200 miles, home for dinner every night and no more worrying whether that trucker next to you has had enough sleep.

i would put in solar but their cost is dropping like a rock. but there is a bit of a supply issue. wind turbines have the same supply issues but we only need just over a million wind turbines verses tens of millions of solar panels.

either way, there is no one answer. our power will have to come from every source possible and it will require a monumental level of cooperation from all levels of industry and government to work.

we mentioned a "WW2" like effort. well, ya. that is exactly what we need. we all need to come to the understanding that buying oil is simply making our enemies too strong

There are some parties making BIG BUCKS on the wars, and they, like Oil, are primarily looting our country. Follow the money ... right up to the "We don't know where it went!".

Hello,
For oil pricing I use www.cmegroup.com

DaveinOlyWA said:

i would put in solar but their cost is dropping like a rock. but there is a bit of a supply issue. wind turbines have the same supply issues but we only need just over a million wind turbines verses tens of millions of solar panels.

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For large-scale power generation, Solar-Thermal is the way to go; they use a liquid, heated in a tower to expand and turn a generator and because the liquid can be stored after heating instead of being used right away, they can generate power for hours after the sun sets.

Well put, EV Now! 680 W m-2 average over the sunlit half of the Earth, with high-latitudes getting much less and equatorial getting much more. Anyone claiming more than that, especially in Texas or farther from the equator is definitely all smoke and mirrors. I doubt though Exxon / Esso / Mobile is going for the smoke and mirrors because as a business it needs to find an alternate to ground-based petroleum and sees the need to do better than the abysmal Corn Ethanol product. Heck, even Bush's suggestion of Switch Grass is a better biofuel ingredient than Corn, and Poplar trees grow like nobody's brother so they'd make great hydrocarbon sources too.

So what is the Theoretical Max? Diesel has a Specific Energy Density of 1.72326 * 10**15 kg m / s**4 and an Energy Density of 37.3 * 10**9 of J/m**3. A bacterium is about 10**-4 m in radius, or has a surface area of about 3.14 * 10**-8 m**2. The bacterium is therefore on average receiving 2.14 * 10**-5 Watts of energy or 2.14 * 10**-5 Joules per second or 46,729 seconds for every Joule or just under 13 hours. That represents 5.74 * 10**-16 cubic meters of diesel per second.

The rest of the text has been excised and replaced with the following post: http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=48241#p48241

Now clearly no bacterium could produce that much material in a second no matter how efficient so it seems to me the real limitation is not solar input but just that the very idea that that much carbon, oxygen, carbon dioxide and fuel could be processed in that amount of time is pretty ludicrous. None the less, I think reality will lay somewhere in between the theoretical maximum and something as simple as a 1% per volume per day of diesel fuel, which is a small fraction of the maximum possible solar conversion.

Anyway, I went through those calculations hastily so please feel free to correct them and sorry if my figures are off.

TimeHorse said:

680 W m-2 average over the sunlit half of the Earth, with high-latitudes getting much less and equatorial getting much more. Anyone claiming more than that, especially in Texas or farther from the equator is definitely all smoke and mirrors.

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Not sure where you got that figure. It's not like we have to guess or approximate about the insolation values here... Middle of Texas? ~6kWh per day per square meter. If we're talking algae production then the best place would actually be in Mexico just off the Gulf of California, so you could use seawater and tides to purge the growing ponds, and you get a little more insolation, but let's roll with 6kWh/day.

TimeHorse said:

So what is the Theoretical Max?

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6kWh/day/sq.m * 4046 sq.m/acre = 24,276kWh/day/acre, * 365 days/year = 8.86 GWh/year/acre, or 31.9 TJ. Bio-D has about 10% less energy per volume than Petrol-D: 33 MJ/Liter. So at 100% efficiency we can produce...3.19e13 / 33e6 = ~966,000 liters (~255,000 US gallons) per acre per year.

In reality, it's less - claims have been as high as 20,000 US gallons per year per acre (75,700 liters). About 7.8% of max theoretical. That doesn't seem unreasonable to claim IMHO. Optimistic, but not unreasonable.

I honestly can't tell if your calculations are off because they are impossible for me to follow. :?
=Smidge=

Smidge204 said:

TimeHorse said:

680 W m-2 average over the sunlit half of the Earth, with high-latitudes getting much less and equatorial getting much more. Anyone claiming more than that, especially in Texas or farther from the equator is definitely all smoke and mirrors.

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Not sure where you got that figure. It's not like we have to guess or approximate about the insolation values here... Middle of Texas? ~6kWh per day per square meter.

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680 W m^-2 averaged over the area of the sunlit Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Incoming_energy

680 W m^-2 corresponds to 16.32 kWh day^-1 m^-2 using your units, and as I said Texas would not be getting that at such a high latitude, which agrees with your calculation of 6 kWh day^-1 m^-2. Thus, your calculations should be a little more than 1/3 of mine.

Smidge204 said:

TimeHorse said:

So what is the Theoretical Max?

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6kWh/day/sq.m * 4046 sq.m/acre = 24,276kWh/day/acre, * 365 days/year = 8.86 GWh/year/acre, or 31.9 TJ.

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31.9 TJ -- I believe you mean TJ year^-1 acre^-1.

Smidge204 said:

I honestly can't tell if your calculations are off because they are impossible for me to follow. :?

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I agree with your calculations Smidge; I've explained my Solar radiation calculation, which does not include atmospheric effects and other losses of power for the solar radiation so I am happy to go with 250 W m**-2 in the calculation. Also, I have no problem with using the Energy Density of Ethanol over Diesel because we're looking for an order of magnitude here, not an exact calculation.

Then, I took things from a different direction; instead of calculating energy per acre, I calculate energy per bacterium since I want to see what the biological output would have to be to achieve theoretical max. How much material must a cyanobacterium generate per second to achieve theoretical max.

So, using your 6 kWh day**-1 m**-2, or 250 W m**-2, multiply by the top surface area of a cyanobacterium, about 3.14E-8 m**2 to get the total power received by the bacterium during the day: 7.85E-6 W or 7.85 microwatts. My prior calculation came to 21.4 microwatts, a little less than 3 times yours, which so far agrees given our different starting values for the solar radiation. Of course, 7.85E-6 W is the same as 7.85E-6 J sec**-1, which is 127 thousand seconds for each Joule in your case or about a little under 1 1/2 days for each cyanobacterium to produce a Joule of energy -- actually, about 3 days because half of the day is night.

Finally, to go from J/s to L/s, we need to divide by the Energy Density of our destination material. In this case, we've chosen Ethanol at 33 MJ/L or 33E6 J/L or 3.03E-8 L/J. Multiplying 3.03E-8 L/J * 7.85E-6 W gives us 2.38E-13 L/s -- which I think is where my calculation went off. Maybe I multiplied by accident?

Anyway, so we get 2.38E-13 L/s or 2.38E-16 m**3 / s or 1.03E-8 L per 12-hour day and 3.75 microliters per year (of 12-hour days).

Since bacteria can be relatively densely packed, the real question I have is can a biological entity produce that much material?

In the end, I think you're right Smidge and sorry for the typo in the final calculation. Seems we basically agree now, it's just a matter for me of breaking it down to 2 levels:

1. How much material can a genetically-engineered cyanobacterium create in a day
2. How densely can you pack cyanobacteria
3. How many molecules of Ethanol does 2.38E-13 L actually represent? How much carbon dioxide? How much water?

Oooh ya forgot about the solar molten salts system. This also addresses the power storage issues as well. Only drawback is the large investment and land requirements which is easy to meet in the west anyway. But several very successful projects in australia that could easily be done thru out the american southwest.

TimeHorse said:

The bacterium is therefore on average receiving 2.14 * 10**-5 Watts of energy or 2.14 * 10**-5 Joules per second or 46,729 seconds for every Joule or just under 13 hours. That represents 574 cubic meters of diesel per second.

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You got that wrong. You are saying 13 hours for a bacterium to receive 1 Joule of energy. That is definitely not 574 cubic meters of diesel / second - since as you say diesel has 37.3 * 10**9 of J/m**3.

evnow said:

TimeHorse said:

The bacterium is therefore on average receiving 2.14 * 10**-5 Watts of energy or 2.14 * 10**-5 Joules per second or 46,729 seconds for every Joule or just under 13 hours. That represents 574 cubic meters of diesel per second.

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You got that wrong. You are saying 13 hours for a bacterium to receive 1 Joule of energy. That is definitely not 574 cubic meters of diesel / second - since as you say diesel has 37.3 * 10**9 of J/m**3.

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I stand by the 13 hours, but yes, I think I multiplied instead of divided; the result should be on the order of 10**-16, not 10**2 L/s, as corrected in a later post.

Smidge204 said:

In reality, it's less - claims have been as high as 20,000 US gallons per year per acre (75,700 liters). About 7.8% of max theoretical. That doesn't seem unreasonable to claim IMHO. Optimistic, but not unreasonable.

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I'm looking for a long interview I read on this topic. When I find it I'll post. That is the source of what I wrote.

Here it is.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v27/n1/full/nbt0109-15.html

Near-term technologies may allow algae to produce up to 6,000 gallons of oil per acre per year (gal/ac/yr). “If you really push the limits, then maybe 10,000 gallons per acre,” says Ron Pate, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This figure could improve with advances in cultivation, species selection, breeding and genetic modification, but only to a certain extent. The laws of thermodynamics and the limits of photosynthetic efficiencies just won't allow it. “When you see 20,000 or beyond—that's total bologna,” says Pate. “It isn't going to happen.”

Yet there are companies claiming they can make up to 100,000 gal/ac/yr, and raking in tens of millions in investment based on those promises. “The moment their production goes over a certain prediction of gallons per acre, you know they are not serious,” says Polle, who has supplied algal strains to startups. “Only a handful of companies are really serious.”

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May be I should split the thread.

TimeHorse said:

680 W m^-2 corresponds to 16.32 kWh day^-1 m^-2 using your units, and as I said Texas would not be getting that at such a high latitude, which agrees with your calculation of 6 kWh day^-1 m^-2. Thus, your calculations should be a little more than 1/3 of mine.

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Well I'm saying you don't have to calculate it in that roundabout way - we have actual data we can use. You're starting with an average power over the entire sunlit planet and trying to generalize energy sums for a location... I'm going directly to measured energy sums.

Also, you start with 680w but end up with 16.32kWh/day - there aren't many places where you get 24 hours of sunlight! For PV design calcs I usually figure 8 hours a day of usable sunlight, so this is where the factor-of-3 difference comes from.

Another error is in the fact that the kWh/day insolation does not scale linearly with latitude. Again, going directly to the measured energy instead of working with averages bypasses this problem. This is why the error between us is not exactly 3, but slightly less.

TimeHorse said:

31.9 TJ -- I believe you mean TJ year^-1 acre^-1.

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Yes. 8.86 GWh = 31.9TJ with the per-units remaining the same.

TimeHorse said:

Also, I have no problem with using the Energy Density of Ethanol over Diesel because we're looking for an order of magnitude here, not an exact calculation.

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I used the density of biodiesel, not ethanol. I was making a sort-of-indirect reply to a comment on algae biodiesel production.

TimeHorse said:

How many molecules of Ethanol does 2.38E-13 L actually represent? How much carbon dioxide? How much water?

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At least this much is simple chemistry...

Punchline: For each liter of pure ethanol (at 20C) burned, you get 1509.3 grams of CO2 and 926.1 grams of H2O. If anyone really want I'll show the math.

Now you can multiply all this by 2.38E-13 if you really want and get your final answer.

evnow said:

Here it is.

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Splendid! I agree that 100,000 gal/acre/year is totally out there - even if they're using grow-lights 24/7. 20,000 is right on the theoretical edge 0 sugar cane has a photosynthetic efficiency of about 7-8%, which matches the 7.8% of max theoretical 20,000 gallons represents. (Okay, maybe that figure is a lot more optimistic and a lot less unreasonable :lol: still theoretically possible, though, especially if grow lights are employed.)

Splitting the topic might be a good idea. Guess it's hard to stay on topic on these forums
=Smidge=

Edit: Forgot to close a size tag

I think the author is on the right track, EV Now. Seems to me again the real problem is understanding the limits of the Calvin cycle -- which turns Carbon Dioxide and Water into Sugar (Glucose) and the process by which sugar is decomposed into hydrocarbon chains, i.e. oil. Some of the energy is definitely dissipated as heat in each reaction, which means more energy lost. But the Calvin cycle is fairly efficient having evolved over, oh, say 2 and a half billion years. But when you're talking about 10**-16 L per second, what I want to know is how many Glucose atoms is that per second? How much Water and Carbon Dioxide? That is a small amount of substance, to be sure, but you can still fit a butt-load of atoms in 7.85E-16 L.

Wait, here you go: Ethanol's Specific Energy is 42.20E6 J/kg or 2.37E-8 kg/J, so the total mass of material per second under Smidge's numbers is 7.85E-6 J/sec * 2.37E-8 kg/J = 1.86E-13 kg/s. The atomic weight of Glucose (the Calvin part of the process) is 0.180156 kg/mol or about 5.55 mol/kg. Again, multiplying, we get 1.03E-12 mol/s. Now, taking Avagadro's number 6.022142E23 Molecules/mol we can get a rough estimate of the number of Glucose molecules that represents by another multiplication: 6.22E11 molecules per second! There's your limit. It takes 6 spins of the Carbon cycle to create a Glucose molecule and 6 Carbon Dioxide atoms to boot. Now with multiple enzymes a cell could have multiple Calvin cycles going at once, but only to a limit. In the end, I've no idea how much a Glucose a cyanobacterium could produce in a second; maybe it's on the order of 1, maybe 100, maybe 1E6. Maybe it could even be engineered to do 6.22E11 but again, there's a lot of thermal waste there (Entropy Increases) and I'd probably guess no more than 1E6 at best, but IANABC.

Smidge204 said:

Also, you start with 680w but end up with 16.32kWh/day - there aren't many places where you get 24 hours of sunlight! For PV design calcs I usually figure 8 hours a day of usable sunlight, so this is where the factor-of-3 difference comes from.

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Technically, the 680 W/m**2 represents all daylight areas of the Earth since it represents the average over the area of the sunlit Earth. I agree though that as I pointed out later that we need to differentiate between the 12-hour, 8-hour and 24-hour day. Thank you for your corrections.

One way to think of this whole algae thing is to start looking at it as farming rather than PV. So apart from sunlight we need to focus on nutrients, water and ofcourse weeds.

"UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification."

"According to Stephen Voller CEO at Cella Energy, the technology was developed using advanced materials science, taking high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying."

Another company working on a fuel alternative… the more the merrier.