Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab • Hacker News Board

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#31

Post by VLM » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:34 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #19

and with the Mexican government stepping away from restrictions of foreign investment in their oil fields will technology like this ever take off or need too? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-16/north-america-to-dr...

LOL no Mexicos Hubbert peak was about a decade ago. Cantarell is bouncing along empty, Chicontepec is useless, economically unviable for geological reasons. And they don't have much else worth mentioning. (edited to add, duh I'm obviously talking about geological petroleum reserves not some kind of racial/cultural commentary)

Its kind of like guano "production" from a century ago... Once its removed and shipped out, its gone, and all the money in the world isn't going to make shippable product appear out of thin air.

You're talking about two different scales. MX will never pump more oil than they did at peak a long time ago. That doesn't mean fat stacks of cash can't be made on the downslope or political intrigue can't be useful. For example, petroleum revenue declines are already causing a financial / political crisis in MX so transferring the blame from PEMEX to "vague groups of rich foreigners" is a wise political move as its always better for a local to blame the foreigners than the other locals. So the Cantarell tank is almost empty, almost entirely pumped out; better to blame Exxon than the CEO of PEMEX, at least if you're the leader of MX, at least on paper (the actual guys running MX are the drug gang leaders, which is a whole nother topic... take away petroleum revenues and legalize weed in the USA at the same time and MX would make Somalia look rich which is a crisis not just for MX but their neighbor to the north, which as a real political issue is why the USA will never legalize weed until long after the oil downslope is all resolved in MX... intentionally collapsing a neighboring country with a completely permeable land border is almost as dumb as the idea of the war on some drugs)

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#32

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:38 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #23

charlieflowers wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if this could be done in space? A few months ago I read about the idea of solar energy being captured in space, and I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it. If the algae could grow in space, and this process could occur in space, then we could wastefully convert solar to oil in space, and spacecraft could use that oil in space. Lot of if's and speculation ther…

I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix. That and the relative lack of local oxygen. I get what you're saying though, its a heck of a lot more rational to design and airdrop an algae plant on Mars than to expect oil wells to produce on Mars.

> I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix.

Not as much in near-Earth orbit where we enjoy much of the Earth's magnetic field's protection. Astronauts come back with an elevated risk of cancer but not tremendously so.

> That and the relative lack of local oxygen.

Grow some photosynthetic algae too, which'll convert sunlight to oxygen.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#33

Post by sp332 » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:41 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #32

VLM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix. That and the relative lack of local oxygen. I get what you're saying though, its a heck of a lot more rational to design and airdrop an algae plant on Mars than to expect oil wells to produce on Mars.

> I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix. Not as much in near-Earth orbit where we enjoy much of the Earth's magnetic field's protection. Astronauts come back with an elevated risk of cancer but not tremendously so. > That and the relative lack of local oxygen. Grow some photosynthetic algae too, which'll convert sunlight to oxygen.

I can't tell if you're joking, but photosynthesis rearranges carbon dioxide and water into sugars, releasing some of the oxygen from the water molecules.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#34

Post by hobbes300 » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:42 PM UTC

charlieflowers wrote: post #22

dagw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not sure it is positive. It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.

Wonder if this could be done in space? A few months ago I read about the idea of solar energy being captured in space, and I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it. If the algae could grow in space, and this process could occur in space, then we could wastefully convert solar to oil in space, and spacecraft could use that oil in space. Lot of if's and speculation ther…

> I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it

Lasers

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#35

Post by blisterpeanuts » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:48 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #20

dagw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not sure it is positive. It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.

Nuclear. You want to generate a lot of heat and you don't have geothermal energy handy, you go nuclear. You could make the whole facility mechanical - the heat from the reactor is used to heat the algae and use steam-driven pumps to create the pressure. Eliminate the electrical middleman.

That's actually a cool idea. A nuclear plant that generates petroleum products! There might be power left over to feed into the grid, too.

I'm sure environmentalists would have a field day with this concept.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#36

Post by mseebach » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:49 PM UTC

peg_leg wrote: post #30

I'm still against it. Burning caloric mass for energy when so much energy is around us is just plain ignorant. We need to move to solar and wind power.

The energy content in algae comes from the sun, so this is solar energy, just being captured in the form of liquid hydrocarbons instead of electricity.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#37

Post by VLM » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:50 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #7

lucaspiller wrote: post #5

Assuming you get the energy for the process to make it from renewable sources, how 'green' would the useful energy in terms of fuel be at the end?

As green as it gets, since the CO2 that is released from burning the fuel has been taken out of the atmosphere by the algae a short time before that. The only issue is to take care of the byproducts and algae production process, which can create local pollution issues - cheaper not to do it, but nothing that hasn't been done before in sufficient scale.

Don't forget capex... need the plant to depreciate slowly enough / be ecologically profitable enough that the ecological value of the biofuel produced exceeds the coal burned to make the concrete and steel to make the plant.

Its not just bulk concrete but SCADA control systems and catalysts and exotic stuff like that.

Without crude oil, its an open question if the high capex algae plant will win, or just have humans sow and harvest and press sunflower seeds into sunflower oil which works perfectly well in Diesel engines and the "plant" doesn't really have a capex (a wood press and some cloth filters?). Of course its not as if only capex has an environmental cost, a couple thousand human ag laborers has a certain environmental impact too, even if (especially if?) you treat them inhumanely.

During the recent ethanol bubble, some stills never refined enough EtOH to make up their cost of production much less the ecological costs of building the plant. If it takes 100K barrels of diesel equiv to make an ethanol bubble era plant, and the plant only refines 10K barrels of EtOH before the bubble crashes, that's a net loss of 90K barrels from the planet not a gain to the planet of 10K barrels. Those numbers are kind of made up, but not as much as you'd think.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#38

Post by thelambentonion » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC

charlieflowers wrote: post #22

dagw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not sure it is positive. It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.

Wonder if this could be done in space? A few months ago I read about the idea of solar energy being captured in space, and I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it. If the algae could grow in space, and this process could occur in space, then we could wastefully convert solar to oil in space, and spacecraft could use that oil in space. Lot of if's and speculation ther…

>> how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it

I've always thought that a rectenna[1] would be the most efficient way to send power from orbit down to Earth.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#39

Post by VLM » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 4:03 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #33

ceejayoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix. Not as much in near-Earth orbit where we enjoy much of the Earth's magnetic field's protection. Astronauts come back with an elevated risk of cancer but not tremendously so. > That and the relative lack of local oxygen. Grow some photosynthetic algae too, which'll convert sunlight to oxygen.

I can't tell if you're joking, but photosynthesis rearranges carbon dioxide and water into sugars, releasing some of the oxygen from the water molecules.

And when you burn the algae sourced synthetic kerosene and algae sourced O2 in your rocket engine (or whatever you're doing with it) you'll run out of water. And its dumb to ship unprocessed water up into space if you can use cheap earth based refineries to ship the same weight of highly refined fuel. Keep those heavy refineries at the bottom of the gravity well unless you have a really good reason to hoist them up.

So that was the origin of my idea that this isn't going to scale in space "in general". I'm told Europa has a lot of water, other than the whole lack of sunlight thing, I could see Europa as the "fuel tank of the solar system" in the future. Maybe it could be economically viable to mine comets and turn them into fuel while they're near the sun? Or mine icy asteroids?

I think you're going to overall have more trouble finding water in space than energy.

Re: Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

#40

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 4:07 PM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #35

Pxtl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear. You want to generate a lot of heat and you don't have geothermal energy handy, you go nuclear. You could make the whole facility mechanical - the heat from the reactor is used to heat the algae and use steam-driven pumps to create the pressure. Eliminate the electrical middleman.

That's actually a cool idea. A nuclear plant that generates petroleum products! There might be power left over to feed into the grid, too. I'm sure environmentalists would have a field day with this concept.

The algae farms should make it carbon-neutral, at least.