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

pnnl.gov

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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

crpatino wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

And this boys and girls: ""Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research. "We believe that the process we've created will help make algae biofuels much more economical." Is why we won't run out of 'oil' at any time. Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Of course at…

> Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Sorry, but this is just ignorant nonsense. EROEI is what counts here, not raw "profits". If your $500/barrel price point was calculated using inputs that require total energy investment equivalent to 2 barrels of oil @ $150/barrel... this is a stupid way of burning perfectly good and relatively cheap natu…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by readlarryniven »

charlieflowers wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The algae->oil part of the process necessarily loses energy, so it all comes down to the process of turning sun into algae. Which is not itself very efficient, but may be cheaply scalable. I think if you just care about renweable EROI and not about storage in convenient petrol form then wind and solar are still the winners.

Science fiction story just popped into my head: The story starts with people terraforming a planet and turning it into a giant algae-growing factory, for the purpose of creating oil from it. Whole plots with interesting characters occur. Then, suddenly, towards the end, those people abandon the whole project to go fight a war in their own galaxy. Then, the story ends with the shocking twist ... somehow you find out t…

In Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories, one bit of backstory is that billions of years ago the Slaver empire colonized planets with yeast to feed to their livestock -- giant bioengineered slugs. In his "World of Ptavvs" he describes a survivor coming out of stasis on earth, long after the fall of the Slaver empire, very confused about what happened to his planet...

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

#74

Post by ARothfusz »

I don't understand the introduction: "0:15 as part of an effort to reduce use of traditional fuels like oil 0:19 which contribute to climate change"

How would using algae as a source of oil not contribute to climate change? You'd still burn it in all the old familiar ways.

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

#75

Post by scarmig »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #58
johnchristopher wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus spoke our prophet: Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. If anyone should like space solar power, it should be me. I got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be really on it, ya know. But it's like, super obviously, not going to work because, ya know, if you have solar panels - first of all, it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, so the…

Isn't the point of solar in space, well, space? You get less efficiency, but you are not going to run out of deserts nearly as fast. So the ultimate scale is not limited.

Are we really running out of deserts anytime soon? Isn't the issue more the capital and labor intensity of harvesting energy from sunlight, and transporting that energy to places that actually need it?

Space exacerbates those two issues.

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

#76

Post by maxerickson »

dclusin wrote: post #72

Oil is a wonder molecule that is used as an input in thousands of industrial processes. Burning it to extract energy is just the use case people understand. Which is unfortunate.

If you are going to say something like that you should at least say "extract energy".

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

#77

Post by tsomctl »

ARothfusz wrote: post #74

I don't understand the introduction: "0:15 as part of an effort to reduce use of traditional fuels like oil 0:19 which contribute to climate change" How would using algae as a source of oil not contribute to climate change? You'd still burn it in all the old familiar ways.

Because in the process of creating the oil algae uses carbon dioxide. The net cycle is 0.

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

#78

Post by scarmig »

ori_b wrote: post #42
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…

The problem is that algae is biomass. Thanks to conservation of mass, whatever amount of biomass you bring down from space needs to come from somewhere, and space is famously devoid of mass, let alone anything for algae to consume. That means that the problem of algae farms in space becomes one putting algae food into orbit. I'm not sure how effective launching literally tons of material into space will be.

Tons is an understatement.

You're forgetting the one plausible energy source, however: the gravitational energy that the biomass has in outerspace. If you could figure out how to capture the energy of millions of tons of material moving from orbit to the Earth's surface, that might be able to provide the large majority of the energy needed to bring it up there in the first place.

I wonder how efficient we could make space elevators.

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

#79

Post by JoeAltmaier »

crpatino wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

And this boys and girls: ""Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research. "We believe that the process we've created will help make algae biofuels much more economical." Is why we won't run out of 'oil' at any time. Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Of course at…

> Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Sorry, but this is just ignorant nonsense. EROEI is what counts here, not raw "profits". If your $500/barrel price point was calculated using inputs that require total energy investment equivalent to 2 barrels of oil @ $150/barrel... this is a stupid way of burning perfectly good and relatively cheap natu…

Its a way to convert one sort of energy to another. E.g. solar to petro. Its sensible, has a place in our economy, and is not ignorant, though the article didn't make this all clear.
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