will we ever see algae oil/gas?

[mopinko]

i have questions.

so the bp commercials are adorable and inspiring w their little skimmers swimming around the pretty pond. it's something that has been just down the pike for a pretty long time, even tho i keep hearing how simple it is.

so, is it actually simple?
this fits w my forever pet peeve w cafos, and using that shit for something. seems like it would be a potent feedstock for algae.
can you turn a manure lagoon into an algae pond?
pretty sure the tech for the skimmers is solid. what else needs to happen?
once you have algae, how do you turn it into gas?
is this a thing that could happen in rural america?

can you use any old algae?
so, can you skim the toxic algae blooms on lake eire, and around florida, then process that?
that seems doable. i assume that just dealing w the toxins would be a whole thing, but like always, strong shit is good for shit.
what do we know about the toxins? i know there is cyanide involved, and that bond is packed w energy. gotta be useful.

a side issue is that i have heard about algae used as a feed additive. seem to me if you can grow good algae on manure, you have a pretty tidy little loop there.
is this happening anywhere?

thoughts?

[Botany]

1. It might make exxon billions but it is all bull shit

In the front spot of those little critter is a dot of oil but even if you can raise those algae
and harvest the hydrocarbons when you burn that fuel you will make greenhouse gases .

[brush]

3. Exactly. Algae-generated oil is still oil that when burned will...

foul the atmosphere further.

And big oil is late to the party on this. The idea of harvesting algae for oil is at least 10 years old. It's a non-starter. I do like their intention however if it's to get away from drilling.

Good intention but they should spend their resources developing green energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal and wave-generated energy.

[lapfog_1]

4. no... I mean yes but the carbon used in the process is coming FROM the atmosphere

so there is actually no net increase in CO2 from the process.

Like almost all plants on earth, algae fixes CO2 from the atmosphere and releases it when the plant decays (or we extract the oil and burn it)

One thing we COULD explore is NOT burn the algae... i.e. grow vast quantities and simply dry it out and bury it (fixing the trapped CO2 in the earth... and making fossil fuel for somebody millions of years in the future - lol)

[mopinko]

8. maybe i am conflating 2 totally different things, but

the way i recall the discussion about it as animal feed was in relation to reducing belching in cows.
that is def something we need to do yesterday.

[lapfog_1]

9. methane is not CO2

We are talking only plants here, not animals..

[mopinko]

10. no, i was talking about cows.

the animal feed part of the question is a side shoot, but the point is that iirc, you can add algae/seaweed to cattle feed and they wont belch. i threw it in there mostly because my recollection is fuzzy, and was hoping someone knew.
esp as related to growing algae w manure, tho. tidy loop.

[lapfog_1]

13. oh, correct... algae oil "waste" product (dried algae without the oil)

makes for decent feed stock for animals (horses, cows, pigs).

[lapfog_1]

2. so having studied doing an algae oil farm 10 years ago

The following problems need to be solved:

1. Open air "raceway" ponds are subject to invasive species contamination. You see, there are only some algae that creates significant amount of oil, unfortunately, other species will invade your open air ponds and out compete your selected species for resource.

2. harvesting the algae requires some energy... you need to effective separate the algae from the water*. Filters are not that good because they clog up, so far one of the popular methods is a centrifuge (think large washing machine on spin).

3. splitting out the oil from the algae... more energy... more scale issues... and the algae cells have to be broken to retrieve the oil. The good news is that if you only centrifuge to concentrate the algae and not dry it completely... if you can then break the cell walls, getting oil from the remaining water in a gravity column (settling column) is pretty easy. So far, the difficulty is breaking the cell walls.

4. Acreage needed to produce a great deal of oil... it's very large... like significant portion of the western US large

5. At the end, you still need to process it to bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is not a good fit for the current fleet of cars... could be used in trucking and farm equipment... but there are emission drawbacks to this as well (N2O)

I haven't checked back with the industry to see if any or most of these problems have been solved in more than 5 years now, but some of them seemed pretty difficult.

[mopinko]

7. 2- seems to me

w computerized controls and solar powered "boats", could be pretty energy neutral.

1- i wonder is genetic mod would be valuable here. toughen up the best oil species?
yeah, i get that would be hard.
3- might be amenable to an assassin type virus?

thanks.

[lapfog_1]

12. Time to correct some other things

In the design in the BP commercials, there are no "Skimmers"

If you look at the picture closely you will see a sequence of U shaped ponds. At the "top" of each pond are a set of paddle wheels. These do two things, first they stir up the algae water (causing the algae growing at the bottom of the pond to move to the top and receive more sunlight), and it pushes the water/algae around the pond, sort of like a water "roller coaster".

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTPcVqO1aNv9n50VEDG_uhaV1HulCdhC1IrdBvLnPv88gZ5unWe&s

When the algae reaches a certain density, the entire pond is drained into a water / algae separation device that removes most of the water (centrifuge is what I've seen used).

That said, yes the paddle wheels could be solar powered, as could the centrifuge.

I haven't considered a Virus to invade the cells and break the cell walls... I've seen much more mechanical means used (press, rollers, even grit mixed in at the centrifuge). Any thing that will crush the structure of the cell walls. A Virus is interesting... so long as it doesn't become an issue in the post processing.

As to solving the invasive species issue, most have turned to a closed tube system (not open to the air but filtered air is bubbled through a column of algae water)...


https://www.google.com/search?q=biodiesel+algae&sxsrf=ACYBGNRDX0I2OIiH_66tYoFf8ZWLggtL6Q:1572657015637&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=wL98b08RtttEGM%253A%252CwkY4SCFz11YNKM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kR20YoASljt687ULzkrWePiPUusCA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj315T2q8rlAhUWrp4KHZtaBukQ_h0wHnoECAkQBQ&biw=1522&bih=706#imgdii=u_M0L3LKpG9YeM:&imgrc=JawHpp5noZcc-M:&vet=1

[msongs]

5. no market for it when internal combustion engines go extinct nt

[hatrack]

6. Vaporware at this point - it would be nice if we had 20 or 30 years to work through basic science .

And 10 or 20 years more to scale up something like this.

We don't.

At the moment, it's more greenwash for ExxonMobil, et. al. and eye candy for their TV ads about women in STEM careers, and Teh Children and pretty windmills and all the rest.

[customerserviceguy]

11. Not at today's oil prices

In my town, I can get a gallon of gas for $2.22.9, so that means that the per-barrel price is pretty low. I would imagine that algae oil/gas might work when the prices are $4-5 a gallon for gas, but we haven't seen that for quite some time.