Colorado Company Takes Algae-Based Fuel to the Next Level

A Colorado company will break ground early next year on an algae farm that is intended to produce thousands of gallons of substitutes for gasoline and diesel at a rate per acre far higher than current biofuel projects.

Solix Biofuels, of Fort Collins, said on Monday that it had raised $15.5 million in capital and would begin with a five-acre plot to produce "biocrude.'' That will in turn be shipped to an oil refinery in place of crude oil, according to Douglas R. Henston, the company CEO.

Algae has held special appeal for renewable energy researchers -- and some investors -- because the organism readily converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into a hydrocarbon fuel, producing an oil that can harvested for use as biodiesel. And the more CO2 present, the faster the algae grows. That holds the promise of cleaner-burning fuels that simultaneously scrub CO2 from the atmosphere during their production. Algae can also regenerate at a remarkable rate, doubling its volume in a matter of hours under the right conditions, and yielding far more of its body weight in oil than any biofuel feed stock currently in use.

Read the full story here.

Related:
Green Energy: Cost-Efficient Process Expected To Turn Algae Into Fuel
Pickens Delays Wind Farm Due To Cheaper Energy

Comments

[JuniorNorman]

BIO-ALGAE IS CENTRALLIZED ENERGY PRODUCTION!
Hemp is decentrallized energy production!
We will have to fight Dems to get hemp legalized!

[JBTenn]

Could KTM be a little more detailed in this explanation? I'm a retired mechanical engineer, and I'm having a little trouble following his number crunching.

His support of solar panels also seems to leave out the capital cost of the panels, and the need to replace and/or recycle them at some time interval. I know from experience that they don't last all that long, nor do the associated electronics.

Finally, does he favor some sort of modern Manhatten project to get really smart people looking at this serious, multi-variable problem?

[KillTheMessenger]

And once you have a chemical fuel, you have to convert it into useful mechanical or electric energy... and you lose at least another 40% right there, but in a conventional ICE you lose approx. 80% over electric. So that brings the required area ratio to achieve the same transportation job to somewhere between 15 and 500, depending on how poorly you chose your technologies.

The capital cost was part of my calculation and no amount of investment can get you around thermodynamics. It's not a multi-variable problem at all. The math required to see the reality of this is roughly eight grade multiplication and word problem solving once you are given all the required constants.

[JBTenn]

Perhaps the big picture is not multi-variable, going from area bathed in sunlight to conveyence rolling down the highway.

The details of getting there, however, are extremely multi-variable:

Source, availability and cost of material in solar panels.
ROI on said panels, given a MTBF and replacement interval.
Means of storing the energy output of any variable output device.
Moving the energy from optimum sunny area to area of need. (Desert to city)
Choice of fuel-cell, pneumatic, hybrid, all-electric, etc. conveyence.
Solving the 100 year problem of pathetic battery performance. (That's why we have nuclear submarines)

Bottom line - solve fusion problems or implement population control.

[KillTheMessenger]

Well, the argument boils down to biological organism being very inefficient. Macroscopic plants convert light on the level of 0.1-1% into useful chemical energy carriers, algae might be a little more efficient, but all are bound by the efficiency of photosynthesis, which is, at most 6.6%:

http://www.upei.ca/~physics/p261/Content/Sources_Conversion/Photo-_synthesis/photo-_synthesis.htm

As you can see, plants are green, so they do not absorb all light, only some part of the spectrum, otherwise they would have to be nearly black, like good solar panels. Add to that inevitable losses in the chemical synthesis chain and you are down to a couple percent light-to-fuel efficiency. Then the fuel needs to be processed to be useful in man made machines (sugar to ethanol, oil extraction etc.) and you lose, again. You have to provide nutrients to plants and algae, it's not just CO2 in as many believe, but also nitrates, phosphates etc. and those cost energy to make. You got losses all over the place. So at best you end up with a couple of percent efficiency. Solar panels can be made to have 15%-40% efficiency already and their thermodynamic limit is 96%. Solar is ahead by a factor of at least 10, but it could be over 100, depending on the bio-fuel.

[pokemon]

So what you have is basically a company that will be paid by other companies to harvest CO2. They will not only make money buy selling the bio-oil, but companies will pay them to off set their own carbon emissions. Actually a great idea if they can make it work. Would be a solid company to invest in if you care not about losing the money:)

So they basically set up scrubbers in the air to take out the CO2, pump it to the tanks growning green gunk.. how smart. I bet they expect to take a loss on the green bio-oil, get the tax break, and make on the other side off settting the CO2 from other companies. Amazing

[KillTheMessenger]

If you haven't noticed yet... a power company making CO2 and paying an algae company to get rid of it is nothing but a Rube Goldberg machine. If no CO2 is supposed to be generated in the process, one would have to feed the algae remains back into the power plant furnace... no coal or natural gas needed. But then, obviously, all of the net energy would come from photosynthesis, effectively making this a solar plant. But since the thermodynamic efficiency of direct conversion in silicon or another semiconductor is orders of magnitude higher than any chemical process can be, replacing the Rube Goldberg power plant/algae farm with solar panels yields orders of magnitudes more energy.

QED.

[ranchosx]

still a forward thinking idea. when those rubes were chanting drill baby drill i would say analog baby analog

[KillTheMessenger]

Please take a class in thermodynamics and then come back and apologize for calling this a "forward looking idea".

[zyxwvutsrqpo]

I know this may sound like crazy talk but...
Couldn't they double their production by say... building a large two story building???
Hey, maybe they could go all out and tripple it by adding one more floor!

[joebaggadonuts]

I think I saw this picture before.... it's from the Chinese clearing the algae from a bay prior to the olympics, right?

[KillTheMessenger]

It's for sure the wrong type of algae... and you are probably right. But then, it's an AP picture, it's on the internet, so it must be "real". Right?

:-)

[KillTheMessenger]

Let's see... five acres... that's 20,000 square meters. Right now a square meter of solar panel can be had for about $500. So those 20,000m^2 could be covered with solar panels at a cost of $10 million. And how much energy would that produce? Roughly 20W on average per square meter, or something on the order of 400kW in total. Over the course of one year that's 1.2e13J or roughly 100,000 gallons worth of gasoline. And if we used it for transportation in plug-in hybrids it would equal some two-three times as much because of the efficiency gain over conventional cars. So by doing nothing but installing five acres of solar cells for the money these people could make energy worth roughly 200,000-300,000 gallons. Instead they are promising us "thousands of gallons", which, even under optimistic assumptions sounds like an order of magnitude less.

Sound like a bad deal? It doesn't just sound like one. It is a bad deal. But they don't want you to know that and assume that you won't do a laugh test.

[joebaggadonuts]

Hey, no fair using real numbers! ;)

Seriously though, the entrenched fuel industry will push this regardless of the numbers because they want to keep reaping profits from existing "plant" and equipment. What we need is real investment - in things like the solar panels you compare this item to - to get us moving again.

Thanks KTM for all you do.

[KillTheMessenger]

It's the next "corn ethanol". And, yes, we will fall for it and the taxpayer will transfer billions of dollars to con-men for yet another false hope.

[DrVeruju]

Feed the algae directly with the CO2 from coal power stations? (I wonder how many acres of algae would be needed to continuously convert all the CO2 from a power station to crude.)

[KillTheMessenger]

It takes 5km^2 of area to receive as much energy from the sun as a 1GWe coal fired power plant puts out. Roughly 10km^2 if we take combustion efficiency into account. Now assume a one percent light to chemical efficiency for those algea... so that makes 1000km^2 for one power plant.

In other words: this thing does not even pass the laugh test. It's a great way to defraud investors, though, who have a magical worldview and can't crunch the numbers.

:-)

[JBTenn]

So help us, KTM, understand your answers to the following:
1. Solar power, using PV cells, is the long-term answer to the problem. Yes or No.
2. Does fusion or fission play any role in the long-term solution?
3. It is necessary to have a transitional period to get to all energy from solar?
4. If a transition is necessary, is it CNG, oil shale, tar sands, bio-mass, geo-thermal?

BTW, if you've ever done the arithmetic on solar powering a home, you shoud be aware that it takes a huge area of panels to to accomplish what we have come to think of as Reddy Kilowatt magic. And whale oil, kerosene, or candles aren't allowed.

[Eusebio]

Dr. Veruju, your idea of feeding the algae with exhaust from CO2 producing thermal power plants was one that was considered viable a few years ago. A company called Green Fuel Technologies based in Cambridge, MA attempted a pilot project using this exact strategy at the Redhawk power facility in Arizona.

While I don't match KilltheMessengers level of pessimism, there were serious setbacks in the implementation of this technology. And while it's easy to criticize these operations having the benefit of hindsight, I don't think we should always be discouraged by initial failures. That's what science is. I'm glad there are people out there willing to fail whilst attempting to make breakthroughs in all scientific fields because their contributions are often vital to our successes. We need to sensibly pursue as many energy alternatives as possible. I think the strategy that these companies are pursuing is still in its infancy and warrants further study.

[KillTheMessenger]

Please see my other comments for why it's a Rube Goldberg machine, which negates any and all arguments about this "being still in its infancy" and "needing further study" because that argument is analogous to "research" into perpetual motion machines.

The idea to generate energy with algae has been under investigation by numerous research groups long before GFT. The DOE spent millions on it and got extremely poor results.

This ain't science, by the way. Science is about explaining how nature works and nothing else. Power generation with algae falls under hard core engineering.