Algae Study Attacked By Biofuel Companies

The New York Times:

In a face-off between academia and industry, algae biofuel companies have made a joint statement decrying recent research that highlights algae's drawbacks.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, found that algae production can be energy intensive and can end up emitting more greenhouse gases than it sequesters.

Read the whole story: The New York Times

Comments

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

04:27 PM on 01/28/2010

Algae biofuels will never be really practical for the kind of massive scale energy production needed to power 'the American way of life'.
The effectiveness of photosynthetic biofuels are limited by the relatively poor conversion efficiencies of green plants. Producing any signifigant amount of energy collection require ENORMOUS collection areas. You can't grow enough algae in test tubes to make enough to be worthwhile, if you have a collection area a fair fraction of the size of one of the great lakes there is no way to prevent contamination with the hundreds of species of 'weed' algae whose spores are floating around the atmosphere in astronomical quantities. These algae don't have to 'waste' (from their perspective) energy growing fuel for our Canyonero's and will ALWAYS crowd out biofuel optimized algae. Arm waving about supposed new generations strains or essentially nonexistent proprietary technologies do not refute these fundamental physical and biological issues.

We could reduce our energy consumption without reducing our GDP by 20%-30% using off the shelf technology at ZERO NET COST.
We could do reduce it by 50%+ by redesigning our lifestyles to require less energy, again at ZERO NET COST.
Conservation will ALWAYS be a better option than pouring money into dubious schema for untried , or physically unviable energy technologies. All we lack is the will to do it.

[urchinsadrift]

10:19 PM on 01/28/2010

The sewage treatment facilities that serve 300 million americans ARE vast sources. And continuous supply. Certainly there is SOME energy to be harvested there.

[urchinsadrift]

01:43 PM on 01/28/2010

I did read the article. The 'scientists' complained that fertilizer was necessary to make algae grow. Where do they get these 'scientists'? The 'scientists' should have to intern at a sewage treatment plant for a couple years. Maybe common sense would infect them.

[quillsinister]

04:19 PM on 01/28/2010

And this is one more reason why we have peer review, so some other clever scientist can find something that doesn't sit right and say, "Hey, wait just a damn minute!"
;-)

[jsarets]

12:13 PM on 01/28/2010

It's not so bad if they use sewer water instead of Haber-Bosch ammonia.

But the more fundamental problem is that they're marketing fuel instead of material. Fat esters can be used to make fuel, which is a very low-cost commodity, or they can be used to make plastics such a polyamides (e.g. nylon) or polyurethanes, which are worth considerably more per unit mass. Waste plastics can then be "downcycled" by thermal depolymerization into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

The current biofuel concept looks like this:

photosynthesis -> biomass -> fuel

A better biofuel cycle looks more like this:

photosynthesis -> biomass -> material -> waste -> fuel

Ethanol can be used as fuel. But it can also be use to make polyethylene, which is a more valuable product, and the waste can be downcycled into gasoline and diesel. In this way, we get more value out of the same biomass.

Fuel is cheap, and biofuel producers are at a competitive disadvantage when their feedstock is in demand by producers of just about anything else. For example, a thermal depolymerization plant in Arkansas that produced diesel fuel from turkey offal went out of business when the USDA ruled that the beef industry could use turkey offal as cattle feed. The beef producers could outbid them.

[PlayTOE]

11:35 PM on 01/27/2010

It would be helpful to take a closer look at Andres Clarens connection to the coal industry.
This study he headed was flawed and negative on the advantages of biofuel, something that the big poluters don't want made available.

[quillsinister]

06:30 AM on 01/28/2010

I expect peer review will be forthcoming. :-)

[urchinsadrift]

05:40 PM on 01/27/2010

Leave it to enviro whackos to deny promising sources of energy. Sources that have an unlimited supply of raw material. Who are the deniers?

[quillsinister]

05:54 PM on 01/27/2010

You didn't read the article. This was not an environmental statement from Greenpeace or The Sierra Club, but a purely scientific study from academia. Its purpose was to point out potential drawbacks and shortcomings in the current process, not to discredit the potential.

I still have high hopes for algae biofuels, but ultimately the science must trump the marketing. Hopefully, the people who want to make biofuels from algae will use this study to correct their weaknesses and become the great boon we need them to be.