edthecynic
Censored for Cynicism
- Oct 20, 2008
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Biodiesel is diesel fuel, Oh wait, everyone knows how diesel fuel works in a diesel automobile engine.Cultivating Algae for Liquid Fuel ProductionIt's dumb idea if it costs too much, does not deliver the efficiency of gasoline or the engine performance of gasoline and is not as readily available as gasoline.
Here's the rub. Now read carefully and understand the words as they are written and not what you want them to state so you can deliver your typical pat response.
ANY fuel which can be used instead of or in concert with current fossil fuels that is readily available, costs no more or hopefully LESS than gasoline, delivers the same or better fuel efficiency and delivers the same or better engine performance is a GOOD idea.
To date and for the distant foreseeable future no such fuel exists or will exist.
The problem is there are people who want to ration our current energy sources by making them less available and increasing the cost so as to convince us there is no alternative but to conform and obey those on the enviro wacko front.
Of course when one peels back the layers of the onion, this all boils down to one thing. Money. People on the inside of the alternative or green fuel industries stand to become very wealthy and of course with any government regulations come new taxes.
Right now the EPA is being hauled into court because in the legal opinion of several prominent business people and many elected officials has overstepped it's authority onlevel that has reached absurdity.
Arguments begin on Tuesday 2/28 at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.
My advice to all you lefties who think the EPA is helping anyone with these proposed new draconian regulations is, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
GreenFuel bioreactor in field test
GreenFuel Technologies in Cambridge, MA is field testing a closed system that uses the CO2 in power plant flue gases (13% of flue gases in the test) to feed algae. (3,4) In so doing, it significantly reduced the CO2 concentration in the exhaust by 82.3% (+/-12.5%) on sunny days and by 50.1% (+/- 6.5%) on cloudy days during the beta-test at the Cogeneration Plant at MIT. (5) The process also removed 85.9% (+/- 2.1%) of nitrogen oxides. And, not only will the GreenFuel Bioreactors reduce carbon and NOx emissions, but the company estimates the cost of a full-scale system installation to be 20% to 40% less than that of a comparable SCR system (pollutant scrubbers).
Using technology licensed from a NASA project, GreenFuel constructs triangular-shaped bioreactors from polycarbonate tubing two to three meters long and 10-20 cm in diameter. The hypotenuse of the triangles face the sun. Flue gases are introduced at the bottom of the hypotenuse and flow up while the media containing the algae flow in the opposite direction. From 15% to 30% of the algal media are harvested each day. The use of tubes in which to grow the algae overcomes the usual surface area limitation of ponds. In this case the turbulent mixing of the algal media with CO2 in the tubes and the speed at which the fluid moves determine how fast the algae grow.
"Until now, it was proving that the technology works. Now, basically, it's proving that the economics behind the technology work," said Isaac Berzin, chief technology officer. "The idea behind all this is that it's not a charity. If it makes sense econo*mically, it will happen." "I read descriptions of all this (previous) research, and it was clear to me that the limiting factor was the engineering side of the system," he said. "Algae can take (carbon dioxide), eat it, and produce algae, that's a known fact. But if your system fails, it's a problem with the system, not the algae."
A GreenFuel Technologies bioreactor in operation. Photos courtesy GreenFuel Technologies.
GreenFuel estimates that 70% of the power plants in the United States have enough space and 'food' to install a full complement of Bioreactor arrays. In the United States about 60% of the oil we use is for ground transportation—cars, vans, and trucks—while only about 25% is used as electricity. Potentially this means that GreenFuel reactors might be able to provide 20*-25% of the fuel needed to meet our transportation needs.
The GreenFuel Bioreactors could be used to fuel the power plant from which the algae are being fed. So you could build a power plant—including the reactors—and only have to provide it with enough fuel to get the bioreactors going! These reactors could also be used in breweries, fed from the excess CO2 that most breweries just waste.
Wonderful.....Now we wait for marketing and distribution.....Oh wait. No one knows yet how this stuff will work in an automobile engine.
And with the billions in research and development, the cost of pond scum fuel will be unaffordable.
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