The Idiots are Bashing Biofuels Again

"The American farmer successfully produces both food and fuel," said Caupert, director of the National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center at SIU's Edwardsville campus.

He said myths such as the increased use of natural space to produce ethanol, the waste of water growing corn and making ethanol and the injury to poor people caused by making ethanol are rampant and wrong.
__Bioenergy

Biofuels vs. food is a debate for the uninformed. Why? Because there is only a false dichotomy there, so no grounds for such a debate exists. Biofuels are the nearest-term substitute for liquid petro-fuels. If our moronic elected officials do not unleash the energy industry to produce oil-equivalent from coal, shale oil, shale gas, and oil sands, there will be nothing but biofuel to fill the need for liquid fuels to power a pre-existing infrastructure. An infrastructure will take decades to replace.

Smart people are starting to recognize the potential. Leaders in various industries, such as oil, chemicals, automobile manufacturing, power equipment manufacurers etc. are starting to look to biofuels for part of the answer to curren shortfalls and high prices.

"Agriculture can supply the solution, providing adequate resources for food, feed and fuel far into the foreseeable future," John Pierce, DuPont Applied BioSciences' vice president for technology, testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing.

Agricultural yields from existing acres will continue to increase in this country, he said. With much of the world lagging behind this country in agricultural productivity, there are dramatic opportunities to expand production globally by bringing modern farming practices to other parts of the world.
__Bioenergy

We are faced with political peak oil. Better political leaders would free up much of the energy locked in the ground by moronic lead brains such as Boxer and Pelosi. But bioenergy offers another--although slower--way to provide today's infrastructure with liquid fuels.

Building enough nuclear power plants will take years and decades. Getting the utility-scale storage that is needed to turn solar and wind into viable baseload power will take decades. Getting enhanced geothermal into position to provide 20% or more of electricity for N. America will take decades.

Converting coal to oil equivalent can be done now, if given the go-ahead by government. Scaling up use of Canadian oil sands and heavy oils could begin now. Increasing development of Bakken oil fields could begin now. Intensifying research and development of harvesting huge oil shale fields could begin now.

Biofuels is on the threshold of plentiful, clean and affordable fuel from algae, cellulose biomass, and synthetic biological forms. Before that, biofuels from cane, sorghum, cassava, jatropha, palm, pangomia, moringa, coconut, and a legion of other biofuel crops will be refined and developed to economical forms.

This is only the beginning of the transition. Biofuels are like a newborn baby with apparently unlimited potential. Babies are a huge drain on resources at first, but if they are raised well, they grow up to take up the load.

Current Energy Source Distribution

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The image and table from wikipedia give an idea of the proportional contribution of different energy sources. Wikipedia tends to underestimate energy reserves of various types such as fossil fuels and geothermal, and to overestimate near-term potential of wind and solar. Even so, one can derive a rough picture of energy consumption and reserves by browsing the link above.

Replacing fossil fuels within the next few decades will be incredibly difficult, short of a breakthrough in fusion energy. Much better to develop clean and responsible methods of using coal, heavy oils, oil sands, oil shale, and nuclear energy--to bridge the next few decades until renewables such as solar, geothermal, and biomass can come into their own.

Fuel type	Power in TW[1]	Energy/year in EJ
Oil	5.6	180
Gas	3.5	110
Coal	3.8	120
Hydroelectric	0.9	30
Nuclear	0.9	30
Geothermal, wind, solar, wood	0.13	4
Total	15	471

Replacing One Cubic Mile of Oil a Year Worldwide

That is how much oil is consumed worldwide yearly--a cubic mile, give or take. How could that much oil be replaced, using other energy sources?

So, what would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil Roughly 4.2 billion wind turbines, 91.2 solar panels, 2,500 nuclear power plants or 200 Three Gorges Dams, according to Menlo Park, Calif., nonprofit research institute SRI International.

In other words, no single category of renewable energy is growing anywhere near the speed it needs to bear the full brunt of displacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels anytime soon.

...While there is no doubt that wind, solar and geothermal have ample energy to power the planet--the sunlight that hits Earth in a single hour contains enough energy to fuel the human population for a year--they will need years to mature before they reach anything approaching their potential....The U.S. spends roughly $1 trillion each year--approximately 10% of gross domestic product--on the fuel needed to power 114 million households, 82 billion square feet of commercial building space, 130 million cars, 95 million trucks and the countless computers, ovens and alarm clocks that drive the metabolism of the modern economy. If there is a cheap and clean energy source out there, odds are someone--looking in the right place--will find it. __Forbes

Fortunately, the catastrophic global warming theory promoted by Al Gore--and used by the US Congress to hamstring the US energy industry--is turning out to be so much pig excrement. Which means that as soon as US voters understand what Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and crew are doing to them, they can vote the miscreants out of office and hopefully replace them with no-nonsense pro-energy people.

The delays of an inept Congress are pushing the US into a corner, energy-wise. Every form of energy requires time and money to develop, and scale up to useful size.

North America is sitting on enough oil-equivalent (trillions of barrels) to last it hundreds of years at current consumption. But within a decade or two, better forms of solar and geothermal energies--to say nothing of better nuclear energy plants--will be available to provide electrical power for the grid. Oil equivalent resources only really need to last about 30 years. By then, algae biodiesel, synthetic biology energy, and biomass energy will be mature enough to replace most liquid fuels now consumed.

Predicting doom is okay for children who have no useful skills. But grownups will dig in and work, to see to it that doom does not actually fall on civilisation.

Comparative Energy Production Costs, Materials

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Large countries require large power generation capacity. Recent proposals to convert power generation to wind and solar renewable energy have received enthusiastic support at the highest levels of the US Congress and European governments. Unfortunately, people at the highest levels of those institutions tend toward innumeracy, and seem incapable of making basic data comparisons.

Though wind turbines don't consume fuel, it takes at least 150,000 lb of steel, concrete, and fiberglass to build a single 3-MW turbine. Thus, turbines have a carbon footprint that is laid down before they ever generate a single kilowatt. And detractors point out that steel and concrete are both energy intensive, carbon-emitting industries. There are also networks of roads needed to service wind farms. And wind turbines take land, somewhere between 60 and 300 acres/MW. (For comparison, nuclear and coal plants generate about 1,000 MW/acre). _BrianWang

Wind and solar require on-call backup energy generators in order to be viable, usually gas turbines. The new Altair lithium titanate utility scale batteries may eventually be scaled up to practical size, or sodium sulfide batteries may eventually become available for utility backup at the scale needed. Both would be incredibly expensive.

The clear winner in terms of materials, land use, and baseload reliability is nuclear. Particularly in the age of "carbon hysteria" and peak oil mania.

The Chinese have apparently come to the same conclusion, and are trying to tie up the Westinghouse output of AP-1000 nuclear reactors for a decade or so. China will no doubt run up the price of nuclear fuel as well--which is not such a bad thing, since security around the sale and transport of nuclear fuel might improve even a bit more, with higher costs--which are a negligible cost of running a nuclear power plant.

Pelosi and Boxer Need Some Tough Discipline

Recently the US Bureau of Land Management proposed to treat solar energy like other forms of energy in the way of requirements and time delays for environmental impact studies. Suddenly, the "constituency" was up in arms, and the policy change was quickly reversed. But in terms of US oil policy--which is where the rubber meets the road in today's energy prices (rhymes with crisis), where is the constituency willing to raise hell over government mismanagement?

While stunning, the BLM’s announcement illustrates the nightmare of U.S. energy policy. Or is it? That the ban could be reversed so quickly is a good sign that the old law on the books can be overwhelmed when enough people stand up and shout. On the other hand, when looking at the crude oil speculators driving oil prices up there are shouters on both sides that can keep the obvious policy move locked down. The difference is that the plants and creatures will get attended to, but the consumer will have to wait until the lenders putting up some 93% of the money to keep the oil futures market going will have a day of reckoning that might be a catastrophe. Imagine oil went down precipitously and lots of those borrowers can’t make the margin calls. Do you suppose the taxpayers will be cornered into bailing those lending guys out too? Just wait and see.

Let’s be sanguine about this and salt the concept with a dash of reality. Policy in the democracies is a market, too. Write that down. As noted above the shouting can come from lots of places and the power measured in money and the old boy network plays a powerful hand against the invisible individual voter. Just to keep things completely confused the media is busily making like they can write intelligent stories to guide us to think properly.

It enough to make the well informed mind swim in its own confusion. __NewEnergyandFuel

Everything rests at the food of the US Congress. If Congress cannot get its act together to adjust policy to meet the needs of its constituency, then Congress needs to get the boot, and hard!

Two congresspersons who are particularly obstructionist over energy policy, and causing more than their share of hardship, are Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi. If there was ever any redeeming social feature from either of them, it has long since passed them by. By promoting energy approaches that will take decades to replace current infrastructure--at the expense of supplying current and near/intermediate term needs--Boxer and Pelosi (and the usual suspects) are painting the US economy into a corner.

I know what you are saying, that booting them back to the dying south-left coast is too easy on them. You are saying they should be drawn, quartered, burned, hung, then pulverised with a heavy mallet. You have a point, but there may be more important things to attend to than mere payback. High oil prices are killing economies around the globe, from inflating costs of doing business, and destroying consumer reserves.

Boxer and Pelosi are true believers in "global warming catastrophe". In order to save the planet from climate change, they are willing to sacrifice the economy of the US and the rest of the developed world. They are creating a "political peak oil", which is a self-fulfilling form of peak oil that is hard to argue with. If political cronies such as B and P make it impossible to drill for new oil and develop oil equivalents such as shale oil and newer coal technologies, then peak oil becomes something of a tautology. Even the borons at the peak oil sites can pat themselves on the back for their perspicacity.

No need for revenge. Just send them back to caw-lee-forn-ya, and Oynklent Green [OTC:OYNK] will weigh the pros and cons.

Peak Oil Punkass? Or Oil Bubblehead?

The debate between the "oil bubble crowd" and the "peak oil doom crowd" has been fast and furious, yet taking on whimsical overtones at times. A recent Physorg newsrelease adds fuel to the "bubble heads."

By analyzing oil prices over the past four years, the researchers have demonstrated more support for the hypothesis that the recent oil price run-up has less to do with supply-demand interplay and more to do with speculation.

In their analysis, the team gathered data on oil prices since 2005 in US dollars, euros, and other major currencies (to confirm that the results are not a consequence of the weakening of the US dollar). They also examined worldwide oil supply and demand data, specifically investigating the extent of increased demand from emerging markets such as China and India.

Then, the researchers analyzed this data using a method that Sornette’s group started to develop in 1996 that identifies bubbles as “transient superexponential regimes” – basically, areas of rapid growth that occur due to a source of positive feedback within the system. The scientists looked at the data in the context of three different models, and all three models revealed the existence of a “log-periodic power law,” in mathematical terms – in other words, a bubble. In economic terms, the researchers explain, a bubble refers to a situation in which expectations of future price increases cause prices to temporarily rise without justification from fundamental valuation....

A comparison of supply and demand showed that, most recently, supply has been exceeding demand by more than a half million barrels per day. Meanwhile, the price continues to increase. Since it appears that the supply-demand balance has only a small effect on the price of oil, the researchers suggest that a major effect lies elsewhere. They point out several reasons why speculation, fed on rumors of rising oil scarcity, may be the positive feedback causing high oil prices.
__PhysorgVia_SnakeOilBaron

Read the entire article for a more thoughtful discussion of the pro-bubble argument than you will find by reading most economic analysts.

The obvious fact that oil prices are influenced by multiple factors should be understood by anyone involved in this debate. It is not an "either-or" question. The facts are that oil prices are subject to emotional over-reaction to events unrelated to current supply and demand issues. The current futures market is more complex than the straightforward commodities market that many analyst cut their teeth on, and at least some oil prices on the market are tied to futures market averages.

Beyond index fund and sovereign fund speculation, there is the larger picture of the decline of many large oil fields--which is simple geology. If one is emotionally inclined to infer a massive global "peak oil doom" scenario from the natural and inevitable decline of oil fields, one will certainly do so. On the other hand, most of the underground and undersea geology of Earth has not been carefully explored for oil resources. That is true even for Saudi Arabia. Even in North American oil fields long considered "dead", new technologies are recovering significant oil--turning a "peak" into an extended plateau for these previously written off fields.

Application of many of these new technologies of recovery and exploration would almost certainly change current concepts of global oil supply.

Part of the oil price surge is due to tight supply and demand margins. Part is due to a weak dollar. Part is due to massive demand from the emerging world. Part is due to financial markets and their influence on oil markets via various mechanisms. Part is due to poorly maintained oil infrastructure within the oil exporting dictatorships. And part of the price runup is intentional politically based manipulation by very wealthy and powerful oil kleptocrats motivated by both greed and a grudge.

Peak oil punkasses have a point about the natural decline of oil fields. But they take the reality far beyond logic and reason, into blindered paranoia. Bubbledywubbledyheads focus on the effect of speculation, sometimes to the exclusion of other factors that influence prices.

The modern disease of academic and media pundits and analysts, as well as their students and acolytes, tends to be an excessive focus on a specialty POV, and a lack of historical perspective. Add to that the complexity of modern financial and commodity markets, and the picture is too easily blurred.

We certainly are experiencing an oil bubble by many definitions, but is it the dominant factor in current economically destructive energy costs? Is it a "bubble within a larger bubble?" Probably.

Taken from original post at Al Fin

Surprise! Even Big Oil Companies Are Jumping Onto the BioFuels Bandwagon

Why are Exxon, Chevron, and other large oil companies frantically studying biofuels and bioenergy? Several reasons. First, nationalisation of oil production around the globe has taken big multinational oilcos out of the running for the really big oil fields, except perhaps for Iraq. Second, the US Congress has put trillions of barrels of oil equivalent off-limits to oil and energy companies. Third, nuclear energy is mired in political/environmental entanglements that could take decades to sort out. Fourth, solar energy and wind energy lack the utility-scale storage that would make them the obvious strategy for large scale energy projects in lieu of nuclear and fossil fuels. Fifth, bio-energy is virtually unlimited, is so far not prohibited by a neanderthal US Congress or absurdist environmental regulations, and can be developed almost anywhere on the globe.

Biofuels production worldwide, led by the U.S. and Brazil, is expected to rise by 330,000 barrels a day this year, which is more than the gain in conventional crude output from any single non-OPEC country, according to the IEA.

"We are focusing on next-generation biofuels," said John Watson, the Chevron Vice President for Strategy and Development. "We are not investing in food-based ethanol" research.

..."Renewables are not the main business of the oil companies, which have to justify returns for investors," said Davide Tabarelli, director of Nomisma Energia, a Bologna, Italy-based energy research company.

"Still, biofuels is the most logical segment of renewable energy for oil companies to invest in," because they produce transportation fuels, he said.
__Source

Canadian province Ontario, lacking the oil resources of Alberta and Saskatchewan, is helping to finance the next generation of biofuels.

Overall, the province has its eye on the 50-million-ton mountain of biomass produced in Ontario every year, much of which gets treated as waste or is underused. The biomass could meet the needs of seven million homes if harnessed by processes such as the projects unveiled today. __Source

The use of waste biomass to produce biofuels and bioenergy is relatively uncontroversial. But there is only so much waste biomass. Unleashing the full potential of biofuels and bioenergy depends upon going far beyond what is currently considered possible, by conventional and pedestrian energy analysts (is there any other kind?).

The potential of algae biofuels for example--both micro-algae and multicellular algae--points to vast, neglected areas of the globe for biofuel production: the deserts and the oceans. Desert land--using closed circuit algae production to conserve water--is ideal for all forms of solar energy, including micro-algae. Oceans are ideal for aquaculture of multi-cellular algaes, or seaweeds. Seaweed could provide immense quantities of biomass without using an acre of food-producing acreage.

Peak oil adherents are incapable of creating anything. They can only dwell on doom, deprivation, depletion, and death. They are catastrophe addicts whose minds are tuned to the Cassandra Channel, and cannot be tuned to any other mode of thought.

Doomsters cannot invent or create, they can only promote futility. They themselves are doomed to become but footnotes, once again.

Jatropha Update

New jatropha growing projects are being initiated in Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Argentina, Indonesia, and Brazil. Intensive investigation into the use of jatropha energy is being undertaken by researchers from China, Italy, the UK, and India. The crown prince of Abu Dhabi is pledging a $15 Billion investment in a project that focuses on jatropha energy. __Source

It is a mistake to concentrate exclusively on any one approach to solving the problem of unfavourable energy economics. Both electric power production and the production of chemical fuels are important. Pursuing safe and abundant nuclear energy is a complementary approach to pursuing bioenergy.

Likewise, neither jatropha, algae, nor any other bioenergy approach should be fixated upon exclusively. Instead, we should fit the energy approach to the particular location and need. The fixation upon maize ethanol by ADM and "corn state" US Senators, has restricted the options of biofuels in the US unnecessarily.

Solar thermal, PV, wind, geothermal, and other "elemental" renewable energy methods continue to make incremental improvements--although the huge problem holding back wind and solar continues to be the need for utility scale storage.

Electricity is the easiest form of energy to move in bulk, once the infrastructure is in place. HVDC is the best way to move large quantities of electricity--particularly underground and underwater, or where multiple power grids may interface together.

North America possesses trillions of barrels of oil equivalent at 1/3 or less current oil costs, using available processes. While there will always be a need for improvement in efficiencies and less polluting processes will always need to be developed, there comes a point where obstructionism (as per Pelosi and Boxer) does far more harm than good.

New Energy Trends Big and Small

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Toyota is the most successful automobile manufacturer in the world, so its future plans for energy efficiency and innovation mean something. Read more about Toyota's plans here.

Less earth-shaking perhaps, but vitally important in the overall energy use scheme of things, is the resourceful approach many distillers are beginning to take in managing their own fuel costs for the distilling process.

Bourbon byproducts are being processed into methane gas for the first time in history to fuel the boilers of a Kentucky-based distiller. Maker's Mark recently installed a proprietary whole stillage treatment system provided by Ecovation Inc. at its distillery in Loretto, Kentucky. The new facility will turn stillage, a mixture of water grains and dead yeast, into a methane-rich biogas.

The bourbon maker expects to use the output to meet 15 per cent to 30 per cent of its natural gas consumption. The same system was previously deployed at Simi Winery, a distillery based in Sonoma County, California in the U.S. Initial tests were also conducted at several major distilleries in Scotland. __EnergyCurrents

Other distillers are firing their boilers with corncobs, garbage, municipal sludge, and other "waste" products that would formerly be expensive disposal problems.

In the near future, a way of improving efficiencies in the production of cellulosic biofuels may lie in how the lignin component of the cellulose-hemicellulose-lignin trifecta is dealt with.

A major problem is that the two types of energy-rich components found in biomass — cellulose and hemicellulose — tend to get tangled up in a sticky web of lignin during processing. What is needed, and what Ralph is pursuing, is an easy way to remove lignin so that these long chains of sugars can be extracted from biomass, turned into simple sugars and converted to ethanol.

"We are (developing the technology) to redesign an agricultural plant so that its lignin falls apart easier to make the production of ethanol much more efficient," says Ralph. "If we get this figured out, there is the potential for a huge reduction in the cost of ethanol."
__Bioenergycheckbiotech

A better way of dealing with lignin would bring about not only a reduction in the cost of ethanol, but a reduction in the cost of bio-butanol, bio-plastics, and other biochemicals and biofuels.

Steam Turbine vs. Gas Turbine Efficiency

A new nuclear reactor being built in China will be the first commercial nuclear plant in the world to operate at high enough temperatures to use the Brayton gas turbine cycle--a more efficient cycle as noted in the graphic above. It is more efficient because it runs at a higher temperature (basic thermodynamics). High Temperature Reactors (HTRs) can utilise gas turbines that are driven by inert helium gas that has been heated in a nuclear reactor to extreme temperatures. The Chinese reactor will initially use steam turbines, then later switch over to gas turbines.

A steam cycle could then be "tacked on" to the end of the gas turbine cycle to improve overall efficiencies even more.

The HTR being built in China is a type of modular helium reactor (MHR), and as different aspects of the design are proven and standardised, it should be much faster to build in the future.

More information at NextBigFuture

Oil Shale Secrets: Over 1 Trillion Barrels On Tap

If the current US Congress has anything to say about it, the US will be starving for energy and fuel within the next few years. Trillions of barrels of oil equivalent are buried within North America in the form of shale oil, oil sands, coal, and gas. Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer intend for as much of that black gold as possible to stay in the ground, far away from American consumers.

Geologists estimate the rocks hold over a trillion barrels of oil.

“That is more than all the reserves of the Middle East,” Vawter said.

But this mother-load is locked deep inside deposits across three states.

"Oh gosh, if you took just an acre, you are probably looking at 100,000 barrels of recoverable oil,” Vawter said....

Cobiella met Terry O’Connor of Shell Oil. She asked him: “how much oil did you pull from here?”

“We pulled 1,800 barrels of oil plus a substantial amount of natural gas, also,” he said.

All from a tiny 30-by-40 foot patch tucked inside a Shell Oil compound that was top secret.

When he saw the results, what did he think?

“We were really happy!” he laughed.

Shell's revolutionary approach involves dropping electric heaters deep underground to heat the shale to 650 degrees. At that magic temperature, oil and natural gas separate from the rock and can be pumped to the surface - all with minimal impact to the surrounding area.

“And with a modest amount of processing this is the final product we go, which can be used for jet fuel, diesel fuel and naphtha for gasoline,” O’Connor said.
_Source

Raytheon's microwave technique should provide even higher yields--with less use of power and precious water resources.

As long as the US government maintains its anti-energy attitudes, the American people will suffer. And if the American people suffer, the US economy suffers. And if the US economy suffers, the world economy suffers. It is a dangerous game that is being played by the Pelosi's and the Boxer's of Congress. They may not like how it all turns out.

Ireland and New Zealand: Seaweed Leaders?

Island nations, Ireland and New Zealand, are located almost precisely diagonally half a world apart from each other--both North and South, and East and West. Interestingly, both Ireland and New Zealand are looking at ways of making a common natural resource--seaweed--an increasingly profitable enterprise. Seaweed is a type of multi-cellular algae that can be quite prolific in areas where other plant life is scarce.

'Compared to other bioenergy crops (eg rapeseed, canola, peanut, oil palm) there are a number of species of algae that have higher areal productivities, higher oil content and that can grow in saline waters.

'These apparently very favourable properties have generated a frenzy of interest and activities in the field of energy production using algae, both microalgae and seaweeds.'

He continued, 'For biofuel production the algal biomass needs to be produced at a cost of around $US1 or less per kg. In order to achieve this ambitious goal there is the need for year-round reliable high productivity algal culture and all factors (eg, algae strains, algae culture, harvesting and further downstream processing) need to be optimised and efficiently integrated.'

Ireland boasts 16 commercially useful seaweed species, with additional species being added as more research is carried out. Ireland's location off Western Europe, surrounded by clean seas, is a major selling point to the world market. __BioenergyCheckBiotech

New Zealand also has a long tradition of seaweed cultivation, and Air New Zealand is one of the airlines looking at seaweed, algae, and oil seeds to fuel their fleet.

Most likely, to replace petro-fuels with biofuels, it will be necessary to use significant areas of both land and ocean for growing fuel crops--until advanced synthetic biology finds ways to boost bio-production far beyond current known limits.

Japan, Korea, and China are other countries making use of extensive seaweed cultivation. But coastlines alone may not be enough. As discussed previously, artificial islands or seasteads may become important "ocean farms" for production of bio-energy--turning vast regions of mid-ocean "deserts" into scattered oasis, teeming with useful life.

Approaches to Algae Energy

Algae is one of the most primitive forms of life. But this primitive lifeform may help provide a bridge for humans to pass relatively unscathed from the petroleum economy to a more sustainable economy. Inventive researchers are trying different approaches:

Microalgae, the simplest and most primitive plants, are generally more efficient converters of solar energy than terrestrial plants and have a much higher energy potential. This possibility has lured entrepreneurs and venture capitalists into the research fray.

Start-ups in the United States and elsewhere are investigating myriad processes and products derived from two basic models: closed or open systems.

Closed systems use photobioreactors, clear containers that allow growers to carefully control the species and the environment...Open systems grow algae in ponds, raceways, or even in the wild.

LiveFuels uses open ponds to grow algae that are indigenous to the local environment, hoping that this will avoid the invasion problem. Since algae need nutrients to grow, including nitrogen and phosphorous, the company plans to feed agricultural runoff water - polluted with nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers - into its ponds...

Bionavitas, of Redmond, Washington, also grows native algae, but in deep, narrow canals, with a special optical system to bring light to the algae beneath the surface. It too hopes to harness nutrients from polluted wastewater; and because intense carbon dioxide inputs can speed growth, it envisages setting up sites next to a factory that could funnel smokestack emissions directly into its canals.

Vertigro, a U.S. company based in Vancouver, Canada, is testing single varieties of algae, grown in bioreactors that resemble hanging plastic bags, to see which grows best in a closed environment and produces the most oil. Its business plan is to sell its system to companies that would use it for commercial biofuel production...

Blue Marble Energy is putting algal biomass in anaerobic digesters to produce industrial chemicals and methane. The latter is combusted in a turbine to generate electricity and could also be used in fuel cells, said the chief executive, Kelly Ogilvie. Saleable byproducts include ammonia, anhydrous ammonia, and other industrial chemicals currently made with petroleum.

"It all comes down to how much is it going to cost to get a gallon of that oil," ...costs currently range from $6 to $100 a gallon, depending on the method...To reduce that cost the laboratory is focusing on the development of commercial co-products, like ethanol or animal feed, which could help to improve profitability.
__CheckBiotechBioenergy

The devil is in the details. Profitability depends upon trimming the process to its essentials, making the best use of products and by-products, and the continual application of focused innovation.

Algae do not ask for much. Sunlight, CO2, minimal nutrients, saltwater, brackish water or wastewater. It should not go unstated that it is business that is driving this promising approach to cleaner and more sustainable energy. Environmental lobbies seem focused strictly upon acquiring more power and money, for apparently inbred reasons of their own.

Me, Mad? Are You Insane???

You are looking at me strangely, but what I tell you is true. You think that solar cells and wind turbines are the measure of natural energy. Bah! I tell you that you are much too timid. Look more deeply into the Earth, for example--into the volcano!

Alaskan officials announced the exploration of the state's volcanoes, saying they could be exploited to provide energy for thousands of homes.

Companies are being invited to lease the rights to explore geothermal resources beneath Mount Spurr, a snowcapped 11,070-foot volcano that most recently erupted in 1992 showering much of Anchorage with volcanic ash. _Source

Yes, are you starting to understand? Or look to the madness of the atmosphere, and seize the power of the tornado!

Michaud got the notion of a man-made tornado — what he calls the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) — while working as an engineer on gas turbines.

The AVE structure is a 200-meter-wide arena with 100-meter-high walls. Warm humid air enters at the sides, directed to flow in a circular fashion. As the air whirls around at speeds up to 200 mph, a vacuum forms in the center, which holds the vortex together as it extends several miles into the sky. _Source

Or, better yet, call down lightning bolts from the sky! You scoff, but I have seen it.

The mobile laser system is capable of creating long plasma channels inside clouds by firing ultra short laser pulses. Measurements before and after the experiment revealed that the laser system was able to increase the electrical activity inside the cloud, in the general direction where the beam was pointed, thus determining local electrical discharges...by increasing the laser pulses by a factor of 10, they would be able to create longer plasma channels, in order to trigger air-to-ground electrical discharges.

Lightning triggering rockets are only 50 percent efficient and require a lot of time and money to operate. By using a laser system, the process could become much faster, cheaper and could be used for a series of applications which cannot be carried out with the current technology. _Source

But perhaps you are not impressed? Perhaps you have looked at these things before and think them beyond the grasp of men. Then you will surely scoff at this--energy from hydrogen to hydrino conversion! A hoax, you say? If a hoax, it is the most elaborate hoax I have seen!

BlackLight Power has invented a novel chemical process of causing the latent energy stored in the hydrogen atom to be released as a new primary energy source. This allows the negatively charged electron that is otherwise in a stable orbit to move closer to the naturally attracting, positively charged nucleus to generate power as heat. BlackLight Power has recently achieved a breakthrough in power generation by the invention of a solid fuel that uses conventional chemical reactions to generate the catalyst and atomic hydrogen at high reactant densities that in turn achieves very high power densities. Plant designs utilize continuous regeneration of the solid fuel mixture using known industrial processes, and the only consumable, the hydrogen fuel, is obtained ultimately from water due to the enormous net energy release relative to combustion. _Source

I dare you to visit the site and study the papers that describe the science and technology involved! We will then see who it is that is insane! (more here and here)

The things I could tell you ... tapping the energy of the stars for example, or creating an artificial black hole. Or a matter-antimatter power generator! What about powering a reactor with nectar distilled from moonbeam residue?

I tell you, since my last lightning experiment, I cannot remember anything from the past, but these energy ideas fly through my mind at the speed of light! Yes, I see you looking at each other and shaking your heads. But I do not have time for your doubts. I hear a thunderstorm approaching. I must quickly gather my apparatus and climb the tower steps....

Previously published at Al Fin

Would You Believe 65% of Petrol from Biofuels?

A study by America’s Departments of Energy and Agriculture suggests that even with only small changes to existing practice, 1.3 billion tonnes of plant matter could be collected from American soil without affecting food production. If this were converted into ethanol using the best technology available today, it would add up to the equivalent of 350 billion litres of petrol, or 65% of the country’s current petrol consumption. And that is before specially bred energy crops and other technological advances are taken into account. _Economist

Whether 30% or 65%, obviously replacing a sizeable part of world petroleum consumption with biofuels would make a difference to the geopolitics of oil. Much lower oil consumption would put the oil dictatorships of Africa, South America, Asia, and the middle east, into a far less potent and threatening posture. Terrorist groups supported by such dictatorships--like Hezbollah, FARC, al Qaeda, etc. would likewise lose influence and power to disrupt normal activity.

Long-term prospects for oil are poor, given the technological ability to replace petroleum with more renewable energy sources. It is only a matter of working through the processes and letting the market sort them out.

30 per cent of All Liquid Fuels from Biomass

Biomass to liquid fuels (BTL) is a potentially lucrative industry, being pursued by numerous companies from different directions. One popular approach with biotechnologists, is the development of micro-organisms and enzyme systems capable of turning biomass into diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline.

Amyris first studied the highest performing compounds of diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, then tinkered with the genetic structures of E. coli and yeast to produce bioequivalents, Renninger says, leveraging the same cutting-edge technology previously employed to produce pharmaceutical-quality medicines at commodity-level prices. ...It projects commercial production of some 30 million gallons of diesel as early as 2010, with production of gasoline and jet fuel roughly one and two years behind, respectively.

LS9 plans to open a pilot facility this summer and a 50- to 100-million-gallon plant three years later, producing a drop-in replacement for diesel, as well as a biocrude to be processed in traditional refineries. Rogue scientist J. Craig Venter, who helped lead an international consortium of scientists to map the human genome, has announced plans to engineer bacteria able to create hydrocarbons not just from sugars, but from CO2 pulled straight from the atmosphere.

"If you look at where sugar cane is in Brazil, or at where biomass will be here in the near future, we're pretty confident that we can compete with oil around the $50-a-barrel range," Pal says. "The key driver of the cost really is the cost of raw materials."

... Until technologies exist to easily derive sugars from tough cellulosic material, such as corn's remaining stalks, leaves and cobs, companies like LS9 and Amyris are likely to feed their fuels with sugar cane—a relatively green source of easy-to-use sucrose, albeit one with limited domestic potential.

As the world continues to consume some 150 million gallons of oil every hour, any potentially game-changing solutions will need not only to work, but to work cheaply and at truly massive scales.

"We could be harvesting on a sustainable basis over a billion tons of dry biomass in the United States if we got serious about it, and that would get us somewhere close to 30 percent of our liquid transportation fuels," NREL's McMillan says. "So while sucrose is undoubtedly part of the solution, to really get that huge volume impact, you have to go to those cellulosic feedstocks."
__PopMech

Once mature, these approaches could compete with petroleum fuels as long as oil is at least $50 a barrel. Once optimised, they will be viable with oil as low as $30 a barrel. But by then, who would want to buy oil at all? Environmental mandates and regulations will probably put oil and coal off-limits, once bioenergy, clean nuclear, enhanced geothermal and other advanced renewables combined with utility scale storage and improved transmission capacity come on-line.

With various unconventional approaches to nuclear fusion on the horizon, along with other even more unconventional approaches to unlimited energy--it is important for all viable approaches to clean energy production to be pursued, to bridge the gap.

Long-term, bioenergy makes sense primarily for small, local economies--particularly in the third world. But until the potential of clean, big energy is achieved through nuclear and other physical means, humans will need to fall back on their oldest energy source. Bioenergy: solar energy with its own built-in storage.

Combined Heat and Power for Food Plants

Many types of food processing plants including sugar and starch refiners, breweries, cereal makers, potato processing plants, etc. can use the organic waste byproducts of their normal operations to create fuel that will both provide process heat and generate electricity for plant operation--CHP. If they are truly thrifty, they can then mine the waste heat from processing to generate yet more electricity, and sell it to the utility if it exceeds their needs.

The Royal Brewery CHP plant will produce 7.4 megawatts (MW) of thermal power and 3.1 MW of electricity, fueled by a mixture of spent grain left over from the brewing process and clean wood waste. Wood is required due to insufficient quantities of spent grain.

Before the spent grain is fed to the boiler, the moisture content is reduced from 80 percent to 60 percent, Kuitunen explains. “That is good enough for our combustion system.”

Food processing giant Tate & Lyle PLC is installing a biomass-fired CHP system at its east London sugar refinery. Wheat husks, a byproduct of flour production, will fuel a $41.4 million, 65-MW biomass boiler. Using biomass will slash energy consumption from fossil fuels by 70 percent, with a corresponding 70 percent reduction in carbon emissions. Steam produced by the boiler will generate electricity and satisfy the refinery’s process heat requirements. Excess power produced by the system will be sold to the National Grid.


McCain Foods in Whittlesey, U.K., constructed an 828,000-square-foot covered anaerobic lagoon to process wastewater from the U.K.’s largest french fry factory. Wastewater containing potato starch generated during processing is piped to the lagoon and produces more than 400-standard-cubic-feet per minute of biogas. The firm may add other potato wastes, such as peels and nubbins, to increase biogas production.

Initially, the biogas fueled a boiler to produce steam but an engineering study determined that more value could be derived from the biogas by producing electricity, explains Carmine Fontana, vice president of gas processing for Ontario, Canada-based Eco-Tec. The biogas now feeds a General Electric Jenbacher reciprocating engine that produces more than 1 MW of electricity, satisfying 10 percent of the plant’s electrical requirements. Heat generated by the engine warms the lagoon.


Austria-based Agrana, one of Central Europe’s leading sugar and starch producers, recently installed a $10.5 million AD system at its sugar refinery in Kaposvár, Hungary. The digester processes spent beet pulp and beet syrup to produce almost 3.9 million cubic feet of biogas a day.

The biogas feeds the plant’s boiler to produce steam, which drives a turbine generating electricity and is used for process heat. The biogas replaces 60 percent of the plant’s energy requirements and cuts carbon emissions by 10,000 tons.

Insource is focusing on six sectors in the food and drink industry that are well-suited for waste-to-energy systems: distilling, brewing and soft drinks, red meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables, frozen and chilled foods. “We are looking for high volumes of consistent types of wastes, which work best with the technologies available,” Coate says.

The company is currently working with five major U.K. food and beverage companies. “In many cases, AD and CHP are the most appropriate technologies,” Coate says. However, the company can deploy a wide range of technologies since no single technology can treat all wastes.

Recently NISP started working with Severn Trent Water, the U.K.’s largest independent water company, to divert industrial food waste from landfills to STW’s AD plants across the U.K. “There is a big move in the U.K. for companies to build new AD plants to process food wastes,” says James Woodcock, NSIP practitioner. “Being familiar with STW and the water industry in general, I thought there are a lot of these plants in existence already treating sewage mixed with industrial waste.”

STW utilizes AD to treat more than 700,000 gallons of wastewater and sewage a day. Biogas produced by the digesters fuels CHP units generating 154,000 MW hours of electricity, representing 17 percent of STW’s electrical requirements. Thermal energy is used in the treatment process.

Adding industrial organic wastes to STW’s AD systems will increase biogas production and renewable energy generation, improving the sustainability of the treatment process. Industrial food waste producers will benefit by cutting waste disposal costs by as much as two-thirds over landfill costs, Woodcock says. __BiomassMag

Most large plants have the ability to either cogenerate heat and power, or the ability to mine significant amounts of waste heat to create electrical power. Being able to use waste products as fuel to power the CHP is an added dividend.

Ethanol biofuels makers have been learning critical lessons about resourcefulness in the face of rising fuel costs. The ones who succeed will be the ones who take advantage of every source of energy they can find--particularly energy that once was considered "waste."

Getting Heavy Oil to Market, Clueless Obama Declares War on Canada Oil Sands

Heavy oil from oil sands in Alberta and Saskatchewan are moving to fill the gap in US supply caused by problems in Venezuelan and Mexican supplies.

* Already the world leaders in bitumen production and an important producer of conventional heavy, Canadians have roughly doubled their non-upgraded bitumen production in less than four years.
* American decision-makers would be delighted to replace politically volatile Venezuelan supply with low-risk Canadian product, and Venezuela’s present leadership would be equally happy to develop markets elsewhere.
* Mexico’s supergiant Cantarell heavy oil field is in steep decline, but Canada has the productive potential to offset the shortfalls.
* The isolation of the Canadian prairies from the world’s sea lanes and from America’s major refining centres means bitumen producers can’t freely compete in world markets. Consequently, they get lower prices.
* As price-takers in North American markets, Canada’s producers have to settle for lower profits, and the province has to settle for diminished royalty revenue. __Seekingalpha

Meanwhile, presidential hopeful and baby senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, has been making ominous noises about the prospects for the tar sands market in the US.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama vowed to break America's addiction to "dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive" oil if elected U. S. president -- and he said one of his first targets may well be imports from Canada's oil sands. A senior advisor to Obama's campaign said it's an "open question" whether Alberta's oil sands fit with Obama's vision for shifting the U. S. dramatically away from carbon-intensive fuels.

The moves follow the adoption in December by the U. S. federal government of a law that bans federal procurement of alternative fuels that generate more greenhouse gases than "conventional sources," which could include oil from the oil sands. A campaign by the Canadian sector to exclude Canada's oil has yet to bear fruit.

Meanwhile, California has adopted low-carbon fuel standards that disfavour Canada's production. __NP

Each of these moronic moves by various US governments and officials have pushed gasoline and oil prices ever higher on the futures markets. One could easily be forgiven for asking the question: "Whose side are these morons on, anyway?"

Proving Oil Shale at $30 a Barrel?

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The Green River area of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado is said to contain more oil equivalent than all the known reserves in Saudi Arabia. This has yet to be proven. If the US Congress would kindly get out of the way, several people in the oil industry would like to have the chance to demonstrate the promise of oil shale.

Bullion Monarch Mining is pleased to announce it has begun construction on a pre-production demonstration plant to extract oil from oil shale. The plant is anticipated to demonstrate a scale feasibility of producing oil from oil shale at a target cost of below $30 USD per barrel.

...The oil shale is heated to approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which releases the oil from the shale in a gaseous form, and then is cooled to become liquid oil. The pilot plant is expected to be completed by late 2008.

This patent pending process has been shown in advanced computer modeling done by the Idaho National Labs, part of the DOE, as a subcontractor for Emery Energy, to use less than three gallons of water per barrel of oil produced and has CO2 sequestering capabilities. EnShale's intent is to mine underground and disturb as little of the surface as possible. __EnergyDaily

This "gasification" method of creating liquid oil from oil shale appears to have minimal adverse environmental impact, compared to the nightmare scenarios that large and powerful environmental lobbies are using to sway congress.

Another approach developed by Raytheon using microwave energy may actually use less energy and be cleaner than the EnShale approach. It is important that the US Congress step back and allow the industry to test the resource and demonstrate its capability to extract the resource responsibly. A period of high oil prices that seriously impact national industry is a time for these irresponsible legislative prohibitions to end.

Portable Biomass Gasifiers on the Move

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Biomass gasification to syngas is becoming the most efficient means of turning waste biomass and garbage into electrical energy. In Iraq, portable gasifier/generators will be undergoing field tests by the US military throughout the summer until August. The use of portable on-site gasifier/generators in Iraq should cut down on the military fuel convoys that have been subject to ambush and deadly IED attacks.

In Washington DC, Auburn University students have been demonstrating their own portable gasifier-on-a-trailer system to the public and hopefully to clueless US legislators.

Auburn University is showing off its mobile bioenergy unit in the nation’s capitol this week, converting wood chips into electricity on the back of a truck near the National Mall.

The mobile unit, used to promote awareness of biomass energy technologies, converts wood chips, switchgrass and other agricultural byproducts into gas, which can be used to generate electricity or converted into liquid fuel. __Source

The synthetic gas can then be used to fuel an engine that can produce electricity to power and heat remote operations such as poultry houses, green houses or other comparable business operations. The unit can be fueled using wood chips, but AU researchers want to see if other feedstocks, such as poultry litter, and a variety of woody residue materials can also be used.

In addition to demonstrating concepts for generating electrical power and heat, using renewable resources abundantly available in Alabama, AU’s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts will work with Alabama Power and Community Power Corporation to identify possible economic improvements of this distributed gasification capability as a supplement to more traditional energy sources, such as coal and water.

The use of small gasifiers, like the AU unit, distributed to poultry farms, saw mill operations or other operations where renewable resources are plentiful and do not have to be transported long distances can help power companies meet their renewable energy goals. Both in the field and on campus, the unit becomes a real world classroom helping to train engineering students to form a pool of gasification-trained engineers ready to enter the workforce in this critical energy area. __Source

Gasification of waste biomass and garbage creates H2 and CO, or syngas. Syngas, once cleaned, can either be:

1. burned in gas turbines to generate electricity
2. fired to create steam--which can then be used to drive steam turbines to generate electricity.
3. fermented to make alcohols
4. run through a F-T process with catalysis to make a wide range of hydrocarbons.

The most economical and high yield methods of performing all of the above tasks--and likely others--are being intensively worked out by scientists, engineers, and inventors around the world.