Algae Farms could produce Ethanol
It is becoming obvious that fuel from corn or soybeans will not solve the energy crisis. As the prices of crude oil products and food crops have jumped recently, entrepreneurs and researchers believe that algae could be burned to generate energy and be used to produce bio-fuels on huge commercial scales. A major attraction of algae as a fuel replacement is that it could produce much more fuel than corn or soybeans in just a fraction of the space and with no effect on the price of foodstuffs.
The potential of algae as a fuel source has been known for years. U.S. government studies in the 1970s and 1980s sought to determine if algae could be used to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. For the next decades, research focused on growing algae in desert ponds, a method that suffered the risks of high evaporation and unwanted algae species proliferating.
Algae is 30 percent to 70 percent oil. Oil can be extracted from algae ranging from large seaweed to tiny micro-algae. There are more than 3,000 strains of algae with some being better suited to the production of biofuels than others. Most of these organisms can double in number every 12 to 24 hours.
For example, in Japan, Professor Makoto Watanabe has selected the Botryococcus braunii algae: give the microscopic green strands enough light and plenty of carbon dioxide – and they excrete oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on the surface of the algae can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics.
But – in laboratory conditions at least – the powers of Botryococcus braunii are extraordinary. A hectare of corn, when converted into biofuel ethanol, may produce about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent. Rapeseed may generate around 1.2 tonnes. Micro-algae can theoretically produce between 50 and 140 tonnes using the same plot of land.
A prospective algae-breeding oil concern would either have to invest billions of dollars in expensive breeder tanks – or find an enormous expanse of well-irrigated land in a country where labour can be bought very cheaply. It is for this reason that Professor Watanabe believes the world’s first algae farms will be constructed in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam.
Instead, may new research projects now choose to use photobioreactors — three-metre high glass tubes filled with algae — to grow the algae and to look for economical ways to convert them to fuel. The algae are fed on water, sunlight and CO2, and through photosynthesis are harvested. While some companies are interested in producing core algae, others are in making fuel.
Because photosynthesis of algae relies on carbon dioxide, some projects seek to involve power companies looking to cut CO2 emissions, in order to mop up waste gases from power plants and turn them into “green crude” for cars and planes. Other companies have converted algae into an ethanol additive or have invented devices to convert algae biodiesel as well as petroleum and other substances into hydrogen for fuel cells. And biodiesel from algae will break down in the environment, reducing longterm pollution.
It is possible to use the methane generated from in hog waste as a power source to help convert the algae to fuel. The nutrients in the waste could be used as a fertilizer to grow the algae, and the vegetative mass left over can be used as a feed additive for livestock or a high quality organic fertilizer.
Algae can be used in pharmaceuticals and even green plastics and packaging. Algae can also be used to produce Omega 3, a health supplement. The waste can be sold off as biproducts such as high-protein animal feed.
If companies can eventually grow algae on a commercial scale in giant vertical bio-reactors, the results will relieve the pressures on the fuel world but also on the human and animal food chains. Some experts estimate that once large-scale commercialisation has been achieved, algae has the potential to produce the feedstock for the biodiesel industry at 100 to 200 times the rate of the current best sources of vegetable oil feedstock.
With algae, production is continuous, even in salt water or waste water. With standing crops such as corn or soybean there is a harvest at once or twice a year. While an acre of soy beans can produce 150 gallons of oil a year, an acre of algae can produce 2,000 - 10,000 gallons and has the potential to produce 100,000 gallons a year. Theoretically, given increasing economies of scale, biodiesel producers can make ever-greater revenues and profits from algae-based fuel. This may no longer happen with food crop-based fuels because they have become too expensive. These high prices may be one reason why the US produces only 450 million gallons of biodiesel a year, while itt has the capacity to produce 2 billion gallons.
Some scientists caculate that algae could produce enough biodiesel in a 15,000-square-mile area to power all the vehicles in the United States. All of the corn produced in the country could only make a fraction of that.
But ultimately the conceptual possibility of being able to grow algae at rates that are so amazingly high, they sound like fantasies, is truly mind-boggling. A plant that can mature in a day and then double in mass in a matter of hours, that can grown in different kinds of bodies of water, that can cling to land and rock surfaces . All species contain oil lipids, some only in their cell membranes, but others comprising 30 - 40%, possibly even 50% or more of the cellular mass in lipid forms, and some even secrete oily substances that clump them together with their neighbors in addition to what is contained within the cells themselves.
When the uptake is 20,000, possibly even 100,000 gallons of oil from a hectare, it doesn’t require an unreasonable expanse of land for an average nation to achieve energy independence from fossil fuels, and since a great many algae species grow in salt water, they can be harvested in the ocean, which is great for small island nations even. None of this is cheap yet, but the huge potential returns may well justify the expense. At least, it is theoretically possible.
Algae Farms to produce Ethanol