Bill Gates Invests in Green Crude

Link

In the spirit of full disclosure, I fully admit that I am pro technology as the best, if not only, way that humanity has a chance of surviving long term as a species. That being said, I am also a great fan of using the lowest possible technology for a given application that does not cause a reduction in efficiency. I also do some basic research on a subject before I'll believe anything that seems "too good to be true". I'm not big on the tin foil hat stuff.

Green Crude, from Sapphire Energy is a wonderful example of the combination of the two. It doesn't get much simpler, biologically, than algae. Using algae to produce oil has some incredible advantages.

• It can be grown anywhere you have sun lite and water.


• It is easily scalable, and can be made transportable.


• Makes it economical to decentralize oil production


• %100 sustainable...forever!


• Can be refined into gasoline, among other things. The exact same gasoline you use in your car right now.


• Can be used with existing infrastructure. No new pipelines, refineries, fueling stations or transport system needed.


• No modifications to vehicles necessary. Will work in any normal gas engine.


• Does not compete with food crops.


• Carbon neutral with the potential to become carbon negative. That's right, you could one day clean the air by driving your Caddy. Well, sort of.


• No sulfur emissions.

So, again, I usually don't say ZOMG WER SAVD, but, if the numbers are true, ZOM WER SAVD!!!

SMA is still waiting for someone to explain to him, in financial terms, how investing in this type of technology is not more cost effective than offshore drilling.

Well, would you have believed him 20 years ago if he said you would be able to buy any movie on your tv with your remote, or buy almost any song on a computer and play it on your car stereo later with a machine the size of a band-aid container? Not that these are his innovations, but visionaries and constructivists have to be ready to take risks for the rest of us.

I'm glad he is spending his money wisely.

This technology came up in a thread a while back, but the source was a different company. I criticized that company because their website was incredibly uninformative, and gave the impression that the product created wasn't a hydrocarbon. Wasn't bio diesel, gasoline, etc.

This website is much better.

I can't explain in financial terms why offshore drilling is more cost effective than investing to develop this technology. Mainly because I have a pretty strong argument for why it isn't. Anyone interested can subscribe to my newsletter.

Ok basically plants convert solar energy to chemical energy at a best rate of about 8%. reference efficency of plants

The earth has solar energy fall on it at a rate of about 1366 watts /meter squared, which naturally varies a little (not a lot). of which you get about half that per day as we do have night. reference solar flux

A gallon of gasoline has a total energy content of about 121 MegaJoules which is 33.61 kilowatt hours. reference gasoline energy

So we get 1/2 * 1.366 kW x ~ 24 hours or 16.39 kW-hr per square meter then multiple by 0.08 (efficency at very best) and you have 1.31 kW per square meter per day, so at very very best you get a gallon of gas for every 25.6 days of operation of your algae farm per square meter of algae exposed to the sun.

A patch 100 meters x 100 meters (10,000 square meters)would get you 10,000 gallons every 25.6 days, neglecting seasons, and other side issues, assuming the algae is all that efficient, which it probably is not, note the same reference states that efficiencies as low as 1 to 2% in most crop plants. That 10,000 gallons of gas will sell for around $35,000 in the USA now. So if you can get the efficency something close to that high, which I really doubt, and can keep your overhead low enough, which might be possible, you can do it, you just need to compare the rental on about that much agricultural land say per month and then look at overhead, and figure out how efficient that process really is.

If it is 1% efficient the amount of gasoline is 1250 gallons for a sale price of about $4375 over the same period, with the overhead and rent about the same. That is a lot less practical looking.

The efficiency rates you linked were for multi cellular plants, not algae. Algae do not have to support stems, leaves, roots or water delivery systems.

Again, you don't need to use agricultural land.

You calculations for how much sunlight can be captured are for a flat piece of ground. Going vertical with the growing chambers can greatly increase surface area therefore greatly increasing solar gain per square meter of ground. Since the ground underneath it has no bearing on production, they could be placed in areas that are unsuitable for agriculture or habitation, therefore they potentially will have little or no effect on existing land usages.

Gasoline is not the only product produced. It is nearly identical to crude oil, so you can make many of the same chemicals and by products as you do with normal crude oil. You have exempted these from your calculations.

Sheesh, remind me not to go to the Ron Paul Investment Bank. I'll end up with nothing but a free toaster and a lifetime supply of vending machine slugs Ron Paul dollars.

You beat me to the efficiency rates and going vertical point.

I'm looking for a reliable reference on the efficiency of algae, so bear with me.

Ok produce a reference to the efficency of algae.

The solar calculations I posted are optimistic at best. If you stack the algae in tanks or whatever you get a shade tree effect. The algae in the lower tanks get less light and so less energy to convert.

The solar energy flux is a hard limit. Your stacking of algae tanks thinking you will get better results is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, namely the first law.

get to know the laws of thermodynamics

Zeroth law of thermodynamics

Simple way to remember, if temperature A is the same as B, and B is the same as C, then C is the same as A

first law of thermodynamics

Simple way to remember it, "you cannot get something for nothing"

second law of thermodynamics

Simple way to remember it "you cannot even break even"

Third law of thermodynamics

Simple way to remember it " nothing can ever be perfectly orderly"

Even I, who doesn't want to know all the technical stuff, can see that the "shade tree effect" would be countered by something called a "pyramid" or, possibly the "christmas tree effect" which would utilize available space and allow for maximum multilayer solar energy distribution.

Another circle jerk!

How exactly?

You have a (1) square meter to use, how exactly do you get more than one square meters worth of light flux out of one square meter.

Think about it.

stop thinking in two dimensions.

Well, first, you start thinking beyond just the one square meter of light.

Think practical. You have two areas to be used in production of this product. One area can be filled with flat-laying algae tanks, while the other area would contain the refining/storage/etc. Or, you could build the storage/refining/etc in a pyramid shape, with the algae tanks on the outside, each recieving an equal amount of solar energy during the highpoint of the day, and throughout the day. Then you build another identical setup on the other area, thus doubling production in the same amount of space.

Fine silly boy, take a circle 500 kilometers across. How do you get more solar energy out of that 500 kilometer diameter circle than falls on that many square meters. For the record 1.96E 11 square meters.

It seems plain you have no grounding in the hard sciences.

Gee, who would think that an English professor wouldn't have a grounding in hard science.

You seem to have little grounding in reading comp. You're still talking in 2 dimensions, and didn't read what I wrote. Instead, you wrote out a rather idiotic question that has nothing to do with anything. You're trying to derail the thread.

I think there's a term for that. . . .

good fucking Lords of Kobol, petepolly, you're trying to make it sound like growing algae is hard.

also, these here seem like they'd be a good place to start.

they are among the many test containers being tested at various coal plants to use algae to reduce carbon emissions.

Gee, those look like they could be attached to the outside of a pyramid-shaped building, leaving a large area underneath where all sorts of things could go on.

Someone who believed in a real liberal education in the old sense of the word Liberal Arts would think he would have some such grounding.

Someone who does not really understand pretty damn basic concepts like the basic laws of thermodynamics does not, in the old school sense of the word, have a liberal education, that is taught in better high schools by the way.

If the first and second law of thermodynamic were bunk you could do the little boy stunt of putting a generator on the same shaft as your electric motor and have a perpetual motion machine (which by the way do not work).

Generation of useful energy cheaply is a HARD engineering and physics problem, that is why some people who are good at it get paid the big bucks.

Getting useful energy cheaply without taking the shortcut of use of fossil fuels is an even harder problem. Do not expect magic bullets.


There is no Royal Road to solving hard technical problems.

Cheaper than oil is, , , yes that is honest to god a real technical challenge.

Nah, his point is technically correct, that no more solar energy falls on x area that that limit. But if angle increases the efficiency than he has to agree that building vertically could increase output. And it may allow algae production in other places that don't allow normal ag. But he didn't have to be snide about it.

My concern is the "benefits" here. We get something exactly like gasoline? We don't WANT MORE POLLUTANTS. Blurgh.

Nevertheless, still a technology to be tested. Algae could be bred (a lot more quickly than say, corn) to be much more efficient as well. It would probably be fairly water intensive, though, which might limit sites and profitability, esp. if the price of water increases. But it's algae. We could build them on the ocean.

and that is why Khan Noonien Singh got chumped.

Way to A) edit my comment
B) try to be insulting
C) avoid the premise that I put forward. Give me one good reason why algae tanks could not be attacked to the outside of a building used in some part of the refinging process?

By increasing the surface area, silly boy. If the rate of delivered energy is 1366 Watts per square meter and you expose 8 square meters the input will be 8x1366 or 10928 Watts, no matter how much horizontal space it takes up. Surface area can be increased using complicated geometric devices called triangles.

Well my bottom line is that AFAIK no biological photosynthesis method has anything close to the efficency of good solar cells in terms of energy efficency.

Yes if you live at a higher latitude it makes sense to build at an angle, as the sun is going to be at an angle.

In effect what that does is reduce your solar flux by IIRC a factor about equal to the cosine of the latitude, but using what you got you angle the panels or vats of algae to get the best exposure you can.

If I were doing this I would look at using really large areas of the ocean near the equator. Find or bio engineer an algae that you can control via tailored plant food that does not exist in nature (so it dies if you do not feed it the plant food so it will not get away from you out of control and fuck up the environment).

Then feed it in this large area of the ocean (several hundred kilometers in diameter) using buoys and dredge the sludge you use to make gasoline or whatever off the bottom, and let it accumulate to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

I figure you could get such a project to work for a lot less than we spend per year in Iraq.

cutting out the enormous cost to transport the base crude around the world from where it's found and drilled to where it's refined and turned into useful products would really, really help that out. gigantic tankers aren't cheap to build, purchase, or operate, you know. having the potential to produce the crude at the same place as the refinery, or even just somewhat nearby the refinery will do wonders to help make production cheap.

and even if it's not cheaper to do, initially, why the fuck shouldn't we do it? it's renewable. oil isn't. it can be produced domestically. oil has to be bought from other countries we're not always on the best of terms with. i'm willing to pay more to fill my tank if it helps make the US more energy independent.

You guys aren't getting it. Surface area is not really the issue here, because that only dilates the sunlight (photons per unit time). The sun's rays effectively illuminate in two dimensions. Remember shadows?