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The New Biodiesel; Algae for High Yield Oil Production

casebro said:
He seems to think that 10% of the sunlights energy will be harvest able in the oil. That alone limits the efficiency of the algae farms.
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That sounds like BS to me. The theoretical maximum efficiency of photosynthesis is somewhere around 13%, in practice it is usually much less. Respiration, cellulose and proteins will consume most of this, not oil.
 
10% IS 13%, once you subtract the processing. Either way, will that add up to 20,000 gallons per acre?
 
So it certainly is a popular concept.

Which of the many start-ups has the biggest demonstration plant? Any of them? They all seem to be more theoretical, with figures based on production in test tubes. Large test tubes maybe...
 
PetroSun has a production facility in Rio Hondo, Texas. I can't recall exact size. An Australian company (Aquabiotics? Or maybe it's New Zealand) has a 1000 acre project going on. I think that's the largest, but don't quote me on it. Valcent has a small facility that was running. 30 of their "bioreactors". (fairly large hanging plastic bags) Their next phase is a larger demo, at 100 bioreactors.

I don't know who else might be doing things larger than a test tube.
 
casebro said:
10% IS 13%, once you subtract the processing.
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What? No, that 13% is just a theoretical maximum efficiency of photosynthesis.

In a real world scenario you'll lose about 15% as reflection on the waters surface, some unknown quantitiy as reflection from the cell membrane, some unknown quantity being absorbed by pigments, dead algea or other crud in the water, of the remaining some 1/3 will go to respiration of the algea, a huge chunk will be "lost" as proteins and cellulose and out of the remaining surplus some more will be lost as heat by the cell during oil production.

I would be very surprised if oil production corresponds to more than a couple of percent of incident sunlight but that's just a guess.

casebro said:
Either way, will that add up to 20,000 gallons per acre?
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In arid desert regions of the US south west you get an annual average daily direct normal solar radiation of about ~25 MJ/m^2 and a few percent more of indirect radiation. An acre is 4047 m^2. That gives you ~37 TJ to play with and there's ~130 MJ in a US gallon of biodiesel.

You'd need about 7% efficiency to oil to get 20 000 US gallons per acre if you operate in the US. That sounds very optimistic to me.
 
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casebro said:
10% IS 13%, once you subtract the processing. Either way, will that add up to 20,000 gallons per acre?
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An acre is 4,000 square meters. In a sunny area, 5.2 kWh/meter/day is a good estimate. This converts to 18,720 kJ/m^2/day.

One barrel of oil equivalent is 6.1178632 × 10^6 kJ.

So 18,720 kJ/m^2/day *365 days * 4000 m^2 /6,117,863 kJ = 4,400 barrel of oil equivalents per year of energy per acre.

That's at 100% efficiency. 10% gives us 440 barrels. 5% (probably a much more reasonable estimate) gives us 220 barrels/acre.

Since the US uses 6.6 billion barrels of oil a year, it would take 50,000 square miles of reasonable sunny land to produce that much oil.

For comparison, the state of Arizona is 113,998 square miles.

This seems reasonable.
 
So at 42 gallons/barrel, 220= 10,000g/a/y.

Oops, though, did you subtract for the space between 'reactors' for access? Maybe 50%?

Corn oil was $10/g at the grocery store today.

Meadmaker, how much oil has actually been produced by any of those pilot projects? Enough to get a realistic estimate of yields?

But then, g/a/y isn't the real subject. Land is cheap. Good farm land U.S. is $2,000/acre, one year's yield. The real point is return on investment. Cost to set up, and then actual yield.

Vinyl flooring cost $2 sqft*, times two layers, times 40,000 sqft/acre, = $160,000 acre. Plus pumps and plumbing. 5,000 gallons per, at $3, $15,ooo per year return on the $160,000 investment? Cost of the $160k, at 5%, $8k, profit of $7,000/ acre.

Seems doable ?

*just some kind of number, for a technical, mass produced material. Maybe water bed matress would also be a good proxy?
 
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Is it cooler under trees because via photosynthesis, the leaves are soaking up heat and storing it in their chemistry?

I was wondering about the algae bioreactor, and whether they need cooling (and it's expense). Seems to me that an enclosed water bath of dark green would soak up a lot of heat, only 13% of which gets chlorophylled into oil. The other 87%(or lots of it) would heat the algae high enough to kill it, no? Unless cooled- how? what cost?
 
casebro said:
Is it cooler under trees because via photosynthesis, the leaves are soaking up heat and storing it in their chemistry?

I was wondering about the algae bioreactor, and whether they need cooling (and it's expense). Seems to me that an enclosed water bath of dark green would soak up a lot of heat, only 13% of which gets chlorophylled into oil. The other 87%(or lots of it) would heat the algae high enough to kill it, no? Unless cooled- how? what cost?
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Leaves thermoregulate. Worldwide, they all appear to operate at about 70 degrees F.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080611/full/news.2008.884.html
 
casebro said:
Vinyl flooring cost $2 sqft*, times two layers, times 40,000 sqft/acre, = $160,000 acre. Plus pumps and plumbing. 5,000 gallons per, at $3, $15,ooo per year return on the $160,000 investment? Cost of the $160k, at 5%, $8k, profit of $7,000/ acre.
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According to the link you previously posted from TheOilDrum there is another $1.50 or so of profit per gallon "from equivalent algae oil production" attributable to proteins and food derivatives to add into your calculations (don't know why cosmetics were not mentioned unless that’s part of food derivatives). Regarding your question about actual oil production from pilot projects, I have been contacting some of the startup companies requesting hard data (and will share whatever I get my hands on here). Is there any hard data publicly available yet? So far I'm not sure. My general "tone" here about this technology (and in particular Valcent's low cost vertical growing system) have been “very positive”; BUT as an investor I am a skeptic at heart (the reason I have yet to purchase shares of Valcent) and I am pleased to see the skepticism and the number of quality posts that are showing up on this thread. I want to know an accurate estimate of the likely economics of algae oil without government subsidies; and even if the resulting economics turn out to be only remotely feasible, I can't think of a better place to spend government subsidies to effectively displace our need for foreign oil if that is in fact a reasonable expectation (if for no other reason than national defense). What did the Farm Bill subsidies for corn and ethanol cost us? What have we already spent over the years subsidizing the oil industry? By comparison, I doubt that the handful of companies currently involved with algae for oil have collectively spent $250 million yet. BTW you don’t need to have economics better than catfish farming to make algae oil an eventual and important reality (depending on the facts yet to be uncovered). Whatever the answer, I’m betting that over time the great skeptical minds that frequent this thread will have it figured out before anyone else.
 
Back around 1980 when I was in college, Israel was growing algae that could be used for fuel. I had hopes that research would result in production rivaling fossil fuels but so far it's in the planning stages still. Maybe with the increasing cost of oil these types of fuels will become realistic. In addition this type of fuel production may cause a net decrease in CO2.
 
sorry for the temp derail, but where exactly can you buy penny stocks?
I've been playing arounds with the idea of teaching my kids about investment etc and I thought that this would be a great avenue to do this, but while I hear talk of it all over, I can't seem to nail down an actuall source to buy it, see it etc.
 
Magyar-- any online broker can sell you shares of Valcent or any of the other players in this market segment . . . to set up an account you only need to fill out their registration forms and fund your account per their instructions. Etrade is an easy full service broker that I use and there are many others you can choose. However I would advise caution with penny these penny stocks and wait to see what eventually pans out from our discussion here. So far Valcent is my favorite but I am not yet ready to invest. You can go to <finance.yahoo.com> and enter the symbol VCTPF.OB for the current price and graph of Valcent. Or use <StockCharts.com> for better stock charts (as I recall you need to drop the ".OB" if you want Stockcharts to recognize the stock symbol you're after). Good Luck
 
The Register calls the second gen biofuels scum-sourced juice. I think it has a certain ring to it.
 
casebro said:
Meadmaker, how much oil has actually been produced by any of those pilot projects? Enough to get a realistic estimate of yields?
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Not at Valcent. The DoE's algae project had lots of data. It's ten years old, but I don't think algae has changed all that much.

Valcent's pilot claimed 33,000 gallons/acre, if I recalled the number, but they were making every possible optimistic assumption in the book. Definitely, real yields would be less.


I want to throw out a question, to anyone. Is it likely that any plant based source of energy would be more efficient than algae?
 
How is the algae extracted and how do you process the soup? Easy to green the swimming pool, not so easy to clean.
 
Thanks for info, sites don't say how. I make all my own diesel from old veg oil and animal fats. If we could find out more on how with algae as I can see the day coming when the PTB will try to stop us. My advise now would be to get a old model diesel with no chip embedded in the chassis.
 
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