Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Apr 06, 2006 Posts: 3626 Location: 3 miles NW of Champoeg, Republic of Cascadia
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:14 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
I think the commenters there need to read R-Squared Energy Blog a bit. _________________ Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
C'mon man, who're you gonna believe?
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:33 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
Sounds like a great idea to me. I think algae ponds would be okay, but the greenhouse pictured in the movie could be a bit pricey.
I think you can make butanol from some kind of algae that you can run a car on quite nicely.
link
It's another form of solar energy.
I wonder how much energy you can get off of an acre of solar panels? Then you can use it to run an electric vehicle. _________________ Deep in the mud and slime of things, even there, something sings.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:41 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
Show me. Where is all the oil that his greenhouse is producing? How much did it cost to produce it? How much energy did it take to manufacture the system and how long does it last? How much energy does it take to refine the algae into pure fuel?
The man is quoting a lot of big numbers, but never showed us a drop of fuel. Why? Its all very interesting, but it smells like a dot com scam.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:06 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
there seems to be a conservation of energy problem here....what are the inputs? sunlight? what is the total amount of energy contained in every photon hitting an acre in one year? subtract for heat loss. divide by the efficiency ratio of photosynthesis. and that's overly generous.
compare this to that of 20000 gallons of oil. if sunlight alone doesn't have the energy, then it's coming from other inputs... soil? nutrients? other fossil fuel inputs? it has to come from somewhere. so what's the cost?
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:24 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
A quick calculation and I get a 15% conversion efficiency from sunlight to oil. This is as good as photovoltaics... That this guy can even quote these numbers is criminal misrepresentation.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:50 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
This is ridiculous. The guy could be making making expensive perfume with that setup, not our primary energy fuel.
This basic structure requires air conditioning and heating equipment, footers and foundations, UV protection, etc. etc. A steel stucture greenhouse cost much more than $100/sq. ft. or more? Where are the energy and dollar cost figures per sq. ft. construction.
The maintenance costs (in energy and money) to pump, heat, cool, purify, cleanse the lipids are what? Let's see numbers.
I did it in another post. Let him do it here. _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:48 am Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
Quote:
If we took one tenth of the state of New Mexico and converted it to algae production, we could meet all the energy demands for the entire United States
That my friends is one h-ll of a big greenhouse. That would be a 12,000 sqaure mile greenhouse or about 77,000 times the size of the largest building ever constructed.
The truth is that algal biofuels are a very interesting technology. One day they may produce a large percentage of our motor fuels. At present they are experimental. Once the guy has a production reactor up and running and producing 20,000 gallons a year, that will be the time to get excited. Under no circumstances are we going to build a 12,000 square mile greenhouse in New Mexico. If we did, we'd have to build another one every few years, because demand is not a static number. It increases over time. The bottom line for any of the alternative fuels is that they're not crude oil. The are expensive and difficult, and under the best of circumstances we're going to have to learn to get by with a lot less. _________________ "We were standing on the edges
Of a thousand burning bridges
Sifting through the ashes every day
What we thought would never end
Now is nothing more than a memory
The way things were before
I lost my way" - OCMS
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 12:38 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
smallpoxgirl wrote:
That my friends is one h-ll of a big greenhouse. That would be a 12,000 sqaure mile greenhouse or about 77,000 times the size of the largest building ever constructed. Rolling Eyes
That would cost $32 trillion at $100sq.ft., several times the GNP of the USA. On another thread I calculated $16 trillion. Seems the costs keep going up with the price of petroleum _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Joined: Jan 03, 2005 Posts: 1212 Location: western Wisconsin
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 1:03 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
There is a large dairy farm in western Wisconsin that has a methane digester producing methane that is put into the natural gas pipeline. They are using some of the warm water from the digester process to grow algae and are getting up to 60 gallons of oil for biodiesel a day from the algae (according to a friend who took a school group on a tour of the facility). Not much about it on the internet, though. Emerald dairy
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 9:47 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
You must remember people in this day and age ACTUALLY THINK that food grows out of nothing. They think dirt contains nothing valuable, that you just need to water it and "crap happens".
So when you realize this, it doesn't surprise me people think algae can just grow without anything needed besides water. Factoring in trace minerals, "food/fertilizer" and ensuring correct water temperature is expensive. Trying to maximize growth by supplementing with CO2 (which is what they would need to do to get the most out of this system) would completely DWARF the other costs. People don't realize how expensive CO2 GENERATION actually is. There is no way you can cheaply generate it, and all our waste CO2 is much too hard to capture cleanly (you can't give plants toxic crap mixed with CO2 as it would kill them or limit the reaction).
So I think this stuff will either exist in an unoptimized state, with no CO2 supply, or not at all. Even without the CO2 it is very very expensive, the CO2 and airflow system just throws it out into another league. _________________ Introducing the human evolution.
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 11:00 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
ANewHuman wrote:
You must remember people in this day and age ACTUALLY THINK that food grows out of nothing. They think dirt contains nothing valuable, that you just need to water it and "crap happens".
They don't give it that much thought and certainly don't understand that dirt has anything to do with it.
Food comes from a convenience store or, if it's freaky friday, Taco Bell. _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 8:00 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
"You must remember people in this day and age ACTUALLY THINK that food grows out of nothing. They think dirt contains nothing valuable, that you just need to water it and "crap happens".
Algae will grow in water on a diet consisting solely of sunlight and C02. But greenhouse production is clearly impractical on any scale. The only hope for commercially viable oil-from-algae seems to be from its production in huge open areas of water.
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 4590 Location: Boston Suburbs
Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 8:29 pm Post subject: Re: 20,000 Gallons of oil from one acre of land per year
I've seen these guys before. What I really want to know is how much electricity is consumed constantly circulating the water. That could seriously cut into the EROEI. Hopefully the power for the pumps is modest enough to be powered by PV solar. _________________ http://doomsteaddiary.blogspot.com/
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ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap 
