Algal Biofuels Not Ready For Scale-Up 179
Tator Tot writes with this quote from Chemical & Engineering News:
"Using today's technologies and knowledge, a scale-up of fledgling algal biofuel production sufficient to meet even 5% of U.S. transportation fuel demand is unsustainable, says a report released last week by the National Research Council. The report examines the efficiency of producing biofuels from microalgae and cyanobacteria with respect to energy, water, and nutrient requirements and finds that the process falls short. The energy from algal biofuel, the report finds, is less than the energy needed to make it. In terms of water, at least 32.5 billion gal would be needed to produce 10 billion gal of algae-based biofuels, the report states. The study also finds that making enough algal biofuels to replace just 5% of U.S. annual transportation fuel needs would require 44–107% of the total nitrogen and 20–51% of the total phosphorus consumed annually in the U.S."
English (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, I know that 'algal' is perfectly good english. But wouldn't 'algae-based' be much more clear to the 99% of the population that are not chemists?
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Yes, I know that 'algal' is perfectly good english. But wouldn't 'algae-based' be much more clear to the 99% of the population that are not chemists?
TFA uses both forms .. so which 99% are we confusing again?
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Algae is biology, not chemistry.
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Technically, it's both...
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Re:English (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
We use "fungal" to describe "fungus-based", what is wrong with algal? One sees "algal bloom" fairly often.
Are we trying to dumb down science for the lowest common idiot now?
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Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.
We use "fungal" to describe "fungus-based", what is wrong with algal? One sees "algal bloom" fairly often.
Are we trying to dumb down science for the lowest common idiot now?
If I had points you, sir, would be 'awarded" one. I love your Simpsonian English.
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Algae is plural, while alga is singular. If you wanted to say something like "algae-based" you would have to say alga-based. If "algae-based" doesn't sound wrong to you just substitute another plural in there such as "horses-based" to see how it sounds.
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Re:English (Score:5, Funny)
I have rewritten the summary using simpler English for the benefit of the weak-minded. A few sacrifices in content were made.
"Using the tech that we have today, we cannot use algae (little green sea creatures) to make our fuel (for cars) because it would be bad for the Earth. Eggheads at National Research Council wrote a report that says so, using all sorts of sciencey terms. It takes more fuel to raise the little green sea creatures than it gives back in the fuel. It also needs lots of water and nitrogen (that's a chemical in bombs) and phosphorus (that's another chemical in bombs). We need to give the little green sea creatures 3 or more times as much water as we can get fuel from them. If we use all the nitrogen and phosphorus we make in the USA, it's only enough to make fuel for one tenth the cars we have."
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Yes, I know that 'algal' is perfectly good english. But wouldn't 'algae-based' be much more clear to the 99% of the population that are not chemists?
You really couldn't just take a guess at what Algal might mean?
Nope. Algal looks too much like a company name or MarketSpeek(tm).
Gotta keep moving (Score:2)
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Here's a hint, nothing else will either. It's the perfect solution for scenarios where long distance, remote and quick fueling requirements need to be met. The military is tops on this list. Just because it won't replace oil entirely doesn't mean it isn't working.
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Re:Gotta keep moving (Score:5, Informative)
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Drugs are bad, mmmmkay? We are in War on Drugs (tm), so that's really really bad, mmmkay?
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I see you and whoever modded my comment as flamebait have never watched South Park.
So to be as explicit as it can get: those against hemp are idiots; those who believe the "war on drugs" is about drugs are really idiots (or haven't really given much thought to the subject); those who defend it as police are the fucking worst evil scumbags there are, but hey! that's your only option on every election!
Is my point clear now? Now to make my previous reference clear: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes [southparkstudios.com]
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Oops, I meant to say 'as policy'. It is arguable that police takes advantage through corruption, but the real motherfuckers are those who make the laws.
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As it is different from the hemp used for textiles. You're missing the point though, which is the stigma associated with it.
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Cecil put it better than I can, so I'll just link to him:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1116/is-hemp-nonpharmacological-marijuana-the-answer-to-our-environmental-problems [straightdope.com]
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Yes but he misses that back then hemp was also not considered for its food uses (the seeds are good food, good for a nutritious oil, a feed stock for animals, etc.) and its biofuel potential (oils from the seeds, possible use breaking down the cellulose from non-useful material--the innards are good, but isn't the outside casing of the stem and such useless?).
Additionally, hemp has historically been less useful to cultivate than cotton because slave labor was more suited to producing cotton. After the ci
Re:Gotta keep moving (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets try to find something else renewable that will work.
It frightens me that this is the level of intellectual clarity the majority of America brings to big problems.
The report said it would not work for more than 5 percent of transportation fuels at the current state of the technology, not that it wasn't a viable alternative if some of the technological challenges can be addressed.
That's what this bit means: However, the potential to shift this dynamic through improvements in biological and engineering variables exists.
Maybe you should stick to problems that can be solved by banging rocks together.
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The most likely solution to my mind would be a soybean geneticly spliced to hell and back to drip with oil. Only it would probably be developed by Monsanto and all the Greens would try and get it banned. But I don't think you're going to get a viable fuel crop without some serious GMO work.
Sewage (Score:4, Interesting)
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Good question. Seeing as how this stuff wouldn't ever come into contact with food, seems like an ideal use to me.
If it at least would produce enough energy to keep itself running, functioning as a waste disposal plant would still be useful.
Or hell, use the Mississippi. There's tons of fertilizer that gets flushed into the Gulf and isn't doing its ecosystem any favors. Run it through some shit that'll eat up the excess first, why not.
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The Fine Article doesn't mention this. Like fuel cells, it's possible that their process gets poisoned by non-pure sources of nutrients.
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Its being done at a lot of places including here:
http://www.opb.org/news/article/osu-researchers-make-electricity-sewage/ [opb.org]
Will probably take decades to make it to common usage though. How often do they rebuild Sewage Treatment Plants?
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It's being worked on. Radio lab did an interesting episode on this
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The NAS report addresses this. It's a serious possibility.
The thing to understand here is that *in principle* the net required water input is tiny (it provides the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon output stream, but that's not much compared to the water needed as a solvent), and the net required nitrogen and phosphorus inputs are zero (they aren't in the output stream). One issue is therefore the recycling of the waste stream after hydrocarbon extraction. Another is losses (especially water) from open ponds,
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There was a Ted Talk on that idea. http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_trent_energy_from_floating_algae_pods.html
I don't understand the criticism that it takes more energy than it outputs as fuel either. Every algae project I've seen uses free sunlight to grow the algae and solar, tidal, or wind power to drive pumps for circulation.
Also the complaint about water use is odd. The projects I've seen use waste water, or are on the ocean and use that water (either straight as salt water or de-salinated), recycl
Who really wrote this report an oil lobbyist? (Score:2, Interesting)
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No offense, but I'm sure you jut figured out in 20 seconds what the DoE couldn't in 20 years. Somehow, I don't really believe that.
For one thing, wastewater, while rich enough in nutrients, isn't suitable for growing algae, or at least not the kind of algae you want (it'll kill it). That means processing. Mind you, algal biofuel has a lot of potential, which is why no less than a dozen US universities are researching it, but it's a bit more complex than dumping pig waste into a pond of water. It has a lot o
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Ask any pool/pond owner. Algae will grow in any body of water that you don't take active measures to suppress it. i.e. Kill it with chlorine, UV, heat, or keep it way from light.
Just a conjecture here, but I imagine that the same traits that make algae produce copious quantities of oil, also make it
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Better-ish link (Score:4, Informative)
TFA doesn't even link to where the actual report can be found (shame on you Chemical & Engineering News)
The actual report is behind a paywall, but has some summary points Sustainable Development of Algal Biofuels (2012) [nas.edu]
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TFA doesn't even link to where the actual report can be found (shame on you Chemical & Engineering News)
The actual report is behind a paywall, but has some summary points Sustainable Development of Algal Biofuels (2012) [nas.edu]
If you look at the link that I included in the article, you'll notice that it links to that very article you describe. I even took the extra minute to search for the link in order to include it in the article :)
Too many links in a summary confuse me!
Why all or nothing? (Score:3)
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Much cheaper to convert them to natural gas, which we have lots of. Cars are going to electric at the same time, so there will be much less demand for petroleum.
from the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another failed attempt at perpetual energy! Why oh why does the laws of physics mock us so?
All joking aside, for most applications, we don't mind energy loss. The key is getting the energy into a compact and transportable form usable in cars.
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All joking aside, for most applications, we don't mind energy loss. The key is getting the energy into a compact and transportable form usable in cars.
Exact. The trick is to convert energy from form A to the form B as efficiently as possible. But, this conversion will never be 100% efficient, that is impossible.
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All joking aside, for most applications, we don't mind energy loss.
Algal biofuel was supposed to be energy positive. It will take up a whole lot of space which could have been covered with solar cells or farmed instead. It is a bit of a bummer to have to waste land on something which isn't energy positive. Methane synthesis doesn't take up much space.
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for most applications, we don't mind energy loss
What?! Of course we do. The energy is already into a compact and transportable form usable in cars. It is called gasoline or diesel. It is liquid, easy to handle and relatively safe (diesel more so than gasoline). And, you know what? It is energy efficient, too, because you spend less energy taking it out of the ground and distilling it than you gain from burning it (plus, you can make wonderful things out of the plastic you get when you add some processing steps). The only problem? It will run eventually o
Why not get our energy from congress-based fuels? (Score:2)
Both side of the aisle are sufficiently full of poo that we'd be in bio-fuel heaven for the foreseeable future.
Similar to corn ethanol (Score:2)
That's a *lot* of water... (Score:2)
... and if we use it at that rate, soon all of the Earth's water will be gone forever!
Imagine a world without a petroleum industry. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now imagine the people in that world imagining what it would take to create a petroleum-based economy like ours from scratch. The amazing drilling technology; the massive investment in super-ships and pipelines; the scale and sophistication of refineries; the ubiquitous distribution networks; the engine technology to burn petroleum cleanly and efficiently.
Imagining all those things happening in the space of, say, ten or even twenty years would be impossible. And in fact it didn't happen that way. It took us more like a century.
People seem to be daunted by any new energy technology because they can't imagine it replacing petroleum overnight. But it doesn't have to happen that way, and in fact it won't. The dominance of petroleum we've known all our lives will be gone someday, probably within the lifetime of some people alive today but that might be fifty years or more into the future. And as with any technology, success with the replacement technologies will depend on timing. You wan to be ahead of the curve, but not investing so far ahead of the curve you're dealing with impracticability. Back in '94 I worked for a new boss who was betting the company on the emergence of something like Netflix streaming in the next year or two. I explained all the difficulties and why it would not happen any time in the next decade, but she was so certain it was going to happen she could not be dissuaded (so I quit). I envisioned the same future as her, but I thought her timing was premature -- as it turned out to be by some 14 years.
Apple's success is, apart from design, largely a matter of timing. They weren't the first to develop a tablet, but the iPad came when it was possible to make something thin enough, light enough, long-lasting enough and powerful enough to be useful. People who tried when you needed to make the things ten pounds and an inch thick to accommodate the battery failed, no matter how impressive their design was for the time, because he time was wrong.
As I said, petroleum will fade away in the lifetime of many of us, and what replaces it would seem astonishing to us today, but it won't happen overnight. And we'll never run out of oil. We'll use less and less of it as the prices rises against the falling price of the alternatives. At the outset, those alternatives won't look competitive at all. And most of them will never be competitive. The few that will work out will be very difficult to pick out from the rest of the pack of doomed technologies.
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Now imagine the people in that world imagining what it would take to create a petroleum-based economy like ours from scratch.
As straw men go, that's a pretty poor one. This article is talking about producing algal fuel, not distributing it; when oil first began to be used as a fuel, it just squirted out of the ground ready to burn... who cared whether someone a thousand miles away can't burn it because there's no pipeline to get it there?
BTW, when I was a kid, we only had twenty years of oil left. Oddly, we seem to have about twenty years of oil left, thirty years later.
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Now imagine the people in that world imagining
Yeah, man...
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We'll use less and less of it as the prices rises against the falling price of the alternatives.
The price of petroleum today is waaaay higher than its actual cost. If alternatives become energy-positive and cheap, the OPEC can just drop the prices to become more competitive. Why should the petroleum price rise against the falling price of the alternatives?
They're Missing Some Fundamental Considerations (Score:2)
Second, what is known of lipid production is that it is a response to nutrient stress -- which means the photosynthetic efficiency is highest with optimal nutrients but the biomass is going to be dominated by non-lipids. Why isn't this work being funded?
Third, the optimal nutrient biomass is largely amino acids and although amino acids have lower market value than lipid
Nitrogen and Phosphorus are FREE... (Score:3)
Where do the Nitrogen and Phosphorous go? (Score:2)
I don't understand how the nitrogen and phosphorus is consumed. Presumably the end product is supposed to be some kind of hydrocarbon fuel. In which nitrogen and phosphorus are neither needed, nor particularly desirable.
If the two end up somewhere else, in some waste product of the process, then why can't the waste be processed and the two elements recycled?
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why can't the waste be processed and the two elements recycled?
They probably can be. The article is being intentionally alarmist. Look at this sentence from the article:
In terms of water, at least 32.5 billion gal would be needed to produce 10 billion gal of algae-based biofuels,
This is written to make consumption of 3 gal of water for each gal of oil sound like a lot. Actually this number is so amazingly small that I find it hard to believe. Producing a gallon of corn-based ethanol consumes hundreds of times that amount of water. Even producing a gallon of gasoline from petroleum requires more water than that. Yet they try to make it look like a problem.
Pure, unadulterated bullshit. (Score:2)
A lot of people think that we are utterly dependent on burning oil for energy for our modern existence, but this is patently untrue. One example of potential independence is biodiesel. I own two diesels (a car and a truck) and I put biodiesel into them when I can, but it costs significantly more than petroleum diesel. This is due to the tax breaks given to Big Oil, and the fact that no one is paying for the major externality of burning petrofuels, carbon dioxide. The US government proved at Sandia NREL [nrel.gov] in t
Joules Fuel (Score:2)
Joules Unlimited/Joules Fuel actually turns SEWAGE into fuel; diesel, ethanol, etc. Now, does it use water? Yup. But that is water that would normally be cleaned up at high expenses. With this case, it turns it into a profit center. Hell, this might make it profitable enough that we will willingly send water to Colorado (via building up clouds on the west coast) to cascade into the various rivers that supply the vast majority of America.
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't most of that nitrogen/phosphorus be recycled into the next generation of algae after extraction of the fuel?
ie. Once the cycle is started it doesn't take anywhere near that amount to keep it going.
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(not a chemist so I'm curious)
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Assuming algae is grown in tubes, how does the nitrogen/phosphorus go from the burning of the fuel into the air back into the tubes?
Even a non-chemist should know that no nitrogen/phosphorus comes out of car exhaust pipes .... it's all CO2 and H2O.
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Car exhaust usually contains carbon dioxide, water, carbon monoxide, and various nitrogen or sulfur oxides.
Now, that nitrogen is from the atmosphere when running oil based gasoline. Is algal biofuel exactly the same? I DON'T FUCKING KNOW SINCE I'M NOT A CHEMIST.
And so I asked the question.
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The nitrogen oxides are the product of atmospheric nitrogen combining with oxygen at the high temperatures present inside engines. It doesn't come from the fuel.
Ahem! [shell.us]
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and and the assumption they make is that algae requires the same levels of both nutrients as regular crops do, which it doesn't. They are also basing their conclusion on a study that DOE did with open ponds, not considering the advancements the closed PBR's have made in recycling the water and with growth rates. Algae offers many advantages that almost all other "green" energy sources lack: primarily it absorbs a lot of CO2, it grows best in waste water (think sewers), can be used for both bio-diesel and bio-butanol, and the pressings can also be used as fuel for pellet type heaters, used as fertilizer as well as feed supplement. Another thing about algae is that you don't have to use land to produce it, we have vast tracks of ocean that floating PBRs could be deployed in and use filtered sea water which has all the nutrients needed. Algae fuel is the best of all the green energy scenarios, its is liquid stored solar power, so you don't need batteries, don't need new storage and delivery infrastructure and in one stroke solves global warming. We just need to put forth the effort and do it.
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Having worked on a solar car project in college we were made very much aware of how dilute solar power is. What algal fuels does is soak up solar power to drive algae growth, then take the algae and process it into a liquid fuel, with that fuel getting entered into the existing liquid fuel distribution system. Unlike the solar electric car I was working on the algae farm does not have to fit on the roof of the vehicle it powers.
Given that the power the sun provides is dilute there is going to have to be s
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We'll probably still do it (Score:2, Insightful)
Ethanol from corn requires more energy than it produces, but due to subsidies it makes money for some politically connected businesses.
Re:We'll probably still do it (Score:5, Informative)
False.
http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf [usda.gov]
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The report ignores the energy input of the sunlight. It may be economically sensible to ignore that, but on a thermodynamic level it's stupid.
Re:We'll probably still do it (Score:5, Funny)
The report ignores the energy input of the sunlight. It may be economically sensible to ignore that, but on a thermodynamic level it's stupid.
So, let me get this straight. You are looking for a process that produces more energy than it requires in inputs. And you are citing thermodynamics?
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The report ignores the energy input of the sunlight. It may be economically sensible to ignore that, but on a thermodynamic level it's stupid.
So, let me get this straight. You are looking for a process that produces more energy than it requires in inputs. And you are citing thermodynamics?
I think the idea behind the crops->ethanol->cars->co2->crops cycle is that the input of human generated energy should be less than the energy you get out of the fuel. The plants serve as a storage device for the solar energy and the nutrients they absorb during their growth phase. The energy input needed is largely absorbed by spreading fertiliser, spreading pesticides, harvesting, transport, and processing into ethanol and that last bit is the hard one. What you want is a 'weed' that grows anyw
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Now if we can only run cars with it.
rgb
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Yes! Very much yes! The reason he mentioned the article ignoring the energy input of sunlight is because that's the whole reason we're using these energy sources to begin with. You're twisting it and trying to make it sound like he's talking about perpetual energy. The reason these things are energy sources to begin with is because they contain the energy of the sun and by extracting them we end up with a net gain of energy.
The energy it takes to extract and refine coal, oil, and natural gas is less than th
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I'm not looking for any such thing, because I know it can't exist. I'm pointing out the sloppy language of the report when it claims over unity return on energy invested. This language is every similar to the free energy nuts who would be looking for such a thing which cannot exist.
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Well no shit. We are performing an action, so almost by definition there will be some losses. When you look at drilling oil from the ground you ignore the energy input from the sunlight all those years ago, the point is whether we can extract that solar energy in an efficient way.
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I am confused. I am confused. I am looking at table 6, corn based ethanol has a net energy value of 1.08. So while, technically, ethanol produces more energy than it takes to produce, it is not exactly a brilliant number – and I suspect other methods would be better – or am I missing something?
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And the immigration "problem" (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's something: (in a simplified nutshell)
Those corn subsidies make US corn really cheap, which is then exported to Mexico. The Mexican farmers couldn't compete and went out of business. So to make ends meet, those million+ farmers came to the US to make some money and then are treated like criminals - all because of farm subsidies.
Talk about unintended consequences.
Next up: farm subsides destroying Gulf fisheries requiring more subsides to fishermen.
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Even growing sagebrush doesn't require much in the way of input water. It's a weed and grows on it's own on land that isn't farmable. Still uses the nitrogen/phosphorus but water would be the biggest expense.
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Either – does it matter?
Using “scrap” for fuel is fine. Every bit of efficiency that can be wrung out of the system is great.
The point that the report was making is that if we use current technology and used everything – new and scraps – we would not even hit the 5% mark.
That is, we are currently using x units of nitrogen fertilizer, etc for our inputs. Let say 50% of the output waste and can be converted. Yeah efficiency! Now, let us saw we redeploy all of our units of nitroge
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Sagebrush likewise is many times more energy productive than corn, so even with existing tech we could get a lot more out of it.
That said, the sheer acreage needed to grow enough of either to replace oil is prohibitive. It will be a relative niche fuel, ideally suited for the military since it is has all the upsides of oil with only a few
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Becasue petroleum will run out, so getting replace technologies before then is a good idea.
Also, its carbon neutral
also, reduce dependence on outside forces.
There is more to think about then just money. Think in terms of overall value.
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We're using 100M+ years of accumulated carbon...
Hah, you've just failed to convince 40% of all the US citizens and your argument hasn't even properly started yet!
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What's your address so I can send you a one way ticket to Vietnam or Cuba? Also say which one you'd prefer.
Are you certain Vietnam counts here [bloomberg.com]? (Does anybody else find the name "Ho Chi Minh Stock Index" amusing?)