Friday, December 12, 2008

Algea Power

Algae holds a lot of potential as a biofuel. As petroleum prices tumble making ethanol less competitive for the present, algae holds a double potential because it can be used to reduce carbon emissions from conventional power plants. While I'm not a fan of the proponents of global warming, there is no good reason to throw away perfectly good CO2 when it can be used to make transportation fuels.



Isaac Berzin has a prototype system in place at MIT's power plant. He's not alone.

http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enZone=Profiles&enDisplay=view&enPage=BlankPage&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Articles^l2141

Here's anothe researcher:



Algae hold the potential to far out-produce corn as a source of biofuel.

2 comments:

KGS said...

Good post, with oil prices now on the increase due to OPEC's insistance that oil production be sharply reduced, ethanol won't lose its appeal, and algae production will be enough to take up the slack when oil prices decline.

Either way, the monopoly is broken!

KGS

There is NO Santa Claus said...

KGS59:

The beauty of using power plant emissions to make algea is that we are using something (CO2) that we used to throw away to make useable transportation fuels.

Algea can be fermented and distilled into ethanol. Some algea species are rich in oil and can have this oil extracted for uses as diesel fuel. (Hence I use the word "petroleum" when referring to mineral oil pumped from the ground.)

It's not about "global warming". It's about petroleum independence from OPEC. If the tree-huggers like Alan Alda like it, so much the better!

President Elect O'Bama's new Sec. of Energy is a big fan of bio-fuels. I don't know where I saw it, but I heard he's a big fan of algea. Keep an eye on this subject in the years to come. I think it holds tremendous potential to turn garbage CO2 into usable transportation fuels.