Regulations and NIMBYism. It’ll happen first in India or maybe China. An operation that makes algal biofuel is much more than a bunch of ponds. You cannot use water or land that is suitable for growing food to make fuel. That is a one-way ticket to social upheaval. But algae can grow in seawater. A desert or every dry mountains would be A-OK for algae production. No food grown there or with seawater. To make algae grow really fast you have to tightly control temperature, salinity, carbon dioxide concentration in the water (up to limits, the more the merrier) and you have to keep other species out. So forget open ponds. The paltry 320 ppm of carbon dioxide in the air is not enough to industrially grow algae. You need more. Where to get it? Either a coal-fired power plant or a Fischer-Tropsch synfuel plant. You separate out the carbon dioxide and bubble it into your algae water. Add a few other nutrients (commonly available in raw sewage) and sunlight and you get algae growing fast. Both types of plants also generate usable industrial heat for processing. But this winds up looking like a big oil refinery. Environmental extremists and NIMBYs will tie it up with regulations or litigation for decades. India is energy-hungry. They will swat aside extremists and NIMBYs. They don’t give a rip about AGW. India has another advantage: By and large the weather is hot there. The proclivity for biofuel to cloud at above-freezing temperatures is moot in most of India. Only the Himalayas will require dino-fuel. Once again, the US government is the enemy of the people.
Uncle Ferd says dat means it costs too much... Navy Biofuel Deal is 'Cost Prohibitive,' 'Another Solyndra, Critics Say December 23, 2011 The Obama administrations deal to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuel for Navy jets comes at a cost of up to nine times higher than regular fuel, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, coming at a time when the U.S. military is already facing deep budget cuts.
Have you looked up what the company does? I think they make lubricants not fuel. Pay no attention to Inhofe.. he's a retard. The company is in bed with Chevron and other Oil majors, but I think they are making lubricants.
10 years ago, I was in Germany. I noted a huge field of what looked like a weed. I asked about it and was told it was bio-diesel (soy?). The cost was 2 Deutchmarks per liter, compared 1.5 Deutchmarks per liter for petrol based diesel. A 33% premium. Maybe the Navy is talking to a company charging $26 per gallon (the price of high quality olive oil) for the same reason the gooberment invested in Solyndra. Giving a green company, that would never be economically viable, a helping hand.
I have severe doubts about the feasibility of algal biofuel. Perhaps if it grown on remote unpopulated coastlines near the ocean. Algae requires a large quantity of water, preferably salt water since there is so much of it available. It requires a large quantity of algae to make a small quantity of fuel. I am not sure that people fully realise this.
I agree that biofuel crops have to be grown on non-arable land (deserts or mountains) and have to use seawater, not ag-quality fresh water. That rapidly reduces biofuel crops to algae. Secondly, algae farms must be paired with industrial facilities that produce lots of carbon-dioxide (coal-fired power plants or Fischer-Tropsch synfuels plants). Then you have industrial amounts of carbon dioxide to support industrial-scale algae farming. But the US regs remain in the way.
What? Like regulations to do things like NOT pump gigalitres of salt water onto land so that the salinity of the soil goes astronomical? Think what you like the bottom line is that it is not yet economically viable
The ideal locations for algae growth is contiguous to sewage treatment (water and fertilizer), a power plant (CO2 and ash), and a refinery (dried / de-oiled algae is burned in the power plant, sludge returned to the algae pond). The output is clean water, CO2 neutral electricity, and CO2 neutral transportation fuels. Can you imagine the regulation nightmare to build that?
With 40 CFR 52.21 and 40 CFR 63 in place there is very little that is economically viable. I always thought the ideal place for algal biofuel production would be Senegal. The land is desert for the most part but there is a whole ocean of seawater available. Feedstocks coal, sewage sludge, and garbage could be barged in from Europe and product (biodiesel, bio-jet, bio-gasoline) can be hauled off to market by tanker. Senegal is subtropical but still desert dry. (Few days of cloud, plus little variation in length of sunlight each day. And Senegal has little or no regulatory structure.
I completey agree. Namibia would also be a good place. The coastal land there, often referred to as "The Skeleton Coast", is very cheap. As a plus, Namibia is a democracy, and the operations could potentially bring desperately needed jobs to the impoverished country, which has a very high unemployment rate of 51%.
