Oil may hold the Green Secret

For all that global warming fear mongers and environmentalists have said about the evils of oil and its dangerous CO2 emissions, regardless of what you may believe concerning global warming, a simple microscopic organism may hold the secret to our renewable energy and climate change needs.  The catch?  To work viably, it needs the ‘dangerous’ CO2 output from our factories and oil refineries.

The hopes of global warming alarmists withstanding, factories and oil refineries are here to stay forever.  Raw goods don’t become finished products through some magical process, and the odds are that you don’t want to return to a prehistoric lifestyle (because even farming done by the ancient Incas is claimed to have contributed to the dangerous greenhouse buildup).

In classic free-market fashion, new methods for producing bio-crude and ethanol are taking the CO2 ‘waste product’ and pumping it into Algae farms that need the high CO2 levels to produce the rapid blooms needed to make oil from algae a viable alternative energy solution.  In other words, much like the natural CO2 cycle used by trees and animals, industry will now use a CO2 pump cycle to curb our dependence on depleting oil stocks and provide a far ‘greener’ yet highly practical energy solution.

How viable is extracting crude and ethanol from algae?  A privately funded Algae farm in Mexico, a $70 million facility, utilizes specialized strains of Algae to produce 6000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year.  The ethanol is collected after it is released in gas form by the algae, meaning there is no biomass waste or need to press the algae to collect the fuel.  Currently, this results in gasoline costing around $3, but other farms have done much better.  Sound intriguing?

The farm in Mexico is just one of a host of Algae farm designs to have recently been tested.  Another design in Colorado by Solix Biofuels is expected to produce up to 3000 gallons per acre per year, but instead of ethanol the resulting fuel is biocrude which has far more useful potential for nearly everything plastics to jet fuel.

The best design so far comes from a farm just outside El Paso Texas that produces, get this, 100,000 gallons of biocrude on a single acre in a single year.  Glen Kertz, the President and CEO of Valcent Products which runs the farm, ditched the pond scheme for a closed vertical system that grows  algae in long rows of moving plastic bags to exponentially increase the Algae’s surface area exposure to sunlight.  He’s also invested a huge part of his time into researching every strain of algae he can get his hands on to find the best strains (and best feeding schemes) for producing various types of fuel.

Basically, Kertz has found a way to produce 2,000X more ethanol per acre than soybeans, 270X more than corn, and 112X more than sugar cane through solar power, while requiring less land to reach viable production levels, less work to process and extract the fuel, without depleting the soil, and without creating a global food crisis and causing corn riots in Mexico.  From a bonus environmental perspective, corn depletes the soil so quickly that even with modern farming techniques it requires heavy use of fertilizer to consistently produce the amount we need for both food and ethanol.  Algae, even after only limited testing, certainly seems the way to go.

There’s another huge benefit to commercial Algae farms when compared to crop based ethanol: the hit to your wallet.  Current methods of ethanol production require massive amounts of government subsidies just to appear to have a semblance of viability.  Corn’s viability for ethanol drops further every time corn’s market price rises, which is bound to happen when you suddenly start gobbling up thousands of acres of corn for ethanol instead of food, just reference Pacific Ethanol’s Q3 woes last year.  Algae, on the other hand, has not only been privately funded thus far, its economic potential and viability is such that it is likely to continue that way too.

So why isn’t Algae funded for ethanol?  That question is the free-market gift that keeps on giving.  Essentially, the department of energy pseudo studied Algae for twenty five years, coughed it up as too difficult, and recommended corn. Why? Well basically, no one in the department thought outside the pond.  Algae was too difficult because it required a lot of surface area for growth (talk to Kertz), it had to be grown in ponds (they were thinking the outdoor natural kind), and they assumed it would be too difficult to control water contamination and prevent an abundance of unwanted wildlife from making Algae ponds home (apparently no one in the department of energy has heard of a closed system either).  In 1996, Algae was removed from the list without ever having been properly studied.

Fast forward a little more than a decade, and the tiny Algae is now king, and anyone who still considers ethanol fomr corn an economically (or physically) viable energy future has been smoking too much of another green plant altogether not as cool as Algae.  All it took was a little out of the box thinking from the private sector to get it growing.

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