Exploring Microalgae as Solutions to Global Fuel Issues

[timallard]

Right, my grades are w/glycerol so an old vdub can use it with the right plugs & ports next are by plastics main change to injection not melting, aviation another specialty like algae-to-crude, that supports bio-gasoline similar to corn ethanol in green.

Yeah Boeing did 50-50 yet 100% algae now along the line to about mass-volume by this outfit likely battered like a better carburetor ... http://www.treehugger.com/aviation/worlds-first-flight-powered-by-100-algae-biofuels-completed.html

The sodium salt idea now fairly refined in one system didn't save the blurb looked good, so, for row-crop, high-loss ag way important to do it, consider moving dirt ... the waste-heat per watt saved for other uses is huge.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This is from dealing with sea-ice loss and direct heat gain there it's now global forcing of 0.21-watts/m^2, that's a lot. Now multiply the wattage of all the power plants in the world by 2 to get the Joules of waste-heat of direct warming because using steam for electrons is 40% thermally efficient, use 1/3, so burns twice the fuel per watt on the wire.

I haven't thought this through completely but I think your concerns about heat are moot when it comes to carbon-neutral fuels. The heat energy released by burning the fuel was first absorbed from sunlight via photosynthesis - an endothermic reaction. So the heat generated by combustion is just delayed heating due to sunlight and would have occurred anyway. In the case of fossil fuels, the same applies, but that sun energy was absorbed millions of years ago. [yes, I was stewing for a moment to be sure there aren't any hidden variables, but those would all be hidden energy in the growth and production of fuel. Provided there aren't any hidden sources of energy in the supply chain, and the operation is completely self powered, carbon neutral means thermal neutral.]

Ironically, nuclear power creates new heat. The energy in nuclear power does not originate from sunlight, rather from the fusion reaction in some star somewhere, I guess.

One obvious source of hidden energy is the energy contained in the fertilizers - which mainly means the nitrogen source. This is another reason why using diesel-produced NOxs is so cool. The energy contained in the fertilizer is already accounted for in the losses in the diesel engines. Not only that, the more we increase the compression ratio, the more NOxs we make, and the more efficient the engines.

 

[timallard]

I haven't thought this through completely but I think your concerns about heat are moot when it comes to carbon-neutral fuels. The heat energy released by burning the fuel was first absorbed from sunlight via photosynthesis - an endothermic reaction. So the heat generated by combustion is just delayed heating due to sunlight and would have occurred anyway. In the case of fossil fuels, the same applies, but that sun energy was absorbed millions of years ago.

Ironically, nuclear power creates new heat. The energy in nuclear power does not originate from sunlight, rather from the fusion reaction in some star somewhere, I guess.

My stance is leave the Steam-Age burn boil nothing for watts the reason is waste-heat, it's far worse than re-emitted radiation on the short-term that matter more to the future than 20-years from now.

An example if you collect-store-use thermal energy where you can gains 80% of all needs with a thermal-mass in the architecture used that way, those grid needs go away by distributing heat to on-site systems that are easy to build vs a power plant [concentrating collectors for higher latitudes].

Even solar-thermal is too lossy in a steam plant in that you need twice the thermal input & storage per watt on-the-wire for the installation's capacity, so, capital expenses went way up to boil water for electrons in a desert. Love that one. If the heat-of-condensation isn't co-generated, which over many decades has never proven viable nobody does it, they heat the planet instead.

So that's the fundamental, the total steam-plant output times 2 in direct heating in Joules is enough to keep the planet heating for centuries, it's a lot of heat that needs to be removed or that's what happens the way the planet works.

So if you want to cool the planet direct waste-heat and Arctic albedo-loss need to be the priority, critical in how fast the planet is heated, that forcing feedbacks and accelerates ones already going.

The next ongoing observable tipping-point is what's called a bluewater event in the Arctic sea-ice.

Right now if you halve the sea-ice minimum you jump global forcing from 0.21-w/m^2, it's a lot of heat. Total forcing gain since 1990 for CO2 was 0.9w/m^2 so Arctic albedo-loss currently is 23% of it. Land albedo-loss is roughly estimated to be the same in the Arctic with both adding more energy to be reflected to the greenhousing, a very strong source of global heating.

A more recent idea trying to quantify what a joule of heat-gain in albedo-loss is to the assumed cooling in emissions reductions to allow priorities on what matters as a solution that is the most bang.

Following that thought, this applies to any latitude & climate hot or cold thus a broad application to reduce waste-heat going into the sky, soils & water for all situations and applied locally with simple changes like do paint roofs white in a desert and don't use black tarmac, just don't do it

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A more recent idea trying to quantify what a joule of heat-gain in albedo-loss is to the assumed cooling in emissions reductions to allow priorities on what matters as a solution that is the most bang.

Following that thought, this applies to any latitude & climate hot or cold thus a broad application to reduce waste-heat going into the sky, soils & water for all situations and applied locally with simple changes like do paint roofs white in a desert and don't use black tarmac, just don't do it

By creating large algae blooms in the oceans, and possibly in deep lakes, we can create both large carbon sinks as well as thermal sinks. The algae grows, dies, sinks to the bottom and is preserved by the low temperatures. Again, all photosynthetic energy is trapped.

Also, thinking of the reefs, algae soaks up acids - nitric and carbonic acids. It would help to increase the pH of the water. One of the challenges in large-scale algae farming is keeping the pH low enough.

Some companies are planning to do this for the carbon credits to offset emissions from factories [as opposed to using CO2 remediation at the source].

 

[timallard]

By creating large algae blooms in the oceans, and possibly in deep lakes, we can create both large carbon sinks as well as thermal sinks. The algae grows, dies, sinks to the bottom and is preserved by the low temperatures. Again, all photosynthetic energy is trapped.

Also, thinking of the reefs, algae soaks up acids - nitric and carbonic acids. It would help to increase the pH of the water. One of the challenges in large-scale algae farming is keeping the pH low enough.

Some companies are planning to do this for the carbon credits to offset emissions from factories [as opposed to using CO2 remediation at the source].

" The algae grows, dies, sinks to the bottom and is preserved by the low temperatures."
The problem here is anaerobic bacteria take over and create methane & CO2 down there, hydrogen-sulfide at the end of the global heating process where extinctions occurred.

This is already happening in the Black Sea from warming and globally it's the final phase of mass-extinction, part of the oceans slowing down as the planet heats up.

Consider we have more electricity than we need by many times, our failure is to have strict engineering on heat-transfer so you don't convert forms of energy, if you need a comfy room using solar-thermal not watts, if you want to drive a car use that waste-heat to heat the house or hot-water for the house.

Being a designer for I did a line of spring-powered things wound up by windmills down to kitchen appliances for off-grid ... still makes sense, nobody funds ideas like that, they sell batteries ...

That's the level and detail we need, it's a thermal-engineering divide needing crossing.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

" The algae grows, dies, sinks to the bottom and is preserved by the low temperatures."
The problem here is anaerobic bacteria take over and create methane & CO2 down there, hydrogen-sulfide at the end of the global heating process where extinctions occurred.

At the ocean floor? This is the first I've heard of this in any relation to algae.

The black sea only goes to a little over 7000 feet deep. In the deep ocean we are talking about far greater depths and pressures.

Consider we have more electricity than we need by many times, our failure is to have strict engineering on heat-transfer so you don't convert forms of energy, if you need a comfy room using solar-thermal not watts, if you want to drive a car use that waste-heat to heat the house or hot-water for the house.

Being a designer for I did a line of spring-powered things wound up by windmills down to kitchen appliances for off-grid ... still makes sense, nobody funds ideas like that, they sell batteries .

I'm not so sure. At small scale the energy invested for the recovery systems and maintenance often exceeds the lifetime benefit of the hardware. And the cost benefit is often a good measure of this. Energy = $. If it makes economic sense, someone will capitalize on that, or would have already.

This speaks to a core problem with alternative fuels. The consumer makes the choice every day. If people would buy $5 fuel instead of $3 fuel, it would be a lot easier. And the cost driver is the cost of production - namely the energy. It is hard to beat the ease of sucking oil out of a hole.

I had developed a complete model for large scale algae farming [with a large number of assumptions, of course, this was early in the game]. I had to go to about 50,000 acres before it was clear the operation could be profitable - the economy of scale.

 

[timallard]

Quickly: The Black Sea has a sill that stratifies it to anoxia and bacteria in all oceans process detritus, the Gulf dead-zone the prime example that all sinks to the bottom where even without the overt stratification it's so large an input the normal bacteria there turn the bottom anoxic from this before currents can clear it out.

Acidifying the oceans takes as long to fix as adding too much carbon too fast to the atmosphere both centuries at best, the sea-air interface is tightly bound, this puts the planet on a different geophysical path due to stored resources, stored clathrate methane, the Greenland ice-sheet examples tied to heating the planet with CO2.

To next consider a concept then on refugia & eco-centric home-farm-ranch if you built one new or simple remodels the design problem. This became the Spartan Farmhouse based on Earthship water & power systems, with a few important additions one using flat-fresnel concentrating collectors in insulated rows, mandatory northern & cloudy sites, the pipe does 250C for the high-temp system the air ducted to a thermal-mass in the crawl space [Also stores heat from 3/4"-deep boxes under the solar panels, cold at night in summer].

The high-temp is for 3d-printing using thermal-fluids for the heat, 83% of the energy used in laser sintering for my target machine, and, owning the gear it's an asset on the books, depreciated on taxes for a small biz by-the-month bill, the other then reasonable to-do is solar-wind-storage and get the same benefit on the books. It means the cost-per-unit drops to competitive from prototype-only, it takes 450-watts per unit on a propeller I want to do on my target machine that's only 76.5-watts in electricity using the thermal system.

For mass-market mfg, 1M-units the basic mfg-unit this drops power from 450-Mw to 76.5-Mw per million-units, the thermal system on-site & an asset on the books not an expense, those reduce profits.

Ok, getting to the Earthship sewage system it's based on a septic-tank, final effluent used in outdoor gardening so I use that to grow algae in photo-bioreactors home-ranch-farm scale, it returns potable water. This gives biodiesel as the liquid fuel to run or heat from the wastewater, scales up to any size city plant, my study & interviews used existing 10M-gallon/day each Phoenix & Glendale, AZ.

Ponds don't scale and don't work in Anchorage in winter, photo-bioreactors run 24x7, mine are insulated cubes 1/2m a side that stack 6-high it's like a pond only fully lighted & aerated top-to-bottom, the whole volume the same conditions as the surface 6mm of a pond in sunlight 24x7, this produces growing rates to match.

Those are key issues to scale while based on home size to purify water for full recycling, my units are water purifiers that can be certified sources of freshwater in a home to well beyond the performance of current treatment plant freshwater supplies as tested containing any drug you want and those are certified, a case of the Flint's.

That was the design spec, I had a small utility in Oklahoma ready to do the biology as the cubes are semi-portable and usable for farm spills as well as provide a revenue stream from the biodiesel, they couldn't get funding nor I as a small-biz sole-proprietor is where it got to over 2007-2011. I'm to the air galleries on 3d-cad ... the parts are easy for 3d-printing.

The biodiesel is the intended need to have the system become a standard of having a full water recycle plant in your garage able to remove the mess using algae world's best water cleaners on a molecular scale. Origin-Oil pioneered using EMF to blast apart cells for harvesting, totally cheap-n-easy to then separate the oil. Their overall process is quite complex using algae, it's to industrial prototype scale for purifying fracking wastewater.

So we don't need that, a dairy can use the wash-down as algae food and run all field & barn operations on this idea the bonus getting the water back pure from a final purification step using treatment plant OTS filters & components for that volume. This can restore the small farm by removing all energy costs per-watt and replacing it with an investment on terms like a milking machine to leverage the resource.

Using algae biodiesel, given running all the IC-engines on the planet until we have a better way, the waste-heat emissions are now more important than the greenhouse emissions from the exhaust, the reason is that low-albedo surfaces absorb heat and that's what is getting greenhoused is longwave-infrared, a small portion of original energy sent back to the sky.

The problem is the total volume of carbon in the sky is so large it has an inertia, adding more CO2 doesn't increase the overall heat forcing so much as increasing the sources of heat, the example global ice where soot is creating direct heating supplying the conversion to water, then to refreeze that requires 80:1 calories per unit volume in cooling, we're in a warming world bad odds.

Therefore, the most important global albedo-loss switch is losing Arctic sea-ice, so, latest work is all on saving it, the main method by damming most of the warmer Pacific water flow into the Arctic basin and creating ice-polders in Bering Strait to keep the sea-ice far longer by actions not dependent on reducing emissions to work. If the methods in the ice-polders works it can be applied to the methane bubble zones one now called a "megaflare" of methane in the shallow seas surrounding the Arctic Ocean.

These measures will slow and delay the final act of our play, to all time we now act, we bequeath what we do today.