Nobody in position of power is proposing turning all our splendid CO2 manufacturing plants off, at best they're talking expensive & energy hungry clean coal tech etc for new build power stations. So we've a few decades to think about, at least. Is there much competition for the CO2? No. Are the emitters keen for any kind of figleaf to make their businesses prettier? Yes.

How is this not a tremendous opportunity for any process that can profitably use this waste product?

Given that the geosequestration pipe-dream (h'yuk h'yuk) is being kept alive only with hundreds of millions of government research dollars (socialism lives), I think algal oil could make the big time, even if net energy is slightly -ve.

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edit for news..

Wheres their CO2 coming from? Theres gas powered 'leccy generators in Perth, nearest to Mandurah would be ?Kwinana, but the coal fired ones are, IIRC, 100's km away.

Well... considering we spend ~20-23 TRILLION dollars per year on oil alone, not including cash spent on infrastructure, not including the cost of the military in the ME, it depends on what the cost of a barrel of algae oil would be. At ~$20 a barrel we'll break even in a few years, $40 a barrel would be 7-9 years (educated guesses really) and at current levels, a couple decades. Of course both of us wouldn't bet on the price of oil staying where it is, it'll probably go up, up, and away in due time.
That is the real reason why we won't see anything like large scale biofuels, or nuclear power, or any other safe, efficient forms of energy being promoted. They cost too much for the business and too little for the consumer. Oil's at or near peak and the business has never been better, in a few decades most fossil fuels will mirror this, and they'll rake in the cash. Now why would a company want to invest in something with large amounts of initial capital, minimal production costs, and no depletion of said fuel source in sight...
When they can invest in oil, and watch as demand outpaces supply and people are essentially force to pay for it because the infrastructure only supports liquid fuels and all the other large scale sources have been purposefully ignored. In fact, the groups that would be able to wrangle up 23 TRILLION dollars in capital have probably bet on oil already, in a big way. It's a large, quick, ROI. The people who have the most cash are the ones that have made the most profit, and what they care about first and foremost is profit. If three million people per year die from fossil fuel emissions, who cares... As long as they can make cash by going long on oil while shutting the majority of alternatives out of the market, they'll make a killing. And economics is about profit, not energy efficiency, not health and safety, profit.

Ok, I'm really confused. Did lorenzo just diss biofuels?



If so, bravo! Not on the dissing of biofuels, but on the realization that nothing is a 100 percent solution. Passing into honest debate and asking questions instead of bold statements is something I wish more people would do. Now I'll read your links again. =_)

Pstarr, while normally I would agree with you, please do realize he's ,as far as I remember, translating from a language other than English. It may not have a direct English translation. Don't bite the mans head off just for faithfully giving the data as he sees it.

The only other comment I have currently on this, as I still don't have any proof either way on it's viablility, is people have been saying how we could spend that much money if we just took the money away from our oil spending. The point I guess is people are barely going to have the money to survive. They aren't going to have spare money for Anything. The FIRST thing to go in a real depression will be research funding.

I'm not talking about the typical doomer view of the world ending, I'm talking about the severe economic depression that is an almost certainty even without peakoil, just based on the world economy right now. When you factor peakoil in, great depression seems like such a small word.

I curious about lorenzo's statement too. Does it imply that algae isn't useful at all without a large consistent source of carbon dioxide, or do the yields simply decrease as the carbon dioxide concentration decreases?

Before Lorenzo mentioned that about algae needing the carbon forever, I was considering how bad it was that the carbon dioxide was needed. So for the algal oil dream to live forever we have to 1) keep using carbon fossil fuels 2) give up on the carbon sequestration dream.

I think we all agree for the environment it would be better if the carbon could be sequestered, but I think it is very likely to make extra profit for coal companies that when oil gets really expensive, algae photobioreactors might be everywhere.

Chuck

Question:

Carbon is needed for the algae, what is needed for these different types of plankton to grow?

Chuck

No, the point is that we would have to spend the $23 trillion in addition to ongoing oil spending. We can't stop spending money on oil and abruptly divert it all to algae, or civilization would collapse overnight. We would have to gradually segue from oil to algae, and that would mean keeping all the founts of funny money in full eruption.

Impossible, of course.

Didn't see this on the thread:



Did find link to Omar's post in April, which i mssed at the time and think deserves reproduction

A few counter points for the people who say absolutely there is no value to this research.

One main argument is the cost of building a 50,000 kilometer covered pool that can be maintained is impossible. Absolutely true. Also absolutely moot. The 50,000 kilometer figure is given to produce enough bio-fuel for the entire planet at current levels. No one company or country will endevour to take on a project like this.

What we are talking about are numerous private companies producing bio-fuel from plankton and algea and selling it for profit as a part of total energy consumption. With current technology, we already can produce engines that will run on any type of bio-fuel including those made from soy, corn, cooking grease, coal, canola, etc.

Next point, we are still on a heavy crude oil model of world consumption for not only cars, but electricity and this is shifting slowly and will be ramped up heavily on already proven technologies. Right now we are talking about nuclear, which alone can potentially shift much of the world reliance of oil cleanly and quickly for energy needs. The waste issue is political and can be dealt with relatively cheaply as Europe is doing now.

Wind power, hydro electric, solar. All these are current technologies that alone will not come near taking us off oil dependence, but combined contribute.

Next is technology. Huge advances are being made on battery technology. It won't be long to see highly efficient batteries that are 1000X better then lithium ion. These will make for 500 mile per gallon hybrid car engines using vapor injected bio-fuels. May seem like science fiction, but the incentive is now here to do it with current oil prices and next gen hybrids for 2008 are already slated for 80+ MPG for sale. More consumers will be buying these thus lowering the demand.

As technology in nano construction (improving not only solar but batteries and every other aspect of technology), batteries, fuel effiiency, bio-fuels, genetic engineering (i.e. super fuel producing soy and algea), and unforseen discoveries made every few years (i.e. cold fusion) all converge, the future looks pretty good for a long term painless transition from crude oil.

Also keep in mind that current technology allows engines to run on all forms of fuel so we would not have to totally transition off crude to avoid total depletion. If alternatives could cut our reliance steadily with the culmination of a 50% reduction within 20 years, we would be looking at manageable cost per barrel of crude and enough energy for generations while technology continues to advance.

Another point is that while world population is growing and demand is being raised from countries like China and India, the rising cost per barrel will put a limit on that demand. These countries do not have the GNP to maintain their demand like Western countries. True, their economies are growing, but it will take some time before they can have the infastructure and mass education needed for an economy that can sustain mass consumption at $100+ a barrel prices.

Demoth, GREAT first post, must rate as best first post ever.



More to the point, their economies are utterly dependent on the health of the US economy, and that is looking very bad at the moment (listen to the mp3 at that link, you'll be stunned). So I foresee huge demand destruction from that region.

i don't think anyone in this debate posited 1 giant 52,000 square kilometer plankton pool.

what the doomers are saying is that it's irrelevant whether the pools are built by lots of individual organisations or one big one.

Plankton are small shrimp-like animals. What on Earth are you going to feed them on?

How is the planet as a whole going to come up with 23 trillion dollars and enough concrete and steel to make the American freeway system look like a kids' Meccano project?

How much of our existing oil and gas reserves will we need to use just to provide plastic roofing to cover these pools?

How will ocean currents and life be affected by us sucking in vast quantities of seawater to be warmed up in our shallow pools?

How much plankton can we realistically produce per square meter per day and how much do we need to make a barrel of oil?

i don't think anyone in this debate posited 1 giant 52,000 square kilometer plankton pool.

what the doomers are saying is that it's irrelevant whether the pools are built by lots of individual organisations or one big one.

Plankton are small shrimp-like animals. What on Earth are you going to feed them on?

How is the planet as a whole going to come up with 23 trillion dollars and enough concrete and steel to make the American freeway system look like a kids' Meccano project?

How much of our existing oil and gas reserves will we need to use just to provide plastic roofing to cover these pools?

How will ocean currents and life be affected by us sucking in vast quantities of seawater to be warmed up in our shallow pools?

How much plankton can we realistically produce per square meter per day and how much do we need to make a barrel of oil?[/quote]
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Actually, a few people did seem to be thinking along the lines of one big pool to supply all the worlds needs while others were talking about this kind of undertaking as an all or nothing proposition.

We are still talking about something in the early research stage which no one knows will even pan out to be feasable. However, the possibilities are encouraging.

This type of bio-fuel can be harvested in regions where bio-crops can not be grown and used locally to help supplement a many pronged solution to reduce crude oil useage as well as sold commercially as a part of a many sourced bio-fuel supply. It also uses less surface area of limited land (theoretically) per barrel of fuel produced. These types of pools could even use solar powered lighting in order to actually grow plankton and algae in multiple layers from a single pool.

The plankton we are talking about here is not the animal variety. There are two types of plankton and these are plant plankton such as blue-green algae which absorb very cheap to seed nutrients from the water and use photosynthesis to convert into energy. These can also be grown in combination with other types of algae that can exist in a symbiosis, feeding off other nutrients, producing more bio-mass per square foot.

Everything is still speculation at this point. We need to see some refined product and determine how long the bio-fuel produced can stay useable or what type of mix it may need with other fuels not to mention more info on costs and what type of residue it may leave in an engine. Any number of factors could well make plankton based fuel non-useable.

However, I for one am happy this type of research is being conducted. I feel eventually one big discovery will in fact come a long way to solving the current problems we face and barring that, our only hope is taking advantage of various alternatives and painfully weaning ourselves off crude.

I am not a doomer simply because if we had to do it we could cut oil consumption with current technology by 75% within 10 years. The caveat is only the United States and some smaller wealthy countries could do this and it would be painful. But, say the Middle East was off limits to us and the price per barrel hit the $500 range or more. You'd see the full resources of our economy building many more nuclear power plants with little political barriers, large wind farms, mandated 100+ MPG hybrid cars with engines capable of taking bio-fuels, a much bigger % of the workforce working from home, forced car pooling and public transport, more home and business solar panels for hot water and air conditioning, limits on outside sourced energy consumption per family and an overall planned slowdown of the economy to conserve fuel.

Of course, all that is only if we absolutely had no other choice. I see a lower standard of living in our future, but not a collapse of the United States or mass starvation here.

We see pretty much what we want to see. Many people just can't cope with the idea that they might die prematurely, so they unconsciously oppose the doomer point of view.

The fact is that the US is especially vulnerable to mass starvation, despite its now-mythical food glut. The population is totally dependent on the shelves at Safeway and Food Lion remaining full at all times. Very few people in America have any connection with the land, and most could not grow so much as a tomato.

We are one major oil crisis away from mass starvation.

Your kidding right? there is 50% if not even more food then is needed in any one super market in the USA at any given time. There is so much food that isnt even needed in the stores that if it wasnt there tomorrow, there would still be more then enough food for people to buy and live off of, stop trying to scare people.
I have lived in a third world country and trust me when I say this the average american lives on way to much food then is needed. I have seen what starving really is and even the poor in america have it great compared to real poverty.

I think, that Heineken is trying to say, that once SUPPLIES to supermarkets had stopped or started to suffer delays, than shelves would quickly go empty.
American citizenery not used to this would soon start panicking, stocking up etc with all consequences.