Isn't it remarkable how insulting people who accuse others of insults can be!

It wasn't my intention to be insulting, prob bad self awareness again on my part.
It doesn't bother you if posters try to shut down discussion with no argument but insults, including a label i believe is specifically banned?

Your posts seemed intensely nasty, but maybe you didn't intend it. Happens to all of us at times, I guess.

Ok they have made a claim, so let's test the math with what we already know. This math ignores water, nutrients, iron, nitrogen, CO2, processing, etc., just tries to see how much energy is actually created by the phytoplankton.

How much energy is in 95 million barrels of biopetro? They claim they can make that each day so let's see. Please help me check all my math and assumptions!


Today's petro-diesel has 130,500 BTU/gallon, so we are assuming they will get at least this much energy out of a gallon of their stuff. Ethanol through sugar cane, which also uses chlorophyll to transfer the solar energy, only gets about 84,000 BTU/gallon, but let's go ahead and assume the best.

1 barrel of Petro-diesel is therefore 42 gallons x 130,500 BTU = 5,481,000 BTU

1.0 British thermal unit (BTU) = 1055 joules

5,481,000 BTU x 1,055 joules = 5,782,455,000 joules in one barrel of petro-diesel fuel

5.7 GJ x 95 million barrels = 541,500,000,000,000,000 Joules per day claimed. Yikes.


How much energy in joules falls on 52,000 square km via sunlight? Let's pick a primo-spot on the earth just to be sure we get good numbers:

Phoenix Arizona averages about 7.0kWh per meter squared per day, assuming the area is perpendicular to the sun and at optimum angle, like around noon.

1 W = 1 J per second

1 hour = 3600 seconds

7.0kWh = 7000 x 3600 = 25,200,000 Joules per meter squared per day

1 square kilometer = 1 000 000 square meter

1 sq km receives 25,200,000,000,000 joules per day

52,000 sq km receives 1,310,400,000,000,000,000 joules per average day near Phoenix. Damn.

1,310,400,000,000,000,000 maximum amount of Joules per day possible via sunlight.

541,500,000,000,000,000 Joules per day claimed.

That is an efficiency of 41%, taking sunlight and turning it into potential fuel. Ok so that's great, there is enough energy entering the system from the sun onto the area they claim.

But according to photosynthesis research, only about 53% of the photons from the sun are "photosynthetically active", meaning that they are inside the 360-700 nm wavelength range. Other wavelengths pass right through or are reflected completely by plants and organisms. Therefore their real efficiency they are claming is something like 78%.

Since these organisms contain chlorophyll A (this is what absorbs the light energy), and plants use similar methods of chlorophyll and chloroplast to transfer solar energy into plant growth, I would have to say that their claim is completely bogus. Sugar cane is one of the most efficient plants on earth and only achieves 2.0% - 3.8% efficiency depending on the study (sunlight -> photosynthesis -> ethanol), and this process has been perfected for 30 years now in Brazil, an incredibly great place to grow the stuff, and the best they can do is 3.8%. Now someone with no evidence at all is claiming somewhere around 78%?

And this doesn't take into any account the fact that the entire 52,000 sq km won't be phytoplankton, but it will be pipes, ground, and water; that wind gusts will create tiny waves which will reflect a significant amount of light away; and that the pools of water won't always be perpendicular to the sun, meaning much more of the light will be reflected.

So really they are claming some kind of outlandish efficiency probably greater than 100%. They also have no fuel to test, so the fuel itself may be near 84,000 BTU/gallon not 130,500 BTU/gallon.


http://www.serc.si.edu/labs/phytoplankt ... ydrops.jsp
http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll
http://www.worldscibooks.com/lifesci/et ... hap1_4.pdf
http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/solmap.htm
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

Hear hear!

These plankton farm lunatics have clearly forgotten to take their Zoloft prescription, or else they are still living in the sci-fi Seventies.

Plankton farming didn't work in Logan's Run, it didn't work in Soylent Green, and it doesn't work now. it will never work.

In both of those movies, the failed plankton farms resulted in people, rather than crustaceans, becoming the plat de jour.

Shouldn't that be "plat du jour," Chicken_Little? If you're going to start quoting French, better get it right.

Otherwise, good post.

Yes, and we all know that movies are scientific experiments designed to reflect reality exactly, right?

LOL, doly has got ya there boys.

Look, I'll say to this thread what I've said to every other miracle cure for peakoil. Until I see on a somewhat decent scale plankton farms, this entire discussion is mute. Unless they show up, and show up soon, they can't possibly have an effect on peak oil EVEN IF THEY WORK. My arguements never involved math, cause I suck at it, instead just logic, which I'm not bad at. The scaleability issue is, for almost every industrial and chemical process, you need time to set it up. That's something we don't have alot of. So the question is, do I believe this could work? Sure, just like every other energy tech that hasn't been totally shown to be bogus, it has potential. Do I believe I'm ever going to fuel my car off plankton. Nope.

I disagree. In many ways, the world depicted in "Soylent Green" is well on the way to turning into reality. An amazingly on-target film. I watched it again recently, after many years, and was struck by this.

Not all movies and novels are off the mark in reflecting "reality."

Yeah I'm sure we can fit in the factory farming food chain somewhere. Lets see, we feed the chicken shit to the cattle and we can also feed them dead sheep offcuts, why not dead processed humans?

It isn't just the "it's people" angle of the "Soylent Green" movie. It's the whole look and touch of it. The characters and what they say and do and how they feel about their world. And the things that are going on in that world, like the dying of the oceans. A classic, a bit dated in some ways (the computers look clunky, for example), but in other ways still ahead of its time (and ours!). And I like the way it combines humor with tragedy.

Merde!

Corrected on my French, by an American, no less!

And damn it, he's right!

I think it has potential, no way way is it a silver bullet, its a possible silver bb. Given that imho hydrogen as a transport fuel and fusion reactors are not even possible silver bb's yet are receiving truckloads of tax-deductible or direct govt funded research cash, i think its worth being clear on the difference.

(Garrett Hardin is best known for his seminal paper "The Tragedy of the Commons".)



Yet another silver bullet, cornucopia, head in the sand approach.

We have to reduce our numbers and our consumption.

You'd be amazed by how much some of us dumb Americans know.