Solar farming: A photobioreactor houses photosynthetic microorganisms that use the energy in sunlight to make fuel and other chemicals from carbon dioxide and water.
Joule Biotechnologies
A startup unveils a high-yield process for making fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight.
A startup based in Cambridge, MA--Joule Biotechnologies--today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.
Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies.
If the new process, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory, works as well on a large scale as Joule Biotechnologies expects, it would be a marked change for the biofuel industry. Conventional, corn-grain-based biofuels can supply only a small fraction of the United States' fuel because of the amount of land, water, and energy needed to grow the grain. But the new process, because of its high yields, could supply all of the country's transportation fuel from an area the size of the Texas panhandle. "We think this is the first company that's had a real solution to the concept of energy independence," says Bill Sims, CEO and president of Joule Biotechnologies. "And it's ready comparatively soon."
The company plans to build a pilot-scale plant in the southwestern U.S. early next year, and it expects to produce ethanol on a commercial scale by the end of 2010. Large-scale demonstration of hydrocarbon-fuels production would follow in 2011.
So far, the company has raised "substantially less than $50 million," Sims says, from Flagship Ventures and other investors, including company employees. The firm is about to start a new round of financing to scale up the technology.
The new approach would also be a big improvement over cellulose-based biofuels. Cellulosic materials, such as grass and wood chips, could yield far more fuel per acre than corn, and recent studies suggest these fuel sources could replace about one-third of the fossil fuels currently used for transportation in the United States. But replacing all fossil fuels with cellulose-based biofuels could be a stretch, requiring improved growing practices and a vast improvement in fuel economy.
Algae-based biofuels come closest to Joule's technology, with potential yields of 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre; yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement. What's more, for the best current algae fuels technologies to be competitive with fossil fuels, crude oil would have to cost over $800 a barrel says Philip Pienkos, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Joule claims that its process will be competitive with crude oil at $50 a barrel. In recent weeks, oil has sold for $60 to $70 a barrel.
Agradis wants to use genomics to develop plants that could yield more material for biofuels.
A research project will make jet fuel without wasting fresh water or farmland.
I was puzzled how this could actually replace our fuel consumption. Based on this page (http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html), with their 378 million gallons of gasoline per day statistic, I calculated that we'd need 6.7 million acres of land to replace gasoline (based on the 20K / year). And to me that seemed ridiculous.
However, the total acreage of farmland in the US is around 922 million, which would make the 6.7 million acre requirement a rather small percentage. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm)
Couple this great technology with an increase in efficiency for our transportation fleet and that requirement gets even lower. Very promising stuff.
Use the fuels to power mass transit first, then individual vehicles.
Mass transit is much more sustainable from an Energy Consumption perspective (rail installation is another matter entirely).
Always was and always will be.
Instead of pounding our heads against the wall with social engineering projects (trying to force people to use mass transit), let's focus on allowing people to drive their cars with homegrown fuel.
This will allow us to quickly reduce our foreign oil dependence, and thus consign the oil producing regimes of the middle east to the dustbins of history.
Alone, the savings from ceasing our petroleum-related aid and military adventures in the middle east and elsewhere ought to pay for this.
You may be surprised to find out that mass transit is not all that energy efficient. In fact, Khosla Ventures commissioned a study that showed that an electric car uses less energy and generates less carbon than taking public transport. The reasonong for this was that public transport often results in mostly-empty vehicles, and because transport stations uses a lot of energy even when nobody is there.
http://khoslaventures.com/presentations/Hybrids.pdf
As a New Yorker, this seems obvious to me. Outside of rush hours, the busses are usually empty, the NYC subway isn't overly full, and the station lights are always on 24x7. In addition, the first air-conditioned station just opened, and a lot of the stations are going to be retrofitted with cooling systems.
The Khoshla paper cites NY Heavy Rail as a reference - NY has higher labor costs, restrictive regulations and a whole litany of issues that make an apples to apples comparison unrealistic. I believe that when you calulate usage over a 7X24 period, the costs escalate considerably as well. The website materials here also target India in particular, not US cities. The government regulations in India are drastically different than the US.
Thought #1 - develop a Light Rail Solution with economies not found in heavy rail. Basically reengineerig the mass transit with fuel efficiency in mind and place an emphasis on the fact that the US can realistically produce X amount of fuels ourselves. The strategy would be to build the solution to use only the fuels or power sources we can produce ourselves.
Thought #2 - Run Mass Transit for peak times only not 24 hrs per day. Most traffic congestion, parking congestion etc all happen during normal business hours. By moving all the workers using mass transit during this peak period, you would drastically improve those cost figures. After working hours, shut the system down for daily maintenance. A 5AM to 8PM Operations M-F window would cover the larger percentage of people who can leverage mass transit most effectively. On weekends, run the systems from 8AM to 6PM or commuters can use their own vehicles.
A key point to remember too is that even a normal ICE vehicle runs much more effciently when you run it at a steady state (ie not stop and go traffic). My 2003 Ford Taurus gets an average of 23 mpg in my daily driving, but just last week I had to take my son to sign up for classes on the other side of the state and my drive at 75mpg in steady traffic, my mileage jumped up to almost 28 mpg. Multiply this type of improved efficiency by millions more drivers and the fuel consumption figures drop dramatically. Getting more cars OFF the road means there will be improved efficiency for everyone who HAS to drive regardless of the type of fuel they fill their vehicle with.
Thought #3 - buying all electric implies these vehicles will be affordable. The readers of this material are most likely well educated, upper middle class people, and buying a $30,000 + car is not a huge burden. However, there are a larger number of poorer people who need mass transit to make a living. The Hybrid paper pretty much hammers down the fact that being green means you have to have "green backs" in your pocket before they're affordable.
Don't get me wrong though. I think Electric propulsion is the way to go, but we're a heck of a long way off before this becomes an affordable reality.
The Khoslav site has a paper that specify's Bicycle Commuting for the 600 million Indian citizens too. This would work in the US in sunbelt areas for many US workers and commuters and parts of the country could use this mode of transport for 30 - 40% of the year.
Utlimately it will boil down to Alternative Fuels, Mass Transit, electric propulsion and human powered vehicles with Telecommuting being a huge tool as well. There will always be a reason a person needs to go from point A to point Z, but what tool they select will be determined by their affordability. A $40,000 Hybrid Electric vehicle can easily be replaced by a laptop, internet connection and cell phone for many people. Conversely a light rail solution can be replaced by a well built bicycle (or electric bike).
Given more choices, I believe commuters will pick the one that fits their budgets best (or combo's) regardless of how energy independent it makes the US, and how much carbon we don't put into the air.
I think your calculation is a bit off. According to the DOE link you provided, the daily US petroleum consumption is just 20milion barrel/day, which means it's about 7.3 billion barrel/year.
Assume Joule Biotech's accurate in their 20k barrel/acre annual production prediction, that means we need just 365,000 acre, or about 570 square miles (think 24milex24mile). see calculation here
Still a huge size, but definitely manageable. Another way to picture this: the Sunny city of Phoenix, AZ is 475 square miles. so in order to produce enough petroleum for the entire US using this tecnology, we just need a little more land than a US city.
The article claims 20k Gallons of fuel/acre NOT 20k barrels.
So the required acreage would be 42x your calculations if you used barrels.
Saving money at the gas pump is only part of the financial ROI. Don't forget about US Petroleum Subsidies (which I suspect BioFuels will get a majority anyways - so it's a wash) as well as the Shipping and Military costs to get crude oil out of the Middle East. We're also increasing spend in South America, so anything that keeps those tax dollars circulating around our local economies the better!
Even if this fuel comes within 10% to 15% of the cost per gallon for other Ethanol-like products, we'll be money ahead and OPEC and Venezuela can then go pound sand!
I do not believe/think the oil companies of the world are going to allow ANY process/technology that even remotely threatens their revenue stream/existence to see the light of day, much less get even close to the market place and the consumer. Capitalism today is a consumption based economic system and as long as there is ANY crude oil to be consumed that is THE WAY it will be!
Have the Obama Administration ante up TARP bucks for this and make it a US Owned Venture per se. The Oil Companies will do everything they possibly can to prevent any product that undermines their revenues from entering the market, but if the governement truly wants transparency, then they would open the books up on what Big Oil costs the US Taxpayers, and balance that with the reasons for backing these Biofuel Companies - namely to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and promote cleaner fuels for the reduction of green house gases.
If Exxon wants to continue selling petroleum, they should be the fully accountable for getting it out of the Gulf Region safely, refining and distributing it on their own dime and ask the Feds to back off their regulating of the Industry to help keep it affordable.
Geez - with all the beatings Wall Street and the Automotive Industry have taken over the past several months you have to ask why none of the other B.S. has been given any of the lime light. Perhaps the txapayers don't want to know or care what the true costs are.
Make Transparency work on Big Oil and Coal, Big Agriculture and other Big "Hat Passers", so the tax payers know what they've bought into for a change and how much it continues to cost them year in and year out.
Mr. Bullis if you can send an email to Obama's Energy Guy, perhaps he can wade in here and provide some answers.
Transparency is fake. It will be circumvented with complexity. That is how they hide their corruption now; in thousand page unreadable bills of crap. Why doesn't the government drop a $100 billion on this project? Because we're going to research "clean coal" or some bull@#@# for a few years while the leaders of industry & governments position their chess pieces. As soldiers die in distant oil fields and miners die in deep coal mines, we talk about solutions as if that is what "they" want to hear.
We,"the masses" need to follow this type of project and make some noise about it. You will not hear it on talk radio unless we make it happen. Write to Congress. Call local shows. Don't let good ideas be pushed aside for years awaiting their "giving hand."
Leaving aside everything else, there is no such thing as "clean coal." Similarly, there are no such things as clean Senators and Representatives from coal states........
The more the government funds this the more likely it is to be subverted. ... but get real. Every week some new company is touted on TR ... "if they can solve their scaling problem" sometime in 2010,11,...,20. Scaling is REALLY hard. I wish them luck but I'm not holding my breath either.
Also note that this "bio" fuel needs to be fed compressed CO2 which will come from ... burning coal or oil.
I agree that, unless there is some sort of intervention (like government regulation, meddling, etc.), the corn industry or the petroleum industry would buy out those who have financial or other interests in this process and we'll never hear about this again, until it may be too late to develop it in time.
The electric car might create a paradigm shift that might make something like this actually work, though.
IMO
As the US enters into the Electric car age and more vehicles are replaced by clean cars there will be an eventual impact to Oil and Petroleum costs. There may be a known "break point" where the number of electric cars drives consumption of oil down to the point that oil becomes cheaper due to less demand (ie Supply and Demand). There has to be some bean counter someplace who has done this calculation, and should share it with the world so we know what we're getting into.
By adding more and more electric cars to the mix, we should see Supplies of Petroleum imfluenced where there is an actual glut on the market. China and India will become the primary markets and consumers for oil, that will shore up those Exxon Mobil profits? I guess I have to ask - will the US permit China to patrol the Persian Gulf to secure "their" oil interests too?? Or perhaps these two countries will be permitted to place troops on foreign soil and stick their necks out for a while. The thought of a couple million armed Chinese Soldiers patrolling the streets of many Gulf countries makes me a bit nervous. You think the Muslim Nations would still think of the US as Satan or would they soften their stance a little and hope we continue to cover their butts?
Conversely, the increase in electric cars will mean higher demand on Lithium for battery production. What is the forecast for battery materials supply is hard to tell? South American countries like Bolivia, Argentina and Chile are volitile regions. How is the US influencing the security of supplies and has Auto Industry been diligent and forward looking to realize there are risks with the batteries they will place in their vehicles?
Free Market Conditions may not prevail in countries with historical illicit activities, border skirmishes and poverty issues.
A worst case scenario may play out like Nicaragua in the 70's where a new challenge to the government manifests itself in any of these key supplier countries, and the US cannot broker any lithium deals - what happens then? The US has increase spend in this region already and things could get messy pretty quickly.
The Auto Industry needs a contingency plan like alternative battery typesand other fuels.
US Consumers may need a back up plan too like walking or riding our bikes more, car pooling, Mass Transi and Telecommuting to offset what we can't cover by any other means.
I think developing countries like China and India will more than make up for any US reduction in oil use. The price will continue to rise in the long term.
I don't think Big Oil, Big Coal and all the big energy bunch are so morons as to block the development of biofuels. Because they are capitalists to the bone it's most likely they'll coöpt in the future the production and distribution of biofuels of every stripe. Look at how environment-friendly British Petroleum tries to be looked at!
I have never seen an algae processing idea proposed that grows the algae in the ocean. It seems so obvious! 5 times as much ocean as land, much of it in the tropics. I envision giant plastic bags to keep the algae contained...perhaps hooked up to defunct oil pumping platforms...oil tankers can come right up and pump the processed fuel directly into their tanks. Obvious.
I have not thought about growing algae at sea but, if you look at what happens in nature as being quite amazing, seen from the weather satellite's pictures of algal blooms growing over thousands of miles of the oceans surface in a short period of time and can be vividly seen from outer space, surely we are onto a good thing here.
Yes we would have to grow the stuff but then we would have truly renewable fuel.
Letting an algae like this grow in the an area that may be susceptible to storms would be a disaster. If this stuff got out in the wild, there's no telling what may happen since over 66% of our planet is covered with salt water. There may be some bays that could be isolated from the se by large barriers or dams, but there's always a risk if these critters get out and start partying where they shouldn't be.
A safer approach may be to flood low lying areas like Death Valley (lots of sunshine there BTW) with water, then pump in the grey water from nearby cities to make the water brackish - then innoculate the water with these hybrid algaes. If the pools pond or brackish lakes dry up, the algea dies off in the hot sun and a fracture in the basin of these big Bioreactors from an earthquake would mean that the waters drain underground and the algae dies.
About the worry that this type of algae is a danger:
They are not giving the algae some new ability they did not have before. (Like making corn produce some insectside) In fact the changes they are making to the algae will make them less fit for survival outside the bio reactors they will be grown in. And thus unlikely to survive long outside. In fact since we are talking about microalgae here I am betting it will be a big challenge keeping the reactors from becoming contaminated with natural strains or keeping the colony from reverting back to a less productive. (oil wise but more productive algae wise)
This was extracted from the comments on THIS article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327186.000-craig-venter-programming-algae-to-pump-out-oil.html
Other Ideas:
Extract CO2 from the air to feed the algae - this has the possibility of being carbon negative:
http://www.physorg.com/news96732819.html
(ah - I see that was commented on below - hmmm maybe also extract C02 from the sea - perhaps reducing the acidity that is becoming a problem)
Wave energy can be used to power the C02 extractors
Ship C02 to the farms in empty oil tankers - returning with fuel.
New 'plastic bags' can be produced on site from the oils produced by the algae.
With proper design of the plastic bag 'bioreactors' the wave energy can be used to provide *pumping* energy to allow easy extraction of the product.
Piezio-electric strips could use that same energy to provide electricty to sensors embedded in the bioreactor to monitor state.
Bio-engineer the algae to die quickly if released into the wild. Making them need something they can only get in the reactor would work...perhaps maintain a higher tempture in them that if the temp goes below it they die. The higher temp would also allow the bags to float better.
First of all: THEY AREN'T USING ALGAE.
Second of all: They've presumably engineered this organism to survive the heat and chemical saturation of a bioreactor and so if it got loose it would ... quickly die or be out competed.
Thirdly These organisms need to be pumped with compressed CO2 and that means siting it next to a fossil fuel burning power plant and that means coal
The process needs pure CO2. This is a pretty big issue, it's not like you can just use air to supply the CO2. Supplying these reactors with a steady stream of CO2 means that they will need to be sited near something like a coal powerplant, with the added expense of CO2 extractors and purifiers. And the coal powerplant would have to be near an area with plentiful water, open available land, and sunshine. So this means that we're still using coal and putting that CO2 eventually into the atmosphere, but we do get double use out of it before it escapes. Kind of a mixed bag in that sense. Still, it's a net benefit compared to just burning the coal. And any way to get off of foreign oil is okay with me.
CO2 can also be obtained from burning or gasifying biomass. It is also fairly easy to convert to dry ice for transport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice#Manufacture
I like the tech cited in this article and I hate to throw a bucket of cold water on this given the enthusiasm expressed thus far, but ...
... so long as this requires a source of "... concentrated carbon dioxide ..." such as a power plant, it isn't quite a renewable resource, rather it is an excellent way to get more out of our non-renewable resources while eliminating our dependence upon foreign oil.
To be truly renewable, such a system would need to pull the CO2 from the air itself, and that would certainly change the productivity and cost dramatically.
How about using one of these
http://www.physorg.com/news145561984.html
to power a fractional distillation process to extract CO2 from the atmosphere? While not absolutely 100% renewable, it will certainly cut WAY down on the biosphere footprint of the process, as well as proving extremely economically feasible.
Exxon Mobil won't "let" the technology develop. How would they stop it? This claim is just a conspiracy theory of the future.
Doing this in the ocean obviously is also silly since we wouldn't want the ocean being converted into gasoline, would we?
Why would we need to use farmland for such a process? There's plenty of unproductive desert land that would do the job. Just pipe in the seawater.
Finally, why would you power mass transit with this first? Most mass transit (trains/subways) are already powered by electricity. It is personal transportation that is the bottleneck for use of liquid fuel.
The geopolitical implications are ENORMOUS: the entire Middle East would become impoverished almost overnight, the price of oil would drop so fast.
It is not a problem to obtain carbon dioxide from the air. Companies like Praxair do it all the time. It is somewhat energy intensive, but then energy is what is being produced. Pulling the CO2 out of the air is the only way to do it that does not result in rising CO2 levels since that CO2 would be recycled.
Pipeline technology can easily transport the fuel to where it is needed. That already is done today. Production of ethanol via this process is obviously suboptimal since it is highly corrosive. Being able to produce a
Turn the oceans to gasoline? Please explain how that could happen? Just because this algae has been engineered to secrete feul - it does not mean it would thrive in the open ocean. If producing oil was a trait that enhanced survivability of the organism this would be a trait that would have already happened. Does yeast turn ALL fruit juice to ethanol? Availability of room to grow - availability of energy resources (sun - wind - waves) - the ability to use the existing infrastructure of tanker ships rather than build pipelines all point to the use of the ocean as a highly economical place to put the bioreactors needed to grow the MASSIVE amounts of the algae needed to replace a significant portion of the fossil feuls needed by the world. HEY BIG OIL - think about it! INTERNATIONAL WATERS - NO TAXES!
The Owens valley, just to the west of Death valley, once had a reasonable sized lake in it. This lake was the product of run off from the Sierra-Nevada mountains. When the population of Southern California exploded they were (and still are) in desperate need of water. The city of LA acquired the water rites to the entire south-eastern Sierra mountains and built an aqueduct that starts up near Mammoth Lakes and travels all the way to LA.
In short. There is plenty of water in the Owens valley to accomplish this task. Perhaps power generation can be accomplished in series with water transportation. i.e. Flow the water through ponds with algae on its way to LA. Perhaps sequestered CO2 can make the uphill trip in the opposite direction?
Water is a consumable of this process. "Flowing it through" isn't sufficient.
The process, similar to many others of its type must deal with: 1. Scale-up and 2. Operations/maintenance issues. The failure to successfully meet these commercial requirements have ruined billions of algae, not to mention investors. I wish the technology good luck, but it has far to go and many hurdles.
We don't need a fuel, we need 100% electric cars that get their power from solar power. A charging station in each home. The technology exists, is available, and is being used!
http://freshkillspark.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/solar-car-charging-station/
Possibly a solar/biofuel hybrid might be more realistic than just bio. Let's get as much as we can from the sun first, then supplement it.
A common process for making industrial grade CO2 is to lower the temperature of air until it liquefies and then distil the component fractions off: CO2, N2, O2. In this case the cold comes via solar powered refrigeration units. Heat exchangers use the exiting airstreams of N2 and O2 to pre-cool the incoming air stream containing CO2. Heat-pumps then extract more energy from the incoming air stream using the partially warmed exiting air stream as the heat sink. Efficiency will depend on the engineering. The technologies exist. Nothing is really new here.
Water is a larger problem. Desalination plants could solve this problem. The ideal place to build this: Baja California. [Mexico would love this!] Perhaps a deal could be struck to make both countries rich.
Oh, I don't know...I think let the algae go - turn the oceans into fuel! Then the ships can just suck it up as they go. Humanity will survive without seafood, there is always steak!
Seriously though, unless humanity decides to consume significantly less fuel, converting the ocean may be the only way to go. I don't think the planet will survive our cleverness if 6 billion people begin consuming the fuel that just 1 billion now do, however that fuel is sourced.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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ka5s
59 Comments
TANSTAAFL
The USA in 2007 used about 20.68 million barrels of oil every day. Put another way, that's some 36 million gallons per hour. There being no such thing as a free lunch, replacing this will require moving more than 70 million gallons of fuel and feedstock every hour. The article is not heavy on water requirements, either, which in our sunny Southwest is the least replaceable of resources.
Still, good luck! Let us find ten technologies each ten percent as efficient as touted and (other things being equal!) our problems are solved.
Reply
Kevin Bullis
177 Comments
Re: TANSTAAFL
The algae will certainly need a lot of water. (I don't have the exact figures.) But it won't be fresh water--the algae grow in brackish water.
Reply
GaryB
119 Comments
Re: TANSTAAFL
" ... company says it is not using algae "
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