"World’s first renewable gasoline"

[blaSSt]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

the CO2 would most likely come directly from factories. It was either these guys or someone doing practically the same thing that were going to set up shop next to a brewery and use them as the CO2 source.

The basic concept is put algea into a plastic bag filled with water-> inject CO2-> expose to sunlight-> harvest oils-> make fuel. Not a whole lot of energy is needed, I think the oils are extracted by using a giant press (don't quote me on that though).

Much better economics coming from a combustion process. BUT still a daunting challenge.

Consider a furnace consuming 200 million BTU/hr natural gas. (I happen to have 10 of these where I work.) The flue gas from one furnace produces 13,500 tons CO2 per year. (theoretical potential 28,000 b.o.e./yr.) What happens when the sun goes down? This is a 24 hr operation.

I suppose we either store it or 'waste it'. Storing 4500 CFM is not very feasible, so we will only go for daylight hours. Or about 60% recovery. 17,000 boe per year.

Now the best we can get our stack gas down to economically is about 300 F after that we get condensation, I bet the algae doesn't survive at that temp so lets get it down to 90 F. It would require a very large expensive (materials of construction) exchanger to condense 3600 #/hr water and cool the gas.

We need to fill the bags with algae, water (take it from the condensate), and CO2. Whats the residence time to convert the CO2 to oil? Let's say it's real fast - 1 hour. (I bet it's much longer.) All this has to be exposed to sunlight, how thick does it work, maybe 6 inches? We have to process 4500 CFM flue gas and hold for one hour with the algae and the water. Volume is 99% gas. At six inches thick we need 24 football fields of land to lay out these bags, and then need to replace them every hour. A daunting task.

How many BTU's of the 200 Million BTU/hr can I get out of the 17,000 boe/yr produced? About 9 MM BTU/hr or 4.5% of what was put in.

Since all of this was generated by the sun, it is a good thing. The capital required would be enormous. That's a lot of land and unless it's automated it would be very manpower intensive. (automation costs capital too.)

Make the digestion period a week and you need over 3 square miles of land for the algae.

[DGthe3]

It will take alot of land, but according to this one article algea gives yeilds of up to 10 000 gallons/acre. Even at half that, its an awful lot compared to some sources of biofuel. Here is an article where they say that, and it uses a brewery as the CO2 source:Algae+brewery=biofuel article
And here is the video that I saw where I first heard about this type of thing Algae Power

[TFord]

jumping in on the A$$ end of things....but this (if they can pull it off) would be the best thing since sliced bread! Being in the military the most important thing would be not hearing the "protecting national intrests" line. When we all know they mean oil! I hope this works our economy needs it, and we need to put money in our own economy.

[blaSSt]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

It will take alot of land, but according to this one article algea gives yeilds of up to 10 000 gallons/acre. Even at half that, its an awful lot compared to some sources of biofuel. Here is an article where they say that, and it uses a brewery as the CO2 source:Algae+brewery=biofuel article
And here is the video that I saw where I first heard about this type of thing Algae Power

WOW! My estimates ended up not too far off, but a little high!

In my example above I was making 17,000 b.o.e. or 714,000 gallons. By this source
a minimum of 71.4 acres of land is required.

I used 24 football fields. At 1.93 acres per football field I estimated 46.3 acres. (Must work to only 4" deep silly me)

[Scotsman]

Sapphire Energy turns algae into 'green crude' for fuel

The San Diego company says its product can produce ultra-clean gasoline and diesel for existing vehicles.
By Elizabeth Douglass, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 29, 2008
A San Diego company said Wednesday that it could turn algae into oil, producing a green-colored crude yielding ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel without the downsides of biofuel production.

The year-old company, called Sapphire Energy, uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide and non-potable water to make "green crude" that it contends is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil that has been fetching more than $130 a barrel in New York futures trading.

Chief Executive Jason Pyle said that the company's green crude could be processed in existing oil refineries and that the resulting fuels could power existing cars and trucks just as today's more polluting versions of gasoline and diesel do.

"What we're talking about is something that is radically different," Pyle said. "We really look at this as a paradigm change."

Sapphire's announcement is the latest development from companies and researchers focused on finding ways to cut harmful emissions from the nation's giant fleet of cars, trucks, trains and planes.

Sapphire's process would help curb the nation's reliance on imported crude and alleviate concerns about the world's dwindling supply of oil, Pyle said. And by using carbon dioxide spewed out by such things as coal plants, the production process would help remove harmful emissions from the atmosphere.

The green crude also would produce fewer pollutants in the refining process and fewer harmful emissions from vehicle tailpipes, Pyle said.

The company wouldn't give details about the production process or where its pilot project would be located. It expects to introduce its first fuels in three years and reach full commercial scale in five years.

Pyle wouldn't cite the price tag for producing a barrel of green crude, but he described the expected cost as competitive with extracting oil from deep-water deposits and oil sands. The company already has produced green versions of jet fuel, diesel and clear, premium-grade gasoline, he said.

Today's biofuels -- in the United States, that's biodiesel and corn-based ethanol -- have helped displace petroleum but also have troublesome characteristics that reduce their appeal. Corn-derived ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel eat into land used to grow food, and their production and distribution consume large amounts of energy.

Many companies are making strides in producing ethanol from nonfood sources such as switch grass, plant waste or recycled paper.

Virent Energy Systems Inc., based in Madison, Wis., in March unveiled a joint venture with Shell Oil Co. that would produce "biogasoline" from plant sugars -- creating fuel that could be distributed through existing pipes and stations and used in existing vehicles.

And there are plenty of companies working toward producing oil from algae. The idea isn't new, but interest and research have grown so significantly that websites such as Oilgae.com are devoted to the topic.

"One thing that is encouraging is the level of attention and the investment that's happening to really try to find better ways to fuel our transportation system," said Don Anair, vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Anair said he was encouraged by Sapphire's reported research results. But he said he'd want to see the greenhouse gas effects of the entire process, from production to combustion, before passing judgment on Sapphire's green crude.

"Changing to this green crude could certainly have very good benefits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but it may not address some of the traditional tailpipe pollutants that are responsible for smog or ozone," he said.

Even if the fuel doesn't contain nitrogen, Anair added, the combustion process adds air to the mix and generally creates harmful nitrogen oxides.

That caveat was echoed at the state Air Resources Board, which is charged with guiding California's goal of reducing the carbon content of fuels and sharply cutting statewide greenhouse gas emissions.

"The emissions reductions may be coming from the refining process but we would still have emissions issues in and from the vehicle," air board spokesman Dimitri Stanich said after reviewing Sapphire's news release. "We wish them luck and look forward to their technical studies that demonstrate the cost and feasibility of their production processes."

The emissions from Sapphire's fuels are being tested by an outside company. Pyle said that because the fuels don't contain sulfurs or nitrogen, "our expectation is that there will not be those kinds of emissions."

The company is privately owned and backed with funding from Wellcome Trust, a British charity, and venture capital firms such as Arch Venture Partners and Venrock. Sapphire's technology was born out of collaborations with Scripps Research Institute, UC San Diego, the University of Tulsa and the Energy Department's Joint Genome Project. Pyle said the genome researchers helped the company pinpoint the kind of algae best suited to making oil.

Robert Nelsen, managing partner at Arch, could barely contain his enthusiasm for the venture.

"We want to displace the existing petroleum system with a continuous production system that is essentially an oil field on top of the ground that produces oil on a continuous basis for as long as you want it to," he said.

"You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the implications of this."

elizabeth.douglass

@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/ny...,3756031.story

[Scotsman]

Green Gold
Turning Algae Into Gasoline
Kerry A. Dolan , 05.28.08, 1:35 PM ET

Start-up Sapphire Energy is promising an innovation that sounds as miraculous as a water-to-wine transformation.

On Wednesday, the company took the covers off what it calls "green crude"--a liquid fuel chemically identical to gasoline but not dependent on either a food source or agricultural land. Even better, it promises to be "carbon neutral"; even though vehicles that burn the fuel will emit carbon, creating green crude involves pulling just as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as it will put back in.

Sapphire, based in San Diego, plans to make its fuel from algae microorganisms, salt water, carbon dioxide and the power of the sun. Chief Executive Jason Pyle was deliberately vague concerning how the technology works, but he says the company, which was formed in May 2007, has been able to produce 91 octane gasoline and has had it analyzed at a refinery.

"We created a process that relies on photosynthesis. It absorbs CO2 to produce a carbon molecule," Pyle said in an interview with Forbes.com. Pyle has been involved in two other start-ups and has a background in biotechnology, engineering and physics. "We believe we're setting the benchmark for an entire new industry."

Other alternative fuel companies such as Solazyme of South San Francisco, Calif., are using algae to produce biodiesel. Like ethanol, biodiesel attracts water and thus cannot be shipped in existing pipelines. Both ethanol and biodiesel also have lower energy density than traditional gasoline and diesel fuels. Pyle says Sapphire's green crude has the same energy density as gasoline and can be shipped in existing pipelines and refined the same way gasoline and diesel are.

Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville, Calif., is also developing renewable fuels that are chemically identical to gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. Amyris announced in April that it will develop a diesel fuel in Brazil from sugarcane, with a production target date of 2010. (See: "Sweet New Fuel.")

But Pyle asserts that Sapphire's technology can scale to a much greater degree than Amyris can, because Sapphire is not dependent on a food source as its fuel. "Agricultural land is of limited supply. We have a huge amount of land that is completely non-agricultural that we can use, desert land," says Pyle. His aim is to produce 10,000 barrels a day in facilities that may be located on desert land across the southwestern and southern U.S.

Sapphire has raised $50 million from respected venture capital companies ARCH Venture Partners and Venrock, as well as the Wellcome Trust of the U.K., the world's largest medical research foundation. The company has been doing some work in Oklahoma but has not yet announced where its first test facility will be located. It aims to have its first facility operational in three years.

The company has elicited technology help from the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Project; the University of California, San Diego; the Scripps Research Institute; and the University of Tulsa.

"Almost every other [alternative fuel company] out there is a refiner," says Robert Nelsen, managing director at ARCH Venture Partners. "They are taking something and refining it. We are producing something."

Nelsen and Pyle believe that biofuels dependent on a food source or agricultural land cannot be scaled to affect more than 1% of the gasoline we consume annually in the U.S. "When we started this company, we wanted to create a whole new category that didn't have a set of constraints preventing it from growing to a large scale. We're not against Amyris or any of these companies ... they will see success in their niches," says ARCH's Nelsen. "We wanted to find something that you could scale infinitely."

Nelsen wouldn't speculate what percent of the fuel supply Sapphire might replace, but he wants it to be a lot more than 1%. "We've talked to people in the oil industry who've said, 'This is the first thing I've seen that can change the game,'" says Nelsen. "We want to take it to a whole new level."

http://www.forbes.com/technology/sci...0528fuels.html

[Scotsman]

A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

That's a fraction of the 20 million or so barrels of petroleum the United States consumes each day, but Sapphire Energy says "green crude" production could ramp up to a level sufficient to ease our dependence on foreign oil, if not end it altogether.

Company CEO Jason Pyle says the algal oil is chemically identical to light sweet crude and compatible with America's $1.5 trillion petroleum infrastructure, making it a direct replacement for oil. Although the algal fuels refined from it emit as much carbon dioxide as conventional fuels, the company says the emissions are offset by the photosynthetic process that uses sunlight, water and C02 to create algal crude.

"At the very worst, it's carbon neutral," Pyle says, calling the fuels a "benchmark for an entire new industry" and "a paradigm change."

Energy experts and air quality regulators say they'll withhold judgment on those claims until they've seen a production-to-combustion analysis of the fuel's emissions. But they say Sapphire could be on to something.

Making fuel from algae is nothing new, and a lot of organizations, from the smallest start-up to the biggest oil companies, are trying to find the best way to do it. But most of the effort has been on replacing diesel fuel or kerosene. Sapphire wants to replace petroleum.

"We designed it to be a completely fungible product with crude oil," Pyle says. He says the company has refined its algal crude into 91-octane gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene chemically identical to conventional fuels. He wouldn't disclose how the process works or what it costs but said it is competitive with deep-water oil drilling and extracting petroleum from tar sands.

Sapphire also avoids the food-for-fuel debate that has plagued crop-based biofuels because it uses algae and works on non-arable land with non-potable water. Pyle wouldn't say where Sapphire plans to build the demonstration plant it will have running later this year, but it's reportedly working in Oklahoma and may locate its facilities in the South and Southwest. It hopes to have a full-scale plant up and running within five years, producing 10,000 barrels of green crude a day. The company has lined up more than $50 million in funding from investors like ARCH Venture Partners.

Ramping up to that level of production without killing the algae can be tricky, one expert said, and the environmental impact of green crude remain to be seen. Even if it is carbon neutral, the algal fuels will emit pollutants that contribute to smog and ozone, says Don Anair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"You're still going to get combustion emissions. You aren't eliminating those with algal fuels," he says, echoing a point the California Air Resources Board made. Still, Anair is cautiously optimistic.

"The fact that there is a lot of interest in finding a better way to fuel our transportation system is encouraging," he says. "This is one avenue to pursue that has very good potential."

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/making-renewabl.html

[DGthe3]

thanks for the new articles! Hopefully this stuff scales up properly. Even if they only get 80% of what they want its still awesome.

[Mr. Wyndham]

How do we capture the C02 for this stuff? Here's one way:

If we're dependent on oil but concerned about carbon dioxide emissions, why don't we just capture the CO2 we emit?

Actually, researchers are looking into this right now. Professor Chris Jones at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and his team have come up with a material called hyperbranched aminosilica (HAS) that captures and stores carbon dioxide emissions.

When HAS was combined with sand, the chemists found that the resulting compound was capable of trapping carbon dioxide when flue gasses -- emissions found in smokestacks -- passed through it.

The HAS compound not only captures CO2, it hangs onto it. To release the carbon dioxide, the material must be heated, and the CO2 that's released can be captured and stored (either as a gas or cooled into liquid form) in a process called carbon sequestration. This is actually more exciting than it sounds. Not only will it reduce CO2 emissions, it makes it possible to reuse the captured CO2 to feed biofuel stock. One company grows algae in Louisiana for use as a biofuel. The algae are fed with captured CO2.

Hyperbranched aminosilica has some advantages over other methods of carbon sequestration. For one, it's recyclable. HAS can be used over and over again; the Georgia Tech researchers tested one batch 12 times and found that there was no noticeable decrease in adsorption [source: Georgia Tech]. And the material also isn't affected by moisture, which is a plus since water vapor is present in flue gases. It's also low on required energy input; the only energy needed comes from the generation of the heat that releases the CO2.

But there are some challenges that face the project. For one, the CO2/amine reaction that binds the carbon dioxide to the branches generates heat. The researchers found that the aminosilica captures CO2 best at cool temperatures, so they must figure out how to get rid of the heat that's produced quickly, so the CO2 binds.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/tailpipe-capture-co21.htm

No need for massive amounts of energy to be used to go out and find it in the air...just take the C02 right from it's source! Then, eventually - as this process is perfected, maybe it can be placed in tailpipes of cars that run on the Green Crude-derived gasoline, like an "oil filter" for exhaust gasses. Every 1000 (or whatever) miles you replace it, and send it to the nearest Carbon dioxide dump. The dump gives it to Sapphire, and they reuse the C02 by feeding it to their algae...repeat cycle.

[chadrcr]

Originally Posted by blaSSt

WOW! My estimates ended up not too far off, but a little high!

In my example above I was making 17,000 b.o.e. or 714,000 gallons. By this source
a minimum of 71.4 acres of land is required.

I used 24 football fields. At 1.93 acres per football field I estimated 46.3 acres. (Must work to only 4" deep silly me)

Originally Posted by DGthe3

It will take alot of land, but according to this one article algea gives yeilds of up to 10 000 gallons/acre. Even at half that, its an awful lot compared to some sources of biofuel. Here is an article where they say that, and it uses a brewery as the CO2 source:Algae+brewery=biofuel article
And here is the video that I saw where I first heard about this type of thing Algae Power

I will donate 80 acres in West Texas...., well donate might not be the word. But I will trade it for a few Camaros

Originally Posted by TFord

jumping in on the A$$ end of things....but this (if they can pull it off) would be the best thing since sliced bread! Being in the military the most important thing would be not hearing the "protecting national intrests" line. When we all know they mean oil! I hope this works our economy needs it, and we need to put money in our own economy.

[Stroker]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

It will take alot of land, but according to this one article algea gives yeilds of up to 10 000 gallons/acre. Even at half that, its an awful lot compared to some sources of biofuel. Here is an article where they say that, and it uses a brewery as the CO2 source:Algae+brewery=biofuel article
And here is the video that I saw where I first heard about this type of thing Algae Power

why would it take alot of land a british man designed and built a 5 story farm i think it was in japan i remember reading about it in popular mechanics when i was younger??? anyways for the stories that weren't on top he used mirrors to re direct the sunlight.... each story was nearly 1 acre and yields were the same as a farm that was on flat land

[DGthe3]

Originally Posted by Stroker

why would it take alot of land a british man designed and built a 5 story farm i think it was in japan i remember reading about it in popular mechanics when i was younger??? anyways for the stories that weren't on top he used mirrors to re direct the sunlight.... each story was nearly 1 acre and yields were the same as a farm that was on flat land

weeellll I suppose its not need, never heard of that multi story farm. But last time I checked, there was alot of land in the south west that isn't used for much of anything. You can't grow crops there, people don't want to live there. So put this stuff there.

[blaSSt]

Originally Posted by chadrcr

I will donate 80 acres in West Texas...., well donate might not be the word. But I will trade it for a few Camaros

Great! Who's gonna donate the 500-800 mile pipeline to the site! Needs to be 120" in diameter and will only cost about $3million per mile. Is everyone along the route ready to give right of way? We will need recompression pumping stations about every 150 miles to keep it going. They will cost $50million each.

Originally Posted by Stroker

why would it take alot of land a british man designed and built a 5 story farm i think it was in japan i remember reading about it in popular mechanics when i was younger??? anyways for the stories that weren't on top he used mirrors to re direct the sunlight.... each story was nearly 1 acre and yields were the same as a farm that was on flat land

Good Idea. By now surely we can stack it 10 high. Therefore, get all ten of the furnaces at work going to the site donated by chadrcr. Of course our pipeline grows to 300" in diameter. cost blooms to about $6million per mile and the pumping stations are about $100million each.

Now we get to build a structure 10 stories high and 80 acres across. That 52 million square feet. Probably $100/sq ft.

So now we are up to about $10billion investment for 170,000 bbl oil/year. Lets take 25 years to recoup our investment. We've made 4.25 million barrels! Only invested $2,352 per barrel. Not counting operational costs. Makes a lot of sense doesn't it!

[GTAHVIT]

Blasst you are killing me.

I appreciate your particular skill of playing devil's advocate. How bout you give us your answer as to how we should reduce or eliminate our dependency on foreign oil. Or your idea of a reasonable technology/alternative fuel source. I can't believe you are content to just do nothing.