Solazyme B100 Algae Biodiesel Goes on the Road
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 02.11.08
We recently wrote about Solazyme, a company that is working on making biodiesel with algae. Their approach is interesting: They grow the algae in the dark, and they've been focusing on how to scale production from the start so they might avoid some of the problems facing other algae producers. Their latest milestone is that they've successfully road-tested all blends of their "Soladiesel" algal biodiesel up to B100, which is pure bio-goodness. Okay, so the stuff works. Now lets see how it scales and how energy-positive its production is. ::Solazyme Ups Soladiesel Testing to B100. See also: ::New Company to Produce Biodiesel From Algae, ::Biodiesel from Algae and the Biofuels Discussion in Argentina, ::GreenFuel: Producing Biofuel from Algae and Power-Plant Emissions
As a partial solution to cleaning up after coal, why can't all carnot cycle generating plants replace cooling towers to reuse the waste heat and CO2 to fuel algae colonies?
Getting twice the power from coal reduces CO2 emissions by half.
One wonders how we'll get all that sugar for the algae....
I've read that the algae can digest cellulose, but considering that photosynthesis is less than 1% efficient (after accounting for life support functions, quantum efficiency is much higher) we'd need a massive amount of land to provide cellulose to feed the algae.
Hats off to a novel approach though.
A project as above was funded in the USA by the US department of Energy for the purpose of relieving our reliance on foreign oil. But atlas after 20 years or research the project was shut down.
The key to there research was to utilize algae native to the environment of study site. The algae were in bed in open air of 2 foot deep beds of CO2 rich waste water from coal fired plants.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/biodiesel_from_algae.pdf
check it out the science is only limited by the scope of the society