[AT] E85/Flex Fuel conversions

[Henry Miller]

On Saturday 03 February 2007 12:59, Dean Vinson wrote:
> Henry Miller wrote:
> > We can grow enough to replace oil IF we use algae (mostly biodiesel)
> > and cellulose, but both of those are just barely out of the lab
>
> Henry, I haven't heard about the algae.  How does it work?  How might it be
> produced and processed efficiently and sustainably enough to really replace
> oil?
>
> Those are my general concerns with all the bio approaches, although as with
> the algae thing I haven't tried to really educate myself much.  But just
> from long experience with any number of other things, I'm skeptical of
> ideas that sound too good to be true.  What feeds the biological process
> over the long term so the corn or algae or sugar cane or grass or whatever
> it is can keep producing the required yield year after year?  How much oil
> is consumed by all the various inputs in the course of preparing, feeding,
> harvesting, processing, transporting, etc a gallon of the synthetic oil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture   
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel

You take a high oil algae in water, and put it in sunlight.   Extract the oils 
once in a while.   The hard part is these algae are slow growing, so if any 
other algae gets into the system it will overtake the algae you want.   Thus 
open ponds do not work.   

In the lab they are able to produce amounts the if scaled up would be about 
10,000 gallons/acre.

I'm not sure about the rest, but biodiesel and ethanol are made from water and 
CO2, so everything else should recycle back into the system once you get 
started.

However this is just coming out of the lab now.   We don't know how it will 
work in the real world.