Algae biodiesel as a sustainable solution does not merely mean providing for the now while guaranteeing self-reliance, sustainable also means without compromising the future.
Is all algae biodiesel a sustainable solution? That is question that requires a serious investigation into all the different kinds of algae biodiesel are out on the market right now, and which ones develop fewer ecological footprints.
Researchers in the Utah State University Biofuels Program have begun to show how native algae from bioreactors is many times more sustainable than our current biofuel food crops.
USUs high-tech bioreactor multiplies the sunlight available in controlled favored conditions for effluent management systems in the agricultural industry, incrementing bioremediation and algae biomass production to 200 times what soybeans can provide.
Corn and soybeans can both be eaten and would provide a wider nutritional market if not compromised by biodiesel production, both as feedstock for animals as well as human consumption and are also subject to bad harvests.
Controlled environments such as those in algae bioreactors are not subject to bad harvests and remain sustainable for the economy year after year.
Lance Seefeldt, USU Biofuels Program:
“For soybeans, you get about 48 gallons per acre. And right now, the idea is for algae, we could get about 10-thousand gallons of oil per acre. So you can see it’s about 200 times more oil per acre compared to soybeans.”
“For every square meter of parabolic dish, we can illuminate 10 square meters of algae surface.”
Byard Wood, USU Biofuels Program: “We’re talking about thousands of acres with these kinds of bioreactors to produce in quantity the amount of liquid fuel that we need to make an impact.”
According to reliable sources, PetroSun is already in its final stages of testing commercially scaled CO2 injecting bioreactors that produce algae biomass that can provide 30 times the production per acre of biodiesel than corn or soybeans.
Injecting CO2 means the bioreactor needs to be near a place that already produces CO2, in the case of PetroSun, major cities and industries that can capturethe needed gas would be more economical to avoid higher transportation costs, and allow self-reliance on a more practical scale.
Biodiesel, including algae biodiesel is considered CO2-neutral because in the process of making biodiesel it consumes CO2, either from the atmosphere or injected artificially, but in the act of usingBiofuel CO2 is then released, either into the atmosphere or into an artificial caption chamber.
The Ozone would not be repaired immediately or directly, but indirectly, over time if we just stopped using the trapped CO2 reserve that is in petroleum (from millions of years ago by the way; a time when the planet was totally covered by vegetation and could handle that kind of reptilian exhale).
If we really wanted to repair the ozone, we would have to confront another issue deforestation.
But algae forests under the ocean are responsible for 60% of the earths oxygen production; so by not polluting the seas with our dirty waterfrom our lakes and streams, we would be indirectly saving forests and forests of algae that would never be burned as biofuel.
A more centralized idea for algae biofuel as a sustainable solution would be a high-tech native pond scum biofuel bioreactor in the Sonora desert.
Not that a single centralized solution is the answer, but nonetheless the algae bioreactor project at USU would leave far fewer ecological footprints in the long run do to the quantitative amount of sunlight provided in the desert.
The Sonora desert is divided almost in the middle by the Mexican-American boarder and represents an opportune location for either bioreactor or wild algae production.
If only 15,000 square miles of the Mexican side were cultivated in algae bioreactors, it could potentially be enough to pay Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) growing debt and turn Mexico into one of the most wealthiest nations over night.
As far fetched as that claim might sound, doing the math of ongoing research in bioreactors has already shown promise among specialists studying the Sonora desert on US soil.
We found that to replace all transportation fuels in theUS, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel (a year), or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a landmass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, considerthat the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels (in the USA) could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification – I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres – far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
The leading research program in biodiesel from algae production between 1978 and 1996 was the Aquatic Species Program (ASP) and their results were well documented in July of 1998 by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
In the first three quarters of 2006 Mexico consumed roughly 10,664,000 US gallons of diesel a day, while still back in 2004 the US was consuming on the average, a little over 164,000,000 US gallons of diesel a day.
With all the free trade agreements Mexico has made in recent years (like NAFTA), and a distinct difference in diesel consumption between the two nations, it would be safe to assume that if Michael Briggshypothetical situation (above quote) is true, that would leave Mexico with at least an extra 153,000,000 US gallons of biofuel per day to sell to anybody in 2006 if they had used 15,000 square miles of their side of the Sonora desert to build sustainable algae bioreactors and refineries in 2005. Wow!
Well, all those hypothetical situations, hypothetical math equations, developed research and commercial organizations go to show us, just how much biofuel based on algae alone could change the world we live in by the end of the decade.
However regrettable; it is highly doubtful that any country with such excess algae biomass production would ever logically consider breeding algae just to save the ozone layer from our insane daily consumption, but that is the point to be seen, bioremediation of the earth goes beyond CO2-neutral biofuels.
But this kind of wishful thinking helps us really see what it would take to be a more sustainable solution; algae biodiesel cuts down the current ecological footprints made by using petrol CO2 reserves, but would never erase them permanently.
The question seems to be, who is going to catch hold of the fish first? Will all nations just go self-sufficient in their current forms of transportation and then stop there? All major nations seem seriously interested in the potentials of biodiesel based on algae such as wild pond scum.
Algae biodiesel as a sustainable solution would mean an overabundance of algae production and the replenishing of our undersea algae forests in an attempt at creating a more healthy and ecologically responsible world for the children of our childrens children.
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Biodiesel from Algae
