Pond Scum Biodiesel is definitely on the rise as an international market and simply put, pond scum (scientifically called cyanobacteria more commonly known as blue-green algae) is a competitive biomass for refining biodiesel that is quickly earning the term sustainable fuel source.
While pond scum is still technically too small to be either plant or animal they are still traditionally seen as plants, due to their photosynthetic nature, consumption of CO2 and release of oxygen.
Bioreactors and open ponds are different methods of raising algae, and the term pond scum biodiesel refers more to the wild/native algae collected from open ponds rather than algae collected from a CO2 injected climate controlled bioreactor.
Pond scum biodiesel would be an easy to harvest crop for dairy farmers, paper or meat industries interested in bio-remediation of their waterways.
Anyone interested in Effluent Management Systems (EMS) would be interested in harvesting raw biomass from what has traditionally been a stream, lake and waterway pollutant.
Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation has been pioneering this technology, in a low-tech fashion that is also cost effective.
ABC optimizes the ponds productive capacity, finds economical methods for harvesting pond algae allowing them to first exploit the available nutrients in the pond which causes bioremediation and lastly offers a third stage of water treatment leaving water in acceptable conditions to be discharged back into the aquifer.
This environmentally friendly cyanobacteria we call wild pond algae is still not yet a part of the US market, as of January 2007 but the gold rush for wild pond scum is already kicking into gear the world over, with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from all over.
Australia jumped the gun in May of 2006 with their EMS project in Blenheim, Melborhough, piloted by ABC as the first wild pond scum biodiesel factory in the world.
Green Gold! Pond Scum Biodiesel is a practical and sustainable way to power combustion engines; its clean, safe, non-toxic and has no sulfur (a major plus).
According to some sources, wild pond scum biodiesel ABC in the US should have a pilot program by January of 2008 while bioreactor projects are already in final stages.
ABC offers a low-tech solution to bioremediation through native algae cultivation and could produce something like 1,440 US gallons of biodiesel per acre, thirty times what we get per acre of soybeans (48 gallons per acre).
If we remove the word wild and replace it with controlled pond scum environments; such as those used in the USU Biofuels Program, we could produce 200 times the biodiesel harvested per acre from soybeans.
USU Biofuels Program, with six million dollars in seed money has developed high-tech pond scum cultivation around farm effluents that are more efficient as bioremediators and produce thousands gallons more biomass than low-tech solutions can.
The USU program has also given birth to spin-offs with solids for methane gas production like Andigen, which can sustain the electricity for 100 homes with only single farms methane production.
With solar parabolic dishes on the roof and fiber-optics leading down to the contained ponds, every 1 square meter of dish space can illuminate 10 square meters of algae, surface, concentrating sunlight many times over that of natural, low-tech lighting.
Utah is positioning itself already to be a major player in this kind of high-tech (bioreactor) controlled pond scum biofuel, intending to become cost competitive within two years.
Pond Scum Biodiesel seems a growing trend among agriculturists nations around the globe, both for the low-tech and high-tech solutions.
The solution that is more sustainable will depend on the economical and industrial demands of the nation at the time, but the higher-tech a renewable energy source goes, the more ecological footprints it tends to make in the initial phases of construction.
The interesting side of this high-tech solution is the long-term use of such bioremediation technology and its quantifying energy production that minimizes greater land use in the production pond scum biofuel.
Pond Scum Biofuel is being more understood by the masses everyday, and the more it is used, the more it is defined as a sustainable way to deal with our energy crises world over.
