John Carter

Arh! There's the problem, and it's as I suspected - you can't actually read anything properly. Did anyone say 60,000 litres per acre?

Besoeker

Well spotted. You deserve a pat on the head. But it isn't a problem. The 60,000 litres was for 1.5 acres. That would equate to 40,000 litres per acre. But that's still a long way different to 2,700 litres so the error in no way invalidates my point. Which it would have, had you actually found the "problem".

In any case, I didn't misread the post. I did the calculations myself to check that the conversion from acres that C_Steam gave was correct* before I commented on the arithmetic. His/her conversion was correct, certainly to the degree of accuracy appropriate to the point being made. (1.5 acres is 0.607 hectares).

But I readily confess to my sloppy typing. And Clippo was right about at least one thing.

Anyway, if you want to add any substantive point relating to the disparity between the 40,000 litres per acre and the 2,700 litres per acre I'd be pleased to see it.

*C_Steam, no offence intended. You asked for the maths to be checked. I know the conversion factors for all the fundamental units and some of the derived ones but acres to hectares is not one that I know offhand so I did the conversion using 1 metre = 39.37 inches.

John Carter

Arh. So you missed the bit where I mentioned algae (which averages at 39,000 litres per acre).

Give up now dad. It's obvious that there's something severely wrong with your information input mechanisms.

John Carter

Oh, and dad... ...it'd help if you were reading articles about biodiesel (i.e. written by people living outside a country which is barely aware of diesel's existence), not ethanol. Different yields, see.

Besoeker

I didn't miss it.
I suggest you read it again.
All of it.
Very carefully.

Clippo

I can’t see the connection between `John Carter’s’ biodiesel claim and the title of this thread. Perhaps it’s a diversionary tactic because he realises the truth of the title claim.

John Carter wrote:-
Well, actually, I had an interest in this & similar topics many years ago but was under the impression that the research had foundered. My current interest in John Carter’s claim stems from the fact that I suspected it would involve some variant of fermentation technology,of which I have a little experience. So, In case I had missed something over the years, I visited his wikipedia article and then went to reference 2 in that article :-

http://oakhavenpc.org/cultivating_algae.htm

It is indeed interesting, and for those of you who can’t be bothered to visit it or are not technically savvy enough, it seems that in the US in the 1970’s and with the advent of rocketing oil prices and so on, the US govt. funded research into this promising potential replacement or part-replacement to ‘oil’.

However, well into the article I was disappointed to read:-

and
So, unfortunately it would seem that these experiments were at best on pilot scale only and never reached any of the exciting potential claimed.

I followed up another reference in this article, no. 2, I think, but didn’t record the exact web link. This turned out to be a 300+ page pdf document from the US govt, in 1998, summarising the research over 2 decades. The very bald conclusion was that ‘even using very aggressive assumptions, (their words), the cost of biodiesel made by this method is at least 2 X the cost of conventional fossil diesel. The project was terminated then with the proposition that bio-Ethanol, produced by fermentation of grain products was likely to be a more cost effective option. I believe some countries like Brazil do add home produced bio-ethanol to their hydrocarbon energy sources, especially petrol.

Still suspecting that more private research might have been carried on, I chose a reference dated 2005, Here’s the link:-
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/news/algaefuel.pdf

Once again, my reading of it suggests that all they’ve designed is a very small bioreactor, but which they claim gives excellent yields of primary oil.
Again for non-technical, these oils aren’t the end of the story. To be suitable as ‘Biodiesel’, they need to be chemically treated in a process known as trans-esterification. To do this, one needs Methanol or Ethanol. Both of these can be produced by fermentation, (obviously), but the current most cost effective way is from hydrocarbon, i.e. oil feedstocks.

The US Govt. may have included this technology in their summary above – I couldn’t be bothered to read all the report.

A great pity.
So John Carter, do you know of a commercial operation producing bio-diesel from algae and how much do they actually produce per annum?

John Carter

Aquaflow Bionomic. One million litres.

Besoeker

John Carter

And when did the bloke say that?

Clippo

Sorry to burst your bubble John Carter, but:-

(May 2006)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0605/S00030.htm

also, from

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/grap...umption&nofb=1

the UK’s oil consumption per day is approx. 1.75 millions barrels. A barrel is approx. 159 litres. Assuming only 1% of our usage is for transport fuel, (I think a low estimate but nevertheless let’s assume this for now), then we use 2,782,500 litres/day for transport. Again, if we assume an additive rate of 5%, we will need 136425 l/day of biodiesel.

This is approx 2% of our needs. It’s not clear to me from the Aqua press release whether they expect this yield to be from just one sewage farm. If they do, which I think they do, then one could speculate that 50 such installations could become a possibility in the UK.
Unfortunately, this process is highly dependent on sunlight for the growth of the algae, as they note in the press release. So realistically in the UK there’s not much hope, (even with global warming, because unfortunately one tends to get more water vapour in the atmosphere).

It’s a b*gger as they say – just when we thought we might free ourselves from the Arab gentlemen, we’re let down by our geographical position. And, yes, you guessed it, who’s got lots of the sun – why those Arab gentlemen again.

Some way to go I fear.

But coincidentally, I’ll be in New Zealand in Feb. – perhaps I’ll drop in and see Aquaflow Bionomic.
.