Algae, coal, & biofuels....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 2-11-2009

To protect our economy and prevent sudden energy shortages or horrible cost run-ups that would cause worse problems than the current economic slowdown, we need to do several things.:

We need to mostly reverse the huge excess of CO2 release world-wide because of the large, and perhaps unnecessary, rise in costs due to extreme weather disasters, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruptions the CO2 will cause. We at least need to minimize these costs for modern economies to continue to exist.

We need to switch to getting our energy to mostly getting our energy from renewable sources, at least half and 80 % is better and doable; we may need to use some nuclear power; and we should get most of the rest from carbon neutral biofuels.

We also need to make the transition with as little increase in the cost of energy as possible.

And, we need to at least double our economic productivity per unit of energy. (Preventing waste and creating much more energy efficient products and services is happening; but it needs to be accelerated.)

Clearly wind, solar photovoltaic, and solar thermal need to provide 100 or more times the energy than they do now.

But, to keep the costs down and cut excessive CO2 emissions soon; plus allow the United States and China to become more energy independent and less dependent on oil for energy and fuel, we also need to do several things as a key part of this.

Yesterday, Reuters online news had a story they titled.:

“Can algae save the world - again?” In it they point out that algae once removed enough CO2 from the air and added enough oxygen to make our current lives possible. So, the title implies that maybe they can do this again for us now.
It’s certainly worth doing as a way to generate carbon neutral biofuels if for no other reason. But the article points out that it may also provide a way to reduce or slow the release of CO2 from the burning of coal.

We already know that biofuels as they exist now tend to make fuels that work well in temperatures of over 45 degrees Fahrenheit. But they do less well for fuels at lower or much lower temperatures.

There are already efforts to turn coal directly into clean fuels rather than burning it directly.

By adding biofuels to fuels from coal, we may be able to almost completely get away from burning oil for fuel. Even if we are only partly successful at first, once we get production in volume at reasonable cost, it will prevent the kind of extremely fast run up in fuel prices we saw recently.

And, though we should stop burning coal to the largest extent we can, we depend on it now & to switch to other sources successfully, we need to transition away from burning it at the lowest possible cost. We also need to avoid the economic disruption of simply tossing the existing coal industry on the scrap heap. Switching to non-oil fuels made from coal and biofuels may be a way to do this.

But the Reuters article makes a key point that would make this work even better. Once we have the right algae strains and efficient biofuels production methods from them, we can also use these algae to turn the CO2 from coal fired plants we cannot yet afford to shut down by literally feeding the CO2 from the coal burning to the algae.

Even better, for this to work in part by protecting the algae, or as a relatively cost effective addition to the system that feeds the coal exhaust to the algae, this process can likely be made to remove the acids and particulate pollution not now removed from the exhaust from coal.

Then coal can become a complement to biofuels as a way to replace oil and to protect against the day when we run out of oil that can be used cost effectively.

This will ease the transition from coal both for cost reasons; because it preserves the use of an existing resource; and it will take the pressure off of oil prices.

Lastly, it will help enable the United States to grow economically while ceasing to import oil or having to drill in ever more locations for it.

As a bonus, it provides a way to produce fuels that do NOT use oil that also does NOT compete with leaving existing forests in place or raising crops which corn based ethanol has been doing.

The article shows that there is progress in this area already.:

“Many companies are working on algae and biofuels including U.S. groups Sapphire Energy, OriginOil, BioCentric Energy and PetroAlgae.

Among uses, Japan Airlines had a test flight last month with a jet fuel and biofuels blend including algae oils.

Brazil's MPX Energia plans to trap 10-15 percent of carbon emissions from a coal-fired power plant by feeding them to algae when it starts in 2011.

Plymouth Marine Laboratory says it is taking what we know about algae in the world's oceans and applying it to biotechnology, an approach which differs from much of the commercial research underway, where some claims about the possibilities of algal biofuels are overstated, according to Carole Llewellyn, a marine chemist.” This article says that this lab is in England.

Meanwhile, there are many other companies that are working to produce biofuels from Algae in a cost effective way.

Solazyme in South San Francisco in California is another. There are very likely at least 20 more such companies, some of which will grow to substantial size.

The CEO of the solar photovoltaic company Nanosolar, points out that we can harvest and use much more of the sun’s energy for transport per unit area with solar than we can by growing algae.

But algae may indeed help save us from C02 based global warming by helping replace oil in already installed engines currently in use; and maybe also by removing C02 from exhaust and C02 that is already in the air. (It might pay us to cultivate algae we do NOT burn for fuel as well as algae that we do turn into biofuels we burn.)

So, the title of the article is extremely well chosen.