Biofuels 'are not a magic bullet'

reply to post by Beachcoma

Hi Beach, Glad I was able to help you out! Lol

I liked your pond scum thread.. Do you know of anywhere they are actually culturing algae for biofuel? I can foresee having problems maintaining the proper culture and avoiding contamination. I've done enough bacteriology and beer making to know that it is difficult to maintain a pure cultures!

I heard that they were doing some trials out in the desert in Arizona and Colorado. I don't remember from where I got that info. Let me try to track them down and provide you the links, okay?

As for contamination, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Contaminated with what exactly? Are you talking about bad bacteria and/or other 'weed' algae?

Edit: I couldn't find the exact article I read then, but I did find this good resource:

Oilgae Blog

It looks like they haven't made any updates since November, but that's better than me. I haven't followed up on the algae biofuel news for quite awhile. So much that I actually missed this:

NZ firm makes bio-diesel from sewage in world first

A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold.

Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds.

It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from "wild" algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April.

That was from May 2006. The latest news from that company dated January 11 2008 --
Oil from algae a solution? -- indicates that the company is still alive and well.

This is the real deal. Pond scum is the future, and it is now.

[edit on 15-1-2008 by Beachcoma]

reply to post by Beachcoma

As for contamination, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Contaminated with what exactly? Are you talking about bad bacteria and/or other 'weed' algae?

I think the idea with algae is to produce a certain product of byproduct from the algae culture such as alcohol, hydrocarbons or hydrogen. To maximize what you produce you'll need a certain strain of algae. Maintaining that strain will probably be the difficulty.

For instance, each different type of beer or wine requires a certain strain of yeast and brewers and vintners are constantly on the allert to maintain a pure strain.

Perhaps, too, you can just grow a natural random strain of algae in your "brew" mixture, harvest the bodys, live or dead and use chemical treatment to produce the biodiesel. Sounds to me that the process is very much in the developmental stages with lots of potential but very little in the way of established protocal!