Re:Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes mi...
by pjc50 on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @12:15PM
(#6928826)
Sure, but people use nonstorable electricity just fine, so I disagree with your first sentence.
Biogas rather than biodiesel might appear as a farm fuel in the future, either from manure or wood gasification. But not while underground gas is still cheap enough to flare.
Re:Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes mi...
by VLM on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:17PM
(#6931265)
Ah I think you're correct. I reread your post and I got stuck circular. Yes fixed installations would almost certainly continue not to use liquid fuels just like now. Probably direct solar like you say. And just like now, the transport industry would continue to heavily rely on liq fuels. I'd worry about practical engineering issues with biogas either leaking out (especially if pressurized) or oxygen contamination leaking into the flammability limit range.
If you unleash a chemist and tell him to do anything he wants to make the best energy store, you end up with a liquid hydrocarbon, they really are awesome by both mass and volume energy density and working temp range and corrosion resistance and shelf stability and a bunch of other parameters, even if cost is not an issue. True, weird corner cases like solid rocket boosters do end up with weird fuel components, but they're weird, so that's OK.
If you can't store it, you can't use it, so it doesn't matter how green it is, it won't be used.
The ideal transportable liquid fuel is diesel with gasoline a very close second. Some peculiar and temporary engineering and economic issues make gasoline ideal for passenger cars but in a very long run perspective the whole world is going diesel, its just the future has arrived a little quicker for some parts of the world than others. A common sci fi (and tech) theme.
Originally the diesel engine was developed by the Diesel bros (no kidding) to run on nut oil not crude oil. The Diesel bros had a political axe to grind about farms having self sufficient tractors much like they had self sufficient ox drawn plows. To say things didn't turn out that way would be an understatement, but there's no scientific reason it won't work that way in the future.
The primary problem with nut based biodiesel is you can't scale the production up to reasonable economic levels by shoving entire walnut trees thru a pipeline... but you can pump algae thru a pipeline...
So that's the big pix of why people are trying to turn algae into diesel.