Re:Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes mi...
by VLM on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @10:15AM
(#6927901)
You need a fair amount of hydrogen gas to run a hydrocracker, which is basically what this is. Industrially you get the hydrogen from natgas. Yeah yeah you can get methane from the output of a hydrocracker and hydrogen from methan but depending on the process its net overall hydrogen negative (think about it, how are you going to split a long chain hydrocarbon that has two H ends into two little ones thus a net of 4 H ends without a continuous input of hydrogen?)
So yeah you're mostly right but never going to get away from maybe 5% to 10% capacity driving steam turbines to electrolyze water and run the (insecure, of course) SCADA and hotel load for the humans running the plant etc.
A likely plant would look like two nuke generating plants backing each other up and 18 nukes cooking algae into diesel, roughly.
So yeah you're mostly right but never going to get away from maybe 5% to 10% capacity driving steam turbines to electrolyze water and run the (insecure, of course) SCADA and hotel load for the humans running the plant etc.
A likely plant would look like two nuke generating plants backing each other up and 18 nukes cooking algae into diesel, roughly.