Q: Global Warming
melting Icecaps?
Q: Soil Depletion causing poor health?
A: Algae
( Note: See my "Algae To Oil" Website - updated
continuously at:
http://AlgaeToOil.tripod.com )
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ALGAE
triples
in volume
every day
(unlike corn / 1 crop per year)
ALGAE
converts CO2 to O2
ALGAE
- some over 50% Oil
ALGAE
converts easily to Bio-Fuel
-------------- and -------------
Conservation
reduces "future" CO2,
Algae reduces EXISTING CO2!
_____________________________________________________________________________
The podcast transcript explains an exciting ALGAE technology ready
now.
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Pond Scum or Planet Savers? |
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Real Player |
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MP3 |
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Pond scum just might be the answer to
solving the CO2 woes of the Industrial Age. Host Bruce Gellerman
visits with Dr. Isaac Berzin, founder of GreenFuel Technologies
Corporation. Berzin is working on a prototype that uses algae to
convert power plant emissions into biofuels. (5:15)
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Pond Scum or Planet Savers?
GELLERMAN: A few years ago, Isaac Berzin traveled from Israel to
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with two goals in mind--to
get his post doc in chemical engineering and save the world.
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Smokestack emissions bubble through algae-filled
tubes at MIT's Cogen plant. (Photo: Ashley Ahearn)
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Well, he got his degree and now he's closing in on the other goal:
saving the world from global warming by using one of the most
primitive forms of life: algae...you know, the yucky stuff that grows
on the side of fish tanks and swimming pools...pond scum...just don't
call it that in front of Berzin.
BERZIN: Okay, they're not pond scum, they're great. So, I want you
to think differently. They're not ugly or whatever. They're the
sweetest creatures.
GELLERMAN: Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But
according to Berzin, algae-- primitive one cell plants--are the
world's champs at photosynthesis, capturing the suns rays and
converting it to chemical energy. That makes the microscopic plants
very special, and potentially very useful, in reducing greenhouse
gases. On his laptop, Berzin shows me a video of the algae up close
and personal.
BERZIN: So, what you're going to see on the screen now is a
microscopic view of the algae. Belly dancing around, they have a
little mustache. They touch each other with the mustaches.
GELLERMAN: So, this is a plant? It's a one-celled plant?
BERZIN: Algae are the fastest growing plants on Earth. Their
doubling time is measured in hours. My kids ask me, 'oh Daddy it's so
cute. It's like pets. So, what do you do with them in the end?' I say,
'uh oh, I burn them.'
GELLERMAN: Berzin grows algae because they're super rich in oil. In
some species, oil accounts for half the little creature's body mass.
In fact, algae synthesize 30 times more vegetable oil per acre than
plants like sunflowers or rapeseed. The algae biodiesel can be used to
run engines, or converted into methane or fermented into alcohol. And
here's the best part: algae eat carbon dioxide for breakfast, lunch
and dinner. And one thing the global warming world has too much of is
CO2 from fossil fuel burning power plants.
GELLERMAN: Not far from his office, Berzin takes me to his algae
laboratory. It's outside on the roof of MIT's 20 kilowatt power plant.
A yellow brick smokestack towers overhead, and some of the power
plant's exhaust is fed through a row of Plexiglas tubes. Inside, the
gooey green algae feed on the CO2 and NOX, nitrogen oxide.
GELLERMAN: Can you describe what we are looking at? It looks like,
I don't know, water gurgling through a bunch of tubes.
BERZIN: Actually, in professional terms it's called a bioreactor.
It's nothing but three tubes connected together with some sea water
and algae in them. And you can see the bubbles bubbling through the
system. And you can kind of look at the bubble and follow it, and in
the ten seconds or so that the bubbles are spending in the bioreactor
80 percent of the CO2 is moved and 85 percent of the NOX. And at the
end of the day you harvest the algae, whatever was growing during the
day, you take out of the system. It's like a cow you milk it and you
make biofuels from the algae.
GELLERMAN: So, you're a farmer, you're a high-tech farmer.
BERZIN: Yeah, that's exactly the point. It's really, really a new
age of farming.
GELLERMAN: Granted, this prototype is just small potatoes. But,
theoretically, if you created an algae bioreactor twice the size of
New Jersey, you could supply the entire petroleum needs of the U.S.
The motto for Berzin's company is "waste not, profit more."
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Algae tubes stand alongside a smokestack. (Photo:
Ashley Ahearn)
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BERZIN: We believe that if you want to make an environmental
revolution it should not come as the law. Okay? It should come as a
great business. And if it's a great business, it has life of its own.
So, you don't come to the power industry and tell them, 'you guys are
the worst polluters and I have to shut you down. I have to fine you
for every...like a carbon tax, whatever.' I think that's the wrong
approach. I think the right approach would be, 'guys, you're throwing
all this CO2 away? Are you crazy? Let's make more money.' And that's
how the world will change. That's how it will become a reality.
GELLERMAN: So, I was taught, you know, if it sounds too good to be
true it usually is. What am I missing?
BERZIN: I'll tell you what the problem is. You have to produce
algae in a cost that will be cheap enough to compete with fossil
fuels. Then you think, 'wait a minute, what does this technology
need?' It needs land, and you need water, and you need CO2. So, CO2 is
not an issue. You're located next to a CO2 generating facility. Water,
you get to use any quality of water. Treated sewage water, brackish
water, ocean water, any water available. The third thing is, the land,
usually near these big power plants, no one wants to live. It's
non-fertile land. Nothing grows there even. So, you don't really
compete with agriculture. So, how realistic this is? We believe it is
realistic.
GELLERMAN: Isaac Berzin...founder and chief technology officer of
Greenfuel Technologies Corp. You can see for yourself if algae are
pond scum or planet savers; check out our web site: loe dot org.
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OCEAN ALGAE FARMS
If algae farms 5 times the state of Colorado would turn around global
warming (old numbers), then what about "ocean algae farms"
where the algae is then converted into a bio-fuel. The person who first
brought up this project thought of this project in terms of algae ponds
on farms with the algae plowed into the soil for remineralization.
However the quickest way to get this rolling is creating algae farms in
existing water areas like swamps, ponds, lakes, and oceans with the algae
converted into bio-fuel.
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Corn = net
81 gallons bio-diesel / acre
vs. Soy = net 41 gallons / acre
vs.
ALGAE = 15,000 gallons / acre
R-Squared Energy Blog:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/03/biodiesel-king-of-alternative-fuels.html
Biodiesel can be produced from crops, such as soybeans. The
reported EROI for biodiesel from soybeans is 3.2(2). Note
that this is over double the EROI for ethanol, and that
doesn’t even account for the higher efficiency of the diesel
engine. Soybeans yield about 40 bushels per acre, which
translates into around 60 gallons of biodiesel per acre.
This is far short of the 350 gallons or more of ethanol that
can be produced from an acre of corn, but we have to take
into account the net energy produced. Given that the real
energy return of grain ethanol is around 1.3, it took the
energy equivalent of around 350/1.3, or 269 gallons of
ethanol to make the 350.
We netted out 81 gallons. For the
soybeans, it took 60/3.2, or 19 gallons of biodiesel
equivalent to produce the biodiesel, for a
net of 41. But
recall that 1 gallon of biodiesel is worth 2.25 gallons of
ethanol when both are used in their respective engines, so
the biodiesel yield is "worth" 2.25*41, or 92 gallons of
ethanol. (Please note that these calculations are
approximate. If I were going to try to publish this
somewhere, I would convert everything into BTUs to calculate
the net yields.)
However, I do not wish to make the argument that we should
be making biodiesel from crops, unless we are doing so from
by-products left over from food production. Production of
biodiesel (or ethanol) from crops can’t make a significant
dent in our current usage of motor fuels. Fortunately, there
may be a better way. A couple of years ago, I ran across an
article that really caught my attention. It was my Reference
1
(http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html),
a report by Michael Briggs at The University of New
Hampshire. Briggs explained that biodiesel can be produced
from algae, at yields as high as 15,000 gallons per acre!
Briggs did a number of calculations of the feasibility and
cost of replacing the entire motor fuel supply of the U.S.
with biodiesel. I checked his calculations and read his
references, and his analysis - based on experiments
conducted by NREL - appeared to me to be spot on. In his own
words, regarding the acreage that would be required:
In the previous section, we found that to replace all
transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8
billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one
quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To
produce that amount would require a land mass of almost
15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider
that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises
120,000 square miles.
Enough biodiesel to replace all
petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000
square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the
Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not
advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in
the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used
strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land
required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly
9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres
currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over
500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
It would be preferable to spread the algae production
around the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in
transporting the feedstocks. Algae farms could also be
constructed to use waste streams (either human waste or
animal waste from animal farms) as a food source, which
would provide a beautiful way of spreading algae
production around the country. Nutrients can also be
extracted from the algae for the production of a
fertilizer high in nitrogen and phosphorous. By using
waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human
sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially
also provide a means of recycling nutrients from
fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer.
Regarding the costs, he writes:
In "The Controlled Eutrophication process: Using
Microalgae for CO2 Utilization and Agircultural Fertilizer
Recycling", the authors estimated a cost per hectare of
$40,000 for algal ponds. In their model, the algal ponds
would be built around the Salton Sea (in the Sonora
desert) feeding off of the agircultural waste streams that
normally pollute the Salton Sea with over 10,000 tons of
nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers each year. The estimate
is based on fairly large ponds, 8 hectares in size each.
To be conservative (since their estimate is fairly
optimistic), we'll arbitrarily increase the cost per
hectare by 100% as a margin of safety. That brings the
cost per hectare to $80,000. Ponds equivalent to their
design could be built around the country, using wastewater
streams (human, animal, and agricultural) as feed sources.
We found that at NREL's yield rates, 15,000 square miles
(3.85 million hectares) of algae ponds would be needed to
replace all petroleum transportation fuels with biodiesel.
At the cost of $80,000 per hectare, that would work out to
roughly $308 billion to build the farms.
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor,
chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance,
insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked
out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $46.2
billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the
oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare
that to the $100-150 billion the US spends each year just
on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries, with all
of that money leaving the US economy.
I spent a lot of time reading through his references (some
are very long reports), and I could not understand why we
weren’t massively funding this research. It turns out that
NREL stopped funding the program in 1996. The reason remains
unclear to me, but this concept had given me hope that there
might be a viable alternative out there after all that
didn’t require us to turn all our forests into farmland. I
spent a lot of time wondering just how I could involve
myself in this area and contribute. I did e-mail Michael
Briggs and we had a nice discussion, and I came away
convinced that he knew what he was talking about. So why on
earth weren’t we all over this? Frankly, I still don’t know
the answer to that.
Biodiesel Plus Carbon Dioxide Recycle
Fast forward to 2006, and newspapers across the country picked up the
story that Isaac Berzin, of MIT, is using algae to quickly recycle
carbon in carbon dioxide rich exhaust stacks from power plants (3). What
a brilliant, brilliant idea! Why didn’t I think of that? By doing this,
he is able to double up on the benefits. First, the carbon dioxide gets
converted back into plant material instead of going directly into the
atmosphere. This would be a way of sequestering the carbon, provided the
algae was properly disposed of. The story reports:
Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power
plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly even in the wan rays of a
New England sun. The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40
percent less CO2 (a larger cut than the Kyoto treaty mandates) and
another bonus: 86 percent less nitrous oxide.
That alone is incredible. But that isn’t all:
After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested
daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out:
biodiesel for automobiles. Berzin hands a visitor two vials - one with
algal biodiesel, a clear, slightly yellowish liquid, the other with the
dried green flakes that remained. Even that dried remnant can be further
reprocessed to create ethanol, also used for transportation.
One key is selecting an algae with a high oil density - about 50 percent
of its weight. Because this kind of algae also grows so fast, it can
produce 15,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre. Just 60 gallons are
produced from soybeans, which along with corn are the major biodiesel
crops today.
Now that’s ethanol I can live with. Finally:
For his part, Berzin calculates that just one 1,000 megawatt power
plant using his system could produce more than 40 million gallons of
biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. That would require a
2,000-acre "farm" of algae-filled tubes near the power plant. There are
nearly 1,000 power plants nationwide with enough space nearby for a few
hundred to a few thousand acres to grow algae and make a good profit, he
says.
I hope this guy is extremely successful and makes a billion dollars. He
has the potential here to make a contribution to society that most of us
only dream about. As he himself said "This is a big idea, a really
powerful idea." I couldn’t agree with those sentiments more.
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ALGAE is probably the best way to reduce
EXISTING CO2.
In 1994,
Daryl Kollman, founder of the blue-green algae company, Cell Tech, (see
Original Algae Project)
said: "algae
multiplies so quickly and produces so much oxygen per square foot that
ponds with a total surface area five times the size of Colorado would be
enough to start to reverse our growing CO2 problem." His
"Algae Ponds"
concept was to have
algae ponds worldwide on farms, continually plowing the algae into the soil for fertilizer (putting
over 60-some elements into our depleted topsoil instead of the 4 that normal
U.S. fertilizers do). The concept today might be to have algae ponds on
farms, in lakes, swamps, oceans, etc., and selling/converting
90+% into a sustainable bio-fuel, and the remainder to farmers for
fertilizers.
REDUCE CO2, CREATE
BIO-FUEL! SUSTAINABILITY: THE DOT COM OF 2000'S.
Exploring possible ways to grow algae in swamps, lakes, and in the ocean,
reducing CO2, cleaning the air, and creating bio-fuel to sell. The
government needs to quit looking at corn and begin massive and
wholesale funding and grants for algae. A new state agri-business of algae farms? Or take it a
step farther and get grants for ocean farming!
Algae
farms 5 times in size of the state of Colorado would turn around global
warming according to 1994 data -- so what about "ocean
algae farms" 10 times that size? With the algae then made
to bio-fuel - the profit motive gives us reason to move forward quickly.
What a great opportunity to create wealth!
Pond Scum
Planet Saver?
Yes, if we
take action!
_____________________________________________________________________________
The
Original...
"ALGAE
Ponds" Project
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Note:
Special Thanks to Linda Grover and book "August Celebration" for
much of the information on this page. And Thanks to Daryl Kollman
for discovering the power in the algae and creating the brilliant
ideas for saving our planet! "WE ARE THE PIVOTAL GENERATION!" |
Algae Ponds
all over the world could reverse the greenhouse effect.
"We lost our window of opportunity to reverse the greenhouse effect with
trees back in the seventies," according to Daryl Kollman, Founder of Cell Tech,
now called Simplexity (Blue-Green Algae Company located at Klamath Lake,
OR). Daryl explains that algae
multiplies so quickly and produces so much oxygen per square foot that
ponds with a total surface area five times the size of Colorado would be
enough to start to reverse our growing CO2 problem. Scientists say it
was blue-green algae that rescued us from the first greenhouse effect
about 3 1/2 billion years ago.
These are the
crucial pivotal years. As Daryl often say, borrowing the Dalai
Lama's words, "We are the pivotal generation." Daryl continues, "Over the
past 2000 years, it took 1900 years for the world's population to double
from 600 million to 1.2 billion. It took only 55 years for it to double
again, then just 30 years to double once more. That's a rate of growth
that is not sustainable. This is one of the reasons we're the pivotal
generation. It seem likely the fate of our civilization will depend upon
grass-roots action by partnership-minded groups."
"And when you
look at the carbon dioxide concentration, it was at 290 parts per million
10,000 years ago. That figure was constant up to 1900, then it went from
290 to 295, then to 320, then 350. That's not sustainable either. There
are 200 billion extra tons of carbon dioxide between sea level and 15,000
feet, and it's increasing so rapidly that it's drastically changing our
weather. We're faced with these two challenges. A population that's going
through the roof and a carbon dioxide concentration that's doing much the
same thing. These, in my opinion, are the two main issues facing the
pivotal generation."
There's also
an increasing disparity between the very rich and very poor. In 1940, ten
percent of the people controlled 40 percent of the wealth in this country.
In 1990, one percent of the people controlled 40 percent of the wealth. We
have an enormous number of poor people on the planet, and that's growing
on the same curve as population and carbon dioxide. It's going to take
incredible wealth to turn things around -- it will take 500,000 square
miles of algae ponds just to start reducing the carbon dioxide. We have
the wisdom and technology; we just have to choose to do something. To
extend the window of opportunity so that our children have one as well, we
must make a commitment."
There is an
almost limitless business opportunity in the algae pond project, according
to Daryl's son Joe Kollman. Joe explains, the plan is for farmers all
over the world to maintain small algae ponds in every field, using the
algae as a food source and plowing the remainder into the earth to enhance
the nutritional value of their crops. Thus we could reduce our dangerous
carbon dioxide levels while revitalizing our soil and improving the
nutritional quality of our food.
Blue-Green Algae
There
are over 30,000 species of algae, 6000 are classified blue-green.
Blue-green is the oldest form of algae. It's said to have been the first
organism on Earth to photosynthesize (use the energy of the sun to make
food for itself). Blue-green algae is what scientists search for first
when they're looking for life on other planets because blue-green algae is
what gets the whole process started. One inch of sediment from volcanoes
on the bottom of Klamath Lake (it's 35 feet) is enough to keep the Klamath
Lake blue-green algae blooming for over 60 years..
It quietly
processes the CO2 we use and then gives us back pure oxygen, plus a myriad
of complex bio-chemical nutrients. According to Kollman, algae today provides some 90% of the
Earth's oxygen while trees and all the other plants provide the other 10
percent. Algae represents 70% of the biomass on the planet and some algae
can double or triple in volume several times a day.
Blue-green
algae tests our for huge amounts of vitamin B12, beta carotene and all the
chlorophyll (cleans the blood) you could possibly get in any food. It's
high in protein and the amino acids in the protein are in almost the same
exact proportion as what's ideal for people. Plus dozens of minerals and
trace elements that we need because our topsoil is so depleted.
Topsoil and
Nutrition
In 1948
you could buy spinach that had 158 milligrams of iron per hundred
grams. But by 1965 the maximum iron they could find had dropped to 27
milligrams. In 1973 it was averaging 2.2 (that's from over 150 to
less than 3). That means you'd have to eat 75 bowls of spinach to
get the same amount of iron that one bowl might have given you back in
1948.
Then there's
cobalt. We need cobalt to process B12 (without B12 red blood vessels get
weak) and yet many vegetables that used to have cobalt are testing out at zero cobalt.
There's some
60-some elements that have been found in plant tissue, and we're putting
back 4 in most fertilizers (potassium, calcium, nitrogen, and
phosphates). So food grows empty of value. Even organic fertilizer comes
from animals fed from depleted soil.
In agriculture
the pattern has been, move into some fertile place, farm till the soil's
shot, then either move on to more fertile soil - or people stay and don't
get the minerals and vitamins they needs, to they get less healthy,
sluggish, don't function as well, and make illogical decisions. We have 1
in 6 children in America with learning disorders. Imagine a generation or
two from now if the topsoil and nutrition continue to deteriorate.
Now the
topsoil over pretty much the whole planet is exhausted. (see map)
And when our topsoil is weak, our food is weak, and we are weak.
The concept of this
project was to have Algae Ponds on farms of 5 times the size of Colorado
or greater allowing the algae to convert excess CO2 in our atmosphere to
O2, then continually plow the algae into the soil for fertilizer (putting
over 60-some elements into our soil instead of the 4 that normal
fertilizers do). The concept today would be to have algae ponds on farms
and convert 90% of the algae into bio-fuel, and plow the remainder into
the soil for fertilizer.
Soil Remineralization
While this project would have algae used to
remineralize earth's depleted soil, another group has much information
about silicate rocks used for this purpose. Remineralization The Earth
www.remineralize.org website
says:
Soil Remineralization (SR) creates fertile soils by returning the
minerals to the soil much the same way the Earth does: during an Ice
Age, glaciers crush rock onto the Earth's soil mantle, winds blow the
dust in the form of loess all over the globe. Volcanoes erupt spewing
forth minerals from deep within the Earth, and minerals are contained
in alluvial deposits. Within silicate rocks are a broad spectrum of up
to 100 minerals and trace elements necessary for the well being of all
life and the creation of fertile soils. Glacial moraine or mixtures of
single rock types applied to soils create a sustainable and superior
alternative to the use of ultimately harmful chemical fertilizers,
pesticides and herbicides.
SR has been shown in scientific studies to increase yields as much
as two to four times for agriculture and forestry (wood
volume), and to have immediate results and long term effects with a
single application. Hundreds of thousands of tons of appropriate rock
dust for soil and forest regeneration are stockpiled by the gravel and
stone industry.
For a Brief History of Remineralization, click here:
http://www.remineralize.org/about/context.html
This paradigm shift away from conventional chemical NPK farming is
a vast new frontier, SR - key to the sustainable agriculture of
tomorrow. The agenda for SR is clear. It will create abundance in an
era of diminishing resources and shift us away from fossil fuels.
Remineralization is nature's way to regenerate soils. We can return
the Earth to earlier interglacial Eden-like conditions through
appropriate technology.
CLICK HERE for more
info on "Blue-Green Algae" and it's
health benefits.
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