Algae to Crude Oil: Million-Year Natural Process Takes Minutes in the Lab
December 19th, 2013Via: U.S. Department of Energy / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:
Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.
The research by engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journal Algal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.
In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.
With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae.
While algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel, and several companies have produced algae-based fuels on a research scale, the fuel is projected to be expensive. The PNNL technology harnesses algae’s energy potential efficiently and incorporates a number of methods to reduce the cost of producing algae fuel.
“Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel,” said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team’s research. “We believe that the process we’ve created will help make algae biofuels much more economical.”
Not a word on Energy In vs Energy Out on this process… very strange.
spOILer, thanks — I didn’t have time to read it all in search of the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) but kinda figured that if they revealed that, it wouldn’t make the discovery look quite so good. Call me a skeptic when it comes to these kinds of energy “solutions” but I’d love to be proven wrong. I do believe we’ll find more efficient ways of using energy, but that sustainability is not going to be achieved without intervention from tptb, and that’s going to be very ugly. Oh wait, it already is.
My interpretation of this was as follows: .mil will have liquid fuels no matter what.
In any event, I also noted the lack of a mention of the efficiency of this process and I contacted the DOE about it.
—–Original Message—–
From: Kevin F
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2013 7:14 PM
To: Rickey, Tom
Subject: EROI on the algae to crude process?
Hello,
I read with great interest the story about the algae to crude process described in this piece:
http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=1029
Nowhere is the energy return on investment mentioned.
Do you have any additional details available on the EROI aspect of this story?
Thank you,
Kevin Flaherty
—
Subject: RE: EROI on the algae to crude process?
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 22:40:26 +0000
From: Rickey, Tom
To: ‘Kevin F’
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for this note. I’m sorry, but the scientist central to this work is out for a week.
This is not something I explored for the news release, though perhaps I should have!
I have attached a copy of his scientific paper on which the release is based, along with another paper that looks more closely at the economics of the process. I’ll also touch base with the scientist once he is back from vacation, and I will try to get a reply then.
Thanks for your interest! Have a great holiday break.
Tom
—
One of the papers he included was:
Development of hydrothermal liquefaction and upgrading technologies for lipid-extracted algae conversion to liquid fuels
Yunhua Zhu ?, Karl O. Albrecht, Douglas C. Elliott, Richard T. Hallen, Susanne B. Jones
—
I’m not really sure if I’m understanding this properly, but it looks like the efficiency is 69.5%. Read the paper though, because there are MANY factors that go into the efficiency. The main point is that the new wet process is much more energy efficient because the feedstock doesn’t have to be dried
So this seems like more of a battery than an energy source, BUT, like I said: The .mil meat grinder keeps going, no matter what.
Thanks Kevin, for following up with the source. Good point about this benefiting the military, no matter what. And here I was expecting to see algae gas stations in my neighborhood. Yeah. Maybe I’ll hafta work on converting sprouts to run my car when the crunch comes. 🙂