Jonathan Trent, the lead research scientist on the Spaceship Earth project at NASA Ames Research Center, has been working on a method to produce oil from algae. Their Algal Biofuels Team appears to be making progress.
NASA Envisions "Clean Energy" From Algae Grown in Waste Water
NASA scientists have proposed an ingenious and remarkably resourceful process to produce "clean energy" biofuels, that cleans waste water, removes carbon dioxide from the air, retains important nutrients, and does not compete with agriculture for land or freshwater...
...Land plants currently used to produce biodiesel and other fuels include soy, canola, and palm trees. For the sake of comparison, soy beans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year; canola produces about 160 gallons per acre per year, and palms about 600 gallons per acre per year. But some types of algae can produce at least 2,000 gallons of oil per acre per year.
The illustration shows enormous bags made of plastic semipermeable membranes, known as "forward-osmosis membranes." The float in the ocean. The algae are fed with sewage. Algae eat the sewage and produce oil. Fresh water leaches out of the bags and into the ocean.
It is not clear to me how well this will scale up. 2,000 gallons is about 47 barrels of oil. Currently, the world is producing about 80 million barrels of oil per day. But that 47 barrels per year per acre figure is for algae in installations on land. Perhaps they can do a lot better in the ocean.
Of course, whenever an alternative energy project is considered, a chorus rises up, proclaiming that it cannot replace our current system. This is true, at least so far. It is likely that nothing, in the near future, will replace oil, with the extent of energy return on investment (EROI) that we are getting now. But we have to do something. Most likely, that something will come from trying a bunch of different things, followed by implementing some subset of those things in a widely distributed network of dissimilar technologies.
Comments
The algae might do better in the ocean, but wouldn't there be an issue with getting megatons of sewage to them? Preferably without spilling any!
Posted by: LW | June 21, 2009 8:55 PM