Bio-Diesel from Algae

[kach22i]

Biodiesel from Algae in Argentina

An Argentine company called Oil Fox announced recently that they would produce biodiesel from algae oil for commercial use. The company has signed an agreement with the government of Chubut province to grow four species of algae in “secret” pools around the province (to avoid industrial espionage, they claim). The whole project would involve 19 million US dollars investments -from German capitals-, and is supposed to result in 240 thousand tons of biodiesel.

Link-1:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/new_company_to.php

Link 2:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/biodiesel_from_1.php

[red-beard]

80,000,000 gallons of diesel for an investment of $19 Million. $.25 per gallon for infrastructure. What are the ongoing costs to make this work?

If a hectacre produces 100,000 liters (25,000 gallons) per year, you would need 3200 hectacres to produce the 80M gallons, or about 12.5 square miles or 32,000,000 sq meters

Where is all of this energy coming from? At a maximum of 1 kw per sq meter (noon time at the equator, clear day), the average energy per day per square meter would be 707 watts per hour, for 12 hours or 8.5 kW-hr per sq meter per day. 271,529,004 kW-hr per day per farm or 99,175,968,702 kW-hr per year per farm.

3 412 BTU per kW-hr,

138,690 btu / gallon of diesel fuel

2,439,890,441 gallon energy equiv.

Argentina is about 45 south, so cut the energy by a factor of .707

let's use a clearness ratio of 60% (clear day percentage and cload effectiveness)

1,035,001,524 gallons of equiv energy hitting the ground will produce

88,000,000 gallons of fuel

So, the energy conversion needs to be near 10%, after all production, for this to work.

Some how, doubt it.

[kach22i]

Originally posted by red-beard
80,000,000 gallons of diesel for an investment of $19 Million...................

That's some serious number crunching.

[notfarnow]

Plus, it's unclear whether they're actually talking about 80,000,000 gallons of raw oil which then needs to be processed into biodiesel.

[red-beard]

Originally posted by kach22i
That's some serious number crunching.

Ya canna change the laws of physics!