Bio-diesel Made from Sewage 322
tito writes "A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds.
It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from 'wild' algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April."
Re:E85 costs more than regular gas! (Score:3, Informative)
E85 is ethanol.
Biodiesel is
Re:E85 costs more than regular gas! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:one million litres? (Score:4, Informative)
NZ consumes around 151,900 blue barrels a day [cia.gov] that's around 8815 million litres a year. So this plant will be able to provide around 0.01% of NZ's fuel.
But, there is going to be no single replacement for fossil fuels, there's going to be many (and this is just the first plant).
I wish Aquaflow Bionomics Corporation's [bio-diesel.co.nz] home page was a little more professional looking, but this is most certainly good news!
E85 won't save money (Score:2, Informative)
More Than One Solution Here? (Score:3, Informative)
I still haven't found anything that states how large an area/volume of pond they must have in order to produce one million litres/year. It is also interesting to note that they require aerating the pond
The UNH Study (Score:5, Informative)
I like biodiesel as a long-term solution for several reasons. . .
Because an air-breathing engine draws much of its "fuel" mass from the air, it starts with a large advantage in energy density, and it will be hard for other energy sources -- batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels -- to ever compete.
Unlike hydrogen, we already have the infrastructure in place to handle, store and distribute biodiesel, and millions of vehicles that can already run off it, and the capacity to economically produce millions more of them.
Producing it from algae mimics the process by which petroleum originally formed, over the eons. It might seem unrealistic to produce enough biofuel on a year-by-year basis to replace the *millions* of years worth of petroleum that we routinely burn without thinking anything of it. . . But the natural processes that created petroleum were haphazard, and hardly what anyone would call efficient.
If you replace haphazard processes with specially selected (maybe genetically engineered) strains of algae kept in controlled conditions, with concentrated feed of nutrients and sunlight, the production capacity could be immense. So yeah, I think it can be done.
We might not ever see dirt-cheap fuel again, but I'm optimistic that we can come up with petroleum alternatives at a level that allows our economy and industry to keep on functioning.
Re:E85 costs more than regular gas! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:1 million litres? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:E85 costs more than regular gas! (Score:3, Informative)
What about thermal depolymerization? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1 million litres? (Score:3, Informative)
That's a small one. I live less than 20 miles from one that is currently making 100 million gallons per year - and it will be doubled in capacity within the next year.
Re:Biodiesel Yield Per Land Area (Score:5, Informative)
According to the UNH study and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the yield of algae farms is about 5000 to 20,000 gallons per acre of pond per year. This number varies mostly due to the pond conditions, strain of algae used, and oil collection method employed.
However, it is worthwhile to note that even the low end (5000 gallons per acre per year) is over 100 times better than soybeans (50 gallons per acre per year) or rapeseed (about 120 gallons per acre per year)... which are the two dominant crops providing biodiesel in America and Europe today.
To supply the entire US fuel needs would require as little as 0.3% of US land area to be covered by algae ponds. This translates to about 28,000 square kilometers, or about 11,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that is about 1/8th the size of Kansas... and well less than the area devoted to Soybeans currently.
Re:1 million litres? (Score:3, Informative)
First, as the parent post notes, getting ethanol from sugar cane, as Brazil does, is much more efficient than getting ethanol from corn. With corn, depending on which estimates you believe, the energy you can get from burning the ethanol you get is anywhere from 0.8 to 1.3 times the amount of energy you put in to get the ethanol. With sugar cane, the ratio is about 8.
It is true that Brazil has major ethanol production from sugar cane, but Brazil is not going to be oil-independent by next year. However, Brazil is already independent of foreign petroleum right now . Brazil has its own petroleum and makes a lot of use of ethanol and natural gas. The situation in Bolivia complicates natural gas, but Brazil actually has its own natural gas too. Further, 96% of Brazil's electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants (dams). Additionally, Brazil, a tropical country, does not have the heating needs a country like the USA does in the winter. Yes, in the south it can get down to freezing occasionally in the winter, and yes, I can tell you the mornings in São Paulo have been a bit chilly for the last several days (it's Autumn here now), but that's nothing compared to places where the temperature can be below freezing for months on end. The lowest overnight low I've ever seen in São Paulo was in the low 40s. I don't even have a heater in my apartment in São Paulo (tho' I do have an electric blanket I sometimes turn on for about 10 minutes to warm the bed before I get in it on the coldest nights of the winter... FWIW, the electric blanket isn't even on my bed right now). Yes, it's nice to have air conditioning in the summer, but for example, my apartment does not. My car does, and I feel any office that would ever require me to wear a suit better damn well have air conditioning, but it is possible to get by without it. Try getting through a Chicago, Minneapolis, or even New York or Boston winter without heat. Yikes!
And Brazil is a growing economic power, with major manufacturing, agricultural, mining, banking, and technology concerns. This is not just a bunch of peasants out in the fields, as anyone who has visited the megalopolis of greater São Paulo can attest. The fact that Brazil does not depend on foreign petroleum and is very close to being completely energy independent. Bolivian natural gas seems to be the last bit of dependence, and Evo Morales may end up forcing Brazil to accelerate development of its own natural gas resouces.
Brazil's government should be congratulated for having the vision and the drive to make Brazil independent of foreign petroleum.
Re:The UNH Study (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, that is what a company called GreenFuel Technologies wants to do. Put up a couple of hundred acres of special vertical tanks (maybe derived from metal tanks used by large commercial breweries) and feed the tanks full of oil-laden algae with the exhaust gases from a coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant. This results in VERY fast growth of the algae and also absorbs 40% of the CO2 gas and 86% of the NOx gases, with the final exhaust gases having way below the Kyoto Protocol mandates for coal-fired powerplant emissions. Just a single 200-acre setup could produce an astonishing 15 million gallons of biodiesel fuel/heating oil per year, and the "waste" from the processing of the algae could be used to make animal feed, plant fertilizer or even make ethanol!
If we set up such "farms" of algae tanks next to every large coal-fired or natural gas-fired plant in the USA we could make enough biodiesel fuel/heating oil to drastically reduce the need for refining diesel fuel or heating oil from crude oil. Given modern catalytic "cracker" technology at most US refineries this means more of the crude oil can be used to make gasoline and/or kerosene motor fuels.
HEMP for bio-diesel (Score:3, Informative)
From 1 acre of hemp you can produce
1300 gal of bio diesel
The equivalent amount of paper as 10 acre's of trees
The equivalent of 5 acres of cotton in cloth.
Hemp Seed flower (For cake, bread, etc)
and
Pulp products that can replace cardboard and many plastic products.
This is from the different parts of the plant. That means that you get ALL of them at the same time. Not just growing corn for fuel and throw away the rest.
Re:one million litres? (Score:3, Informative)
That said, the tricky part with getting above 10% biofuels is not with biodiesel in diesels - modern diesels (1995 and newer) can handle 100% without much problem at all. And older diesels just need fuel lines replaced with urethane or Viton lines.
The tricky part is ethanol in gassers. The fuel system components often have a difficult time dealing with ethanol, and the fuel is different enough from gasoline that the engine must be optimized for ethanol to run well on it. (See the "flex-fuel" cars nowadays in the US, that are merely normal gasoline-powered cars with extra sensors... they get 30% less economy on 85% ethanol...)
Re:1 million litres? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure I see your point. You're saying we'd need to find 26 municipalities with wastewater treatment plants to convert to algae farms, which would be part of the requisite wastewater treatment solution as well as producing fuel, in order to match one plant which requires farmers to go out and actively produce feedstock for at added expense? That's more than just 'decent' in my book. And imagine what your municipality would say if you told them they could offset the costs of fuel and wastewater treatment at the same time - ka-ching!
Taking advantage of existing feedstock (read: waste) beats growing feedstock for most efficiencies. And if you want to look for more viable biodiesel feedstocks, there's a wide number - rapeseed, mustard, jatropha, and palm oil. See the table at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Note that algae wins hands down over crops.
Lets do a little math shall we? (Score:3, Informative)
And that is actually quite a lot of fuel per person. That's around 11 US gallons PER WEEK. I myself use about half that much (I live in the US), so a little energy consumption curbing in NZ could make a large impact on the percentage.
Re:Nothing new (Score:3, Informative)
(I've been told it's BP Diesel Supreme, which is refined right here in Ohio, and made from 0% Middle Eastern oil.
And, I plan on running homebrew biodiesel in the future, as well.
Re:Nothing new (Score:3, Informative)
It IS hygroscopic (attracts water), but an additive will take care of that - and, so is regular petroleum diesel, for that matter. Using it quickly, or not letting it sit in a container that air can get in, solves that problem, as well.
BTW, fuel tanks on most diesel cars are plastic. Even on my Jetta, which is a 1985, I have a plastic tank.
Check the following sites:
http://www.biodieselnow.com/ [biodieselnow.com]
http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/ [infopop.cc]
http://forums.tdiclub.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52 [tdiclub.com] (centric to modern VW diesels)