Plankton to Provide Clean New Oil

[Wild Luck]

read it all:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34239

 

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cf...37354/story.htm

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_Fuel_Systems

 

im trying to find the company main website

 

EDit: Is a company from Spain, shame on us for not inventing it first.

[AstroProdigy]

Why do you still expect America to be first in anything anymore?

[WongKonPow]

It's because Spain doesn't have the greedy, money-grabbing oil companies who cover up the alternative methods.

[Aileron]

That's not the simplest explaination. Why is every inperfection on Earth the result of a vast conspiracy involving millions of people? It gets harder and harder to keep something secret as you add more and more people to the process, and for energy companies to keep something secret would be impossible. The simpler explaination is that it is very difficult to solve the problem and that nobody has perfected a solution yet.

 

Oil is essentially the concentrated byproduct of millions of years of biomatter. The energy that is in oil is solar energy collected by a million or so years' worth of plant and animol life, concentrated into a very dense package.

 

The problem 'clean alternative fuels' keep running in to is that they keep trying different ways of trying the same less concentrated solar energy. You can put solar collectors on a car, and can indeed get the same power output from solar as you can from gas, but the problem is that the power input for solar is in real time wheras for gas more time was available to make the oil.

 

Burning various plants is also trying to use solar energy in essence. Here you can make up the power input gap by increasing the surface area of the plants you intend to burn. However, a good way to guess how much this would require is: say you have a certain oil field of certain surface area which took a thousand years to form, which will satisfy energy needs for a year. To match that energy in corn, plankton, solar panels, giant rubber tree plants, or any other cleaver method of getting power from the Sun within a year, you would need to cover about a thousand times the surface area of the oil deposit. By real life figures, we simply don't have enough surface area on Earth to fuel all energy needs by burning any plant.

 

The only solution is to stop trying to draw power from the Sun, and the only way to do that is Nuclear. You can't make a Nuclear car, so you'd have to use Hydrogen which you could get from electrolysis powered by a Nuclear plant.

 

The US didn't think about using plankton essentially because we learned our lesson from trying corn. Spain is simply being arrogant enough not to learn from our mistakes.

[all_shall_perish]

The only solution is to stop trying to draw power from the Sun,

why? it's free energy for all we care.

[Aileron]

Um, that's not what I meant at all...

 

My point was that burning plants is essentially solar power, and that burning fossil fuels is essentially a concentrated form of bio-matter, and is essentially several million years worth of solar power. Burning plants will simply never catch up.

 

Granted, using plankton means you can use ocean surface area rather than land surface area, meaning more surface area, and unusable area at that. I would expect that if Spain could get sole rights to harvest all of the plankton in all of the oceans, they could power the needs of their country, but to solve the world's energy needs we're just going to need something much more powerfull than that.

 

(I know plankton isn't technically a plant, but biology isn't relevant here.)

[all_shall_perish]

My point was that burning plants is essentially solar power, and that burning fossil fuels is essentially a concentrated form of bio-matter, and is essentially several million years worth of solar power. Burning plants will simply never catch up.

 

only half of this is true and i think you need to read a chemistry book or study up on thermodynamics; energy isn't just held on to as you are making it out to be.

Edited November 13, 2007 by all_shall_perish

[Samapico]

My point was that burning plants is essentially solar power, and that burning fossil fuels is essentially a concentrated form of bio-matter, and is essentially several million years worth of solar power. Burning plants will simply never catch up.

 

Granted, using plankton means you can use ocean surface area rather than land surface area, meaning more surface area, and unusable area at that. I would expect that if Spain could get sole rights to harvest all of the plankton in all of the oceans, they could power the needs of their country, but to solve the world's energy needs we're just going to need something much more powerfull than that.

 

(I know plankton isn't technically a plant, but biology isn't relevant here.)

Burning plants would be closer to thermal energy. Also, plants and other organic stuff can have other energy sources than the sun, like the heat from Earth's core.

And the article is not about burning plants, it's about producing oil from plankton... I have no idea how they can do that, but if they can, it's pretty much awesome. Sure it doesn't completly fix the pollution problems because in the end, it's still oil burnt. But apparently, the consequences of its production/extraction are much smaller.

 

And also, if we could use solar energy more effectively, we wouldn't have any problems.

 

The article also says that the oil output per square kilometer is ~50-100 times greater than common seeds that could be used for the same purpose, so if they harvest all the plankton of all the oceans, I'm pretty sure it would power up more than just Spain. By the way, using corn or other land organic oil for fuel is stupid as !@#$%^&*. Takes way too much land to be a 'good' thing. I kind of agree that this can not solve the all the world's problems, but I think it's still a great innovation.

I'd personnaly go with nuclear power as well... nuclear waste could just be sent in space or something

[Aileron]

No, all plants get energy from the Sun by definition. Now, plankton isn't a plant, but plankton consists of "plant-like" and "animol-like" species, where the plant-like varities absorb sunlight and the animol-like eats the plant-like.

 

ASP, when I said that plants "store solar energy", it was indeed in simple terms. Yes, the real process is more complicated than that, but going into those details would serve no purpose for the discussion. If you want I could give a lecture on the chemical process behind photosynthesis, but those details are not critical to the topic at hand.

[Russky]

that would be a good idea to have some day... but once again there will be people complaining about global warming and such... and im sure they will invent some new issue to keep this from going big

[Dav]

I would expect to see many inovations like this in the coming years. Biofuels are a very young technology in need of much refinement before it becomes a viable alternative to crude oil.

 

Ail there are species that derive energy without sunlight, they exists deep in the ocean using volcanic vents and the sulphides they produce however most ecosystems rely on sunlight to derive energy. Anyway that's another thing.

 

Biofuels if they can be refined (which isn't looking like it will happen quickly) are a good idea in theory. You gain as a product less carbon then is integrated into the fuels making them carbon negative in effect. It is good other ways are being explored to do this. Current crop-based methods have too many problems at current top be viable.

 

I like your suggestions for hydrogen fuels but getting hydrogen requires massive amounts of energy making it very difficult, even is nuclear was accepted its also not the most stable of fuels out there.

 

I expect battery power is where we will go, using nuclear fusion to get the energy for it but we are probably 50 - 100 years away from seeing that happen.

 

Anyway nothing wrong with using the sun to get energy. Nature has done it for billions of years and nature often finds the most ideal solutions for things. If you really think about it many many things we have created have been done by nature.

[AstroProdigy]

The idea is to find every way possible to produce fuel that's cleaner than oil, natural gas, and coal energy and even though one will not be the solution all of them combined can be.

 

I disagree that nuclear energy isn't stable. France has been using nuclear power for years and produces 78% of it's energy from nuclear power and 11% from hydroelectric power. They only use fossil fuels for 9.5% of their energy needs. If there was an oil crisis France would easily come on top and that's because of all the investment they've made to nuclear power. If there's one thing we can all agree on France it's that they've taken care of their energy needs much better than anyone else in the first world and that's mostly because of nuclear power.

[Aileron]

I agree...managing energy is one thing that France does right. Mind you, they didn't come to this by listening to radical environmentalist and seeking 'clean' hypothetical power sources which maybe could be developed. Instead, they looked at the technology they had, realised that none of the options were perfect, and made a hard decision. Its not utopian, but it works better than the 'don't build any 'bad' power plants and whine when blackouts occur' approach used elseware. Heck, I'm only amazed they came to that decision without having to kidnap an American Republican.

 

I know there's nothing wrong with taking power from the Sun. I'm just saying that fossil fuels are "power from the Sun" times millions of years. Solar energy, collected by oats and stored in glucose molecules can power a one-horsepower engine (a horse). Gas can power a 500 horsepower engine. The problem with taking power from the Sun is that you would never will improve upon fossil fuels.

 

The first response to that is 'with development' they could make the technology more efficient - but, automakers have been making the gas engine more efficient for over a century now, and with development they will likely make it even more efficient. The second response is that we could 'reduce our energy needs'. Yes, you can make progress, but countries will still need more and more energy, especially as the third world starts advancing.

 

Thus, taking power from the Sun and trying to compete with fossil fuels would be like you trying to run the same distance in five minutes as the distance I can run in an hour. You could try to become a better runner, but its humanly impossible to train yourself to be that fast. You could also get twelve people together and sum up the total distance, but the problem with that is now you are using twelve people analagous to 'a lot of resources'.

 

 

As for the 'extremophiles' surviving off of vents at the bottom of the ocean - I'd actually count harvesting them as a bigger environmental issue than drilling for oil.

[Bak]

energy from the tides doesn't come from the sun.

 

also if you go anywhere on earth and drill a mile down it's very hot. tap this energy with a stirling engine and you have permanent energy supply (at least until the earth's core runs out of heat). Now the problem is just drilling technology, which seems a lot easier to overcome. Plus, since you can do this anywhere on earth, there's not going to be one area with the entire supply (like the middle east has lots of oil).

[AstroProdigy]

Heck, I'm only amazed they came to that decision without having to kidnap an American Republican.

Hey don't confuse socialist liberals with hippy liberals. Also keep in mind they haven't been so utterly interconnected with big oil and the interests of Saudi princes like the Bush administration has.

 

Fossil fuels technically take power from the sun, but they store only a tiny fraction of energy which is eventually used by us. Solar energy could be made massively more efficient and there really are few limits to this. The good thing about solar power is that as our computer technology progresses so will solar power efficiency. The fact is that that oil took thousands of years to condense into that easily usable form we have. Solar energy will be massively more efficient than oil in the future if we keep developing it. It will also provide us with an increasingly bigger payout whereas nuclear fission energy payout is increasingly going to hit an efficiency ceiling. I'm not saying nuclear power is not a good idea, but it's only a temporary solution until it is completely replaced by a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and fusion power. That's what I mean by a combination of solutions.

[JDS]

You guys need to think outside the box, sure electricity is swell, but is there another way? of course there is, in this infinite universe there are infinite posibilites, dont limit your selves to one

[Dav]

yeah France did get it right.

 

the UK has a problem keeping 20% nuclear as there are activists all over the place that believe the waste is worse then CO2, uranium production is unethical and we will have a repeat of Chernobyl. Reason for this is people only see scaremongering from the media rather then the facts about modern nuclear power generation.

 

anyway as far as biofules go they are a serious thing. Hydrogen is very hard to produce without CO2 ruling that out. The electric motors and batteries for transport have low output power and lifetime. The current technology is currently ideal bar the emissions which can be solved by using biofules, at least until something better becomes viable.

[Bak]

so using biofuels like corn actually requires putting more energy in (planting, watering, harveting, converting), than we get out when we burn it. The reason it's starting to become popular is that the US government is currently subsidizing it making it profitable, and that the US is one of the largest corn growers in the world (also it works reasonably well with the existing technology). But in the big picture, we need a net gain in energy in the technology that will replace oil.

[Dav]

you get enough energy out of biofules. Problem is that it is very expensive and the yields we are currently getting arnt getting anywhere close to the amount we would require to replace oil.