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This message has been edited. Last edited by: john galt,

News stories like this boil my blood...

What a bunch of hogwash.

What does the discovery have to do with Algae? I love how they just throw that word in there to attract attention and funding.

To much garbage news these days..

But doesnt the misleading information bother you?

quote:

misleading

Hi
Why do they associate the new solid catalyst with oil from algae?
Isn't valid with other oil like palm, soy, etc?

Best regards

Hey John,
Are you ok? You seem upset for some reason..

Pardon me if I'm mistaken....

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:
Heck no, I don't get upset over internet stuff.
I just wonder why you're directing your complaints to people on the forum who can't do anything about it. Sorta like shouting up the asswhole of a dead horse, eh wot?

LOL... I can only guess what happens when the horse is alive.

When you post subject matter on a forum like this one, people tend to chime in with all kinds of opinions. That's what happens when you "start a conversation".

I must agree, no offense against (who is?) John Galt, but this article in so many words says nothing...

We already know how to turn most any vegetable or animal oil into biodiesel. What needs to be solved is how to effectively grow algae for its oil content and harvest this oil. Feeding the algae to brine shrimp or some other organism that can be much more easily removed from water for oil extraction is probably the future of the algae-for-oil industry.

The best way to get algae to grow is feed them a generous supply of sunlight and carbon dioxide and a few mineral nutrients. They consume the CO2 and produce O2 as a by product through photosynthesis and can reproduce 2-3 times daily in ideal conditions.This is easily accomplished by plumbing flue gasses from a power plant into rows of large clear plastic cylinders say 2 ft in dia and 15-20 ft long laying inverted on a 30 degree angle. the algae will do what they do best and when the cylinder becomes over populated you harvest the algae

Decoding the Science Blahgest Blah Blah

quote:

'First Economical Process' For Making Biodiesel Fuel From Algae
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.../03/090325222006.htm
ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2009) — Chemists reported development of what they termed the first economical, eco-friendly process to convert algae oil into biodiesel fuel — a discovery they predict could one day lead to U.S. independence from petroleum as a fuel.

Since algae oil is pretty much the same as any other vegetable oil, 18 chain lipids with cis bonds, including omega-3 fatty acids, why would they need a new process anyway?

quote:

One of the problems with current methods for producing biodiesel from algae oil is the processing cost, and the New York researchers say their innovative process is at least 40 percent cheaper than that of others now being used.

40% isn't even enough. When did they write this, June of 08?

quote:

Supply will not be a problem: There is a limitless amount of algae growing in oceans, lakes, and rivers, throughout the world.

What!?! NOBODY is considering this on lakes or rivers! Do we want to industrialize our park system?

quote:

A key advantage of this new process, he says, is that it uses a proprietary solid catalyst

Sounds expensive, not cheap, if you have to pay someone royalties to use their "proprietary process"

quote:

developed at his company instead of liquid catalysts used by other scientists today. First, the solid catalyst can be used over and over. Second, it allows the continuously flowing production of biodiesel, compared to the method using a liquid catalyst. That process is slower because workers need to take at least a half hour after producing each batch to create more biodiesel. They need to purify the biodiesel by neutralizing the base catalyst by adding acid. No such action is needed to treat the solid catalyst, Wen explains.

Mostly sounds like what WE all know already. Of course to the layman who reads Science Daily it sounds really complicated and ground-breaking.

quote:

He estimates algae has an "oil-per-acre production rate 100-300 times the amount of soybeans, and offers the highest yield feedstock for biodiesel and the most promising source for mass biodiesel production to replace transportation fuel in the United States." He says that his firm is now conducting a pilot program for the process with a production capacity of nearly 1 million gallons of algae biodiesel per year.

That's gonna be huge. Hope it's not on Lake Nocqueby, WI.

quote:

Depending on the size of the machinery and the plant, he said it is possible that a company could produce up to 50 million gallons of algae biodiesel annually.

50 million is a number straight out of a press release such as Soy-Mor in Ralston, IA. You could produce 50 BILLION gallons of biodiesel annually if you had enough oil to do so.

quote:

Wen also says that the solid catalyst continuous flow method can be adapted to mobile units so that smaller companies wouldn't have to construct plants and the military could use the process in the field.

We've seen that already, too. This is just a rehash of all the biodiesel press releases of 2003!

quote:

The National Science Foundation

Ha!

quote:

funded Wen's research.

Well yippie for him.


Let's get some real algae news out there, folks. I started some news pages in the non-biodiesel algae section of this forum. Please help out by adding anything you see out there, locally or nationwide. You can follow the format I used or whatever.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: clean and green,

If I have a problem with something I see posted on these forums I will address it on these forums. You are literally telling me to shut up and go away.

Tell me, exactly what facts did you learn from this, other than that some guy is getting funded with endless tax dollars to tell us stuff we've known for over 5 years?!?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: clean and green,

Funny. If nobody here cares then why did you respond within 12 minutes of my post to this thread. You just called yourself a nobody. Guess nobody disagrees all the time.

So you play the 'it's personal card', huh? What do I even know about you?

I'm attacking this ridiculous article. It's a waste of paper and prime propaganda.

Stop defending this stupid article! You're smarter than this, aren't you John (again, I know nothing about you.)

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:
I never defended the stupid article, nor have I ever defended the stupidity of pinning one's future energy hopes on algal biodiesel. It's a scam, the article should make that clear to anyone with some intelligence.

You posted it, though.

And no, it's not a scam, it's merely 8-12% of the $ value of the algae that has been harvested commercially for over 80 years in the U.S. The rest is mainly protein, a valuable food additive. See www.martek.com, a $300 Million dollar commercial algae cultivation company ( link).

Why don't you tell them algae is a scam?

True, John, manmade global warming IS a hoax. But the people who print the money are backing algae.

Call it self-protection. Call it hedging my bets. Call me a sell-out. Either way I'm going with algae for the foreseeable future.

John, could you edit your post and add that this is just the introduction to a 4-page article?

And to quote from page 2 of said article:

"The crucial need for putting a price on carbon emissions is also a reminder that the industry is still pretty much a government creation. "The reason why renewable fuels exist at all is because politicians have decided they meet policy objectives. The whole market is 100% political," says Jeff Passmore..."

So essentially the governments (still plural?) have decided to go with the CO2 global warming model, and will provide nearly unlimited supplies of the only resource they actually produce, money, to solve all these "problems".

So science be damned. If you want to ride the money train, then get on board! Solar panels, algae farms, perpetual motion machines (they're out there, you know, my uncle knows a guy who talked to someone in a YMCA about it), all of these industries are getting in line for BILLIONS of glorious $$$. And as long as each company plays by all the rules laid down by the regulatory agencies (all 709 of them), they'll get their dough.

And so long as people have faith in the dollar they will exchange their value, their labor, for it, even if they have to build gallows for their own countrymen. That could never happen in the U.S. of course, I'm talking about the rest of the world.

quote:

do I have to add step by step instructions for how to click on a link?

No but you should make it clear you didn't copy the entire story, as you have done before.

The quotes around the excerpt sort of imply that it is the whole story. Just wouldn't want you to accidentally mislead people by inadvertently using a technique from propaganda known as data mining.

The guy says in the article that bird droppings etc could wipe out a whole algae farm.

If that is so, someone should have told it to China before the Olympics.

I wouldn't call publications like BusinessWeek propagandists if they would just stop printing so much propaganda and actually tell us something.

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:

quote:

The guy says in the article that bird droppings etc could wipe out a whole algae farm.

That is incorrect, the article does not say that at all. If you have to resort to hyperbole to try to make your point then you've missed the point entirely.

He said it would go after an algae farm like a pack of jackals. That is hyperbole.

In this instance we see how 2 paragraphs out of a 4 page article can be used to essentially discredit an entire emerging industry, that being done with an exaggerated stance on a mostly non-existant problem.

Pop it in the middle article that deals with some, probably more real concerns, and you have "guilt by association".

Now that is some good propaganda.

It's implied that somehow bird droppings lead to bacterial infections, depending on how you read it.

The point is, there have existed for decades huge, uncovered outdoor ponds of spirulina and chlorella, so evidently these industrial algae growers for health food supplements have already encountered and largely solved the problems of fungi and bacterial outbreaks. This is by far not the largest problem facing future algae cultivation. Algae are simply really hard to kill by any means other than overheating. If this person's concern were actually valid, it would be used to kill unwanted algae such as in the article I posted about China.

Again, you ignore the point I am making and decide instead to focus on some minor detail.

OK, then, let's call it a hyperbolic metaphor.

Just the fact that this individual would resort to using such a phrase is evidence that he wasn't addressing scientific minded people when he said it, he was speaking to the uneducated masses who get their reality from Popular Science, The NY Times, and other publications written by 5th graders, for 5th graders. I can just imagine these microbes swimming around like scary green Pac-men gobbling up all the algae in sight. Ooh, scary!

OK, your turn. How about another gay joke, John?