Scientists cut million-year natural process to convert algae into crude oil to about an hour

[xchrom]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/18/scientists-cut-million-year-natural-process-to-convert-algae-into-crude-oil-to-about-an-hour/



Engineers have sped up a naturally occurring process to make crude oil from algae from about a million years to just minutes.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pumped a slurry of wet algae into a chemical reactor, which then subjects the biological material to very hot water under high pressure to tear it apart and convert it into liquid and gas fuels.

The resulting crude oil can then be conventionally refined into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel, the researchers reported in the journal Algal Research.

The team’s experiments converted more than 50 percent of the algae’s carbon into crude oil, sometimes up to 70 percent, in about one hour and created nothing more hazardous than an odor of dirty socks, rotten eggs and wood smoke from the processed biological material.

[Niceguy1]

1. ,,awesome

a real way to a sustainable future

[The2ndWheel]

2. Another attempt at conquering nature

[intaglio]

3. Conquering, no. Replicating, yes.

Let's say the algae absorb 100 tonnes of carbon from carbon dioxide, and this yields 50 tonnes of carbon in oil equivalent. This means that there has been a nett of 50 tonnes of carbon from CO2 removed from the atmosphere.

Now the feedstock is converted to fuel and plastics feedstock. Even if only 5 tonnes is used for plastics that gives 55 tonnes of carbon sequestered.

BUT I suspect that the 50 tonnes waste is a bigger problem than is identified here.

[The2ndWheel]

4. It's tough to call speeding up a process

that takes millions of years to do, just because we can and want to, replicating that process. It might not be conquering either. Replacing could be a better word. Replacing time with technology. Maybe a better phrase would be forcing part of the world to conform to immediate human desire.

[NickB79]

5. There's no way the waste would be sequestered

That 50 tons of residual biomass would represent too much of a cost loss to be just buried in a deep hole for a million years. You'd actually have to pay extra to find a place to properly sequester it and transport it to those sites.

They'd find a way to feed it to cattle, or burn it in a coal-fired plant, or just dump it in a landfill where it would decompose into methane gas. Remember, it's not sequestered until it's locked up for geological timescales. I was recently scolded here for thinking that carbon locked up in dead trees was sequestered because it would take decades to decay.