it does need huge amounts of land though, as you need a lot of sun light.
their test one is 1,200 acres
Usually for good reason.
Joule Creates Renewable Fossil Fuels At Unlimited Quantity.
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it does need huge amounts of land though, as you need a lot of sun light.
their test one is 1,200 acres
Usually for good reason.
which isn't a problem for growing things like algea and I assume ecoli. They are not plants.
Space is the fairly obvious issue here - they've got this stuff to produce ethanol at a similar rate we can obtain ethanol from corn. In theory they might eventually be able to get twice that... Its not going to scale well - sure they might produce some fuel with the stuff if it became economical - but if we were to try and use this as an alternative to drilling for oil.... we'd need rather a lot of space....
yes it is.
Lots of ground is unsuitable for building massive collections structures covering thousands of acres which need huge quantities of fresh water.
Did you miss the ecoli
that's not what they say
As jokester says it's more comparable to pv solar cross than a crop.
It doesn't need fresh water, they can use sea water, coupled with places with lots of sunlight ie deserts, then space isn't really an issue and it certainly isn't competing for land use with agriculture that conventional bio-fuels do.
Nope... that is what we're talking about... not algae....
Man of Honour
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It's an interesting idea but I still think we should be waning away from creating hydrocarbons. The fact that they're messy should be a reason to find other sources not just because as things stand they're running out.
I don't know, I'm a huge fan of solar power yet it's still not that efficient. I'm sure this is where the money should be on.
I don't know, I'm a huge fan of solar power yet it's still not that efficient. I'm sure this is where the money should be on.
I included both algea and ecoli. Neither require farmland or fresh water,
Quite obviously is still a massive issue - the amount of space required is still huge.
There is huge, empty swathes of desert all over the world!
Soldato
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If it did require agricultural land (which it doesn't), the US would have to use 1/3rd of it's arable land to grow enough algae-based biofuels to sate their appetite.
This is at least a factor of two times more efficient than traditional biofuels per acre.
It says it doesn't use fresh water, isn't fresh water another name for low salt content?
although it would only take (from some crude maths) 8.76 million acres (35,450 km² )of land to produce enough fuel to meet the Us daily usage of petrol/diesel.
And that's not including the ethanol they produce at the same time.
That's actually a pretty reasonable amount of land.
And that's not including the ethanol they produce at the same time.
That's actually a pretty reasonable amount of land.
exactly - they reckon 800 barrels of crude equivalent per year per acre.
so it really needs millions of acres to make any impact - the logistics for collection from an area that size must be horrendous.
And if you don't see the logistical nightmare in that then.....