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Cancel those battery car subsidies – new patent turns algae into biofuel in minutes.

Ok . . . GM, you can shut down the Chevy Volt production line. US government, get your Fisker, Tesla and other loans back ASAP. Prius owners, wipe that smug expression off your face. Inventors have patented a process to turn algae in crude oil in a matter of minutes. At competitive costs. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/18/Scientists-Manufacture-Crude-Oil-The-End-of-Peak-Oil

Wait – it gets better. The inventors are .. (drumroll) . . the US Department of Energy. About time they did something other than inviting BP to besmirch the gulf of mexico.

Wait – it gets better still. As byproducts from the algae to oil process, you pure water, and phosphorus, which is an important fertilizer which can be used to boost the yield of the next algae crop.

Wait – it still gets better !!! The algae of consume massive quantities of carbon dioxide, essentially “cleansing” the atmosphere of Al Gore’s income stream. (full disclosure – burning the biofuel made from algae returns an equal amount to the atmosphere, but it’s a closed loop cycle, and the net amount of carbon never goes up.)

Windmills that decapitate millions of migrating birds annually? Shut ‘em down.

Exotic metal batteries that burst into flames and leech toxic materials into landfills – no longer needed.

Solar panels – you can stay for now. But we’re watching those reports on your toxic components too. (a little gallium arsenide, anyone?)

Of course, the whole process of growing algae is enhanced by . . . ahem . . warmer temperatures. So this might be ideally suited to the middle east, the american southwest, latin america, Africa, etc.

And maybe even Canada, if the global warming nutjobs are somehow right, and the last 15 years of non-temperature rise is just a pause, and sea levels are secretly massing for the final onslaught.

Anyway, I just thought you’d want to know about american ingenuity at its finest. Not that this will stop the Chinese and Russians from using the process without paying royalties. They’re the worlds ultimate hackers, spammers, counterfeiters, and thieves.

Ps – ethanol subsidies- we can cancel those too. Like yesterday!!
 
Ok . . . GM, you can shut down the Chevy Volt production line. US government, get your Fisker, Tesla and other loans back ASAP. Prius owners, wipe that smug expression off your face. Inventors have patented a process to turn algae in crude oil in a matter of minutes. At competitive costs. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/18/Scientists-Manufacture-Crude-Oil-The-End-of-Peak-Oil

Wait – it gets better. The inventors are .. (drumroll) . . the US Department of Energy. About time they did something other than inviting BP to besmirch the gulf of mexico.

Wait – it gets better still. As byproducts from the algae to oil process, you pure water, and phosphorus, which is an important fertilizer which can be used to boost the yield of the next algae crop.

Wait – it still gets better !!! The algae of consume massive quantities of carbon dioxide, essentially “cleansing” the atmosphere of Al Gore’s income stream. (full disclosure – burning the biofuel made from algae returns an equal amount to the atmosphere, but it’s a closed loop cycle, and the net amount of carbon never goes up.)

Windmills that decapitate millions of migrating birds annually? Shut ‘em down.

Exotic metal batteries that burst into flames and leech toxic materials into landfills – no longer needed.

Solar panels – you can stay for now. But we’re watching those reports on your toxic components too. (a little gallium arsenide, anyone?)

Of course, the whole process of growing algae is enhanced by . . . ahem . . warmer temperatures. So this might be ideally suited to the middle east, the american southwest, latin america, Africa, etc.

And maybe even Canada, if the global warming nutjobs are somehow right, and the last 15 years of non-temperature rise is just a pause, and sea levels are secretly massing for the final onslaught.

Anyway, I just thought you’d want to know about american ingenuity at its finest. Not that this will stop the Chinese and Russians from using the process without paying royalties. They’re the worlds ultimate hackers, spammers, counterfeiters, and thieves.

Ps – ethanol subsidies- we can cancel those too. Like yesterday!!
wow, you stooped all the way to breitbart, RW fringe.
We will look for more reliable sources, not cought 78649375 times in lying and distortion like breitbart. As far as 15 years BS, RW fringe
Choke on this:
The public debate about the alleged “warming pause” was misguided from the outset, because far too much was read into a cherry-picked short-term trend. Now this debate has become completely baseless, because the trend of the last 15 or 16 years is nothing unusual – even despite the record El Niño year at the beginning of the period. It is still a quarter less than the warming trend since 1980, which is 0.16 °C per decade. But that’s not surprising when one starts with an extreme El Niño and ends with persistent La Niña conditions, and is also running through a particularly deep and prolonged solar minimum in the second half. As we often said, all this is within the usual variability around the long-term global warming trend and no cause for excited over-interpretation.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/global-warming-since-1997-underestimated-by-half/
 
wow, you stooped all the way to breitbart, RW fringe.
We will look for more reliable sources, not cought 78649375 times in lying and distortion like breitbart. As far as 15 years BS, RW fringe
Choke on this:
The public debate about the alleged “warming pause” was misguided from the outset, because far too much was read into a cherry-picked short-term trend. Now this debate has become completely baseless, because the trend of the last 15 or 16 years is nothing unusual – even despite the record El Niño year at the beginning of the period. It is still a quarter less than the warming trend since 1980, which is 0.16 °C per decade. But that’s not surprising when one starts with an extreme El Niño and ends with persistent La Niña conditions, and is also running through a particularly deep and prolonged solar minimum in the second half. As we often said, all this is within the usual variability around the long-term global warming trend and no cause for excited over-interpretation.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/global-warming-since-1997-underestimated-by-half/
help me out here, Yuri - why is a so called "right wing fringe" media outlet extolling the benefits of a government energy program? if they were as right wing as you claim, i'd have expected this to be a rant against wasted tax dollars.
 

Arkady

President
Ok . . . GM, you can shut down the Chevy Volt production line. US government, get your Fisker, Tesla and other loans back ASAP. Prius owners, wipe that smug expression off your face. Inventors have patented a process to turn algae in crude oil in a matter of minutes. At competitive costs. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/18/Scientists-Manufacture-Crude-Oil-The-End-of-Peak-Oil

Wait – it gets better. The inventors are .. (drumroll) . . the US Department of Energy. About time they did something other than inviting BP to besmirch the gulf of mexico.

Wait – it gets better still. As byproducts from the algae to oil process, you pure water, and phosphorus, which is an important fertilizer which can be used to boost the yield of the next algae crop.

Wait – it still gets better !!! The algae of consume massive quantities of carbon dioxide, essentially “cleansing” the atmosphere of Al Gore’s income stream. (full disclosure – burning the biofuel made from algae returns an equal amount to the atmosphere, but it’s a closed loop cycle, and the net amount of carbon never goes up.)

Windmills that decapitate millions of migrating birds annually? Shut ‘em down.

Exotic metal batteries that burst into flames and leech toxic materials into landfills – no longer needed.

Solar panels – you can stay for now. But we’re watching those reports on your toxic components too. (a little gallium arsenide, anyone?)

Of course, the whole process of growing algae is enhanced by . . . ahem . . warmer temperatures. So this might be ideally suited to the middle east, the american southwest, latin america, Africa, etc.

And maybe even Canada, if the global warming nutjobs are somehow right, and the last 15 years of non-temperature rise is just a pause, and sea levels are secretly massing for the final onslaught.

Anyway, I just thought you’d want to know about american ingenuity at its finest. Not that this will stop the Chinese and Russians from using the process without paying royalties. They’re the worlds ultimate hackers, spammers, counterfeiters, and thieves.

Ps – ethanol subsidies- we can cancel those too. Like yesterday!!
Time will tell whether this winds up being commercially viable, or whether, as with the fuel-cell hype of the early Bush years, it's mostly used by right-wingers who want to forestall more immediate and practical environmental efforts.
 
Time will tell whether this winds up being commercially viable, or whether, as with the fuel-cell hype of the early Bush years, it's mostly used by right-wingers who want to forestall more immediate and practical environmental efforts.
there's a a"long chain of events" between patetnt and production, for sure.

do you know that there are a dozen or more ethanol fuel distilleries still under construction? the lead time for engineering, loans, zoning permits, construction, staff training, etc is enormous.

these new ethanol plants are totally unnecessary of course, since everyone now agree the entire subsidy program has been a waste.

but tell that to everyone who got a federally guaranteed loan - including corn farmers, refinery operators, and rail operators who built spurs to serve the new refineries.

with the algae the federal governments best position would be to license the process/technology to companies (on a royalty basis - per barrel sold, or something), and completely eschew the federal loans, mandates, subsidies, etc. the most efficient operators will get it to market without any of those taxpayer funded boosts.
 

Arkady

President
there's a a"long chain of events" between patetnt and production, for sure.

do you know that there are a dozen or more ethanol fuel distilleries still under construction? the lead time for engineering, loans, zoning permits, construction, staff training, etc is enormous.

these new ethanol plants are totally unnecessary of course, since everyone now agree the entire subsidy program has been a waste.

but tell that to everyone who got a federally guaranteed loan - including corn farmers, refinery operators, and rail operators who built spurs to serve the new refineries.

with the algae the federal governments best position would be to license the process/technology to companies (on a royalty basis - per barrel sold, or something), and completely eschew the federal loans, mandates, subsidies, etc. the most efficient operators will get it to market without any of those taxpayer funded boosts.
I suspect ethanol subsidies have a lot to do with the unfortunate confluence of Iowa's importance in the presidential nomination process and corn's importance to Iowa. And that all also ties in with the tendency for US politics to treat farmers as secular saints, who have to be sheltered from negative market forces.
 
I suspect ethanol subsidies have a lot to do with the unfortunate confluence of Iowa's importance in the presidential nomination process and corn's importance to Iowa. And that all also ties in with the tendency for US politics to treat farmers as secular saints, who have to be sheltered from negative market forces.
i hadn't thought specifically about iowa, but your theory makes a lot of sense. i simply assumed it was bipartisan jockeying for agricultural state votes. that's what drives big agribusiness legislation.
 

fairsheet

Senator
i hadn't thought specifically about iowa, but your theory makes a lot of sense. i simply assumed it was bipartisan jockeying for agricultural state votes. that's what drives big agribusiness legislation.
The ethanol "problem" goes back to the Nixon Era. Rising food prices were making the "natives" restless. Prior Roosevelt Era Ag. regimes were about controlling production in order to moderate price levels. The Nixon Era regimes went to paying farmers to produce, and the more the merrier.

Ever since then, we've been looking for new markets for all that excess corn.
 

Arkady

President
there's a a"long chain of events" between patetnt and production, for sure.

do you know that there are a dozen or more ethanol fuel distilleries still under construction? the lead time for engineering, loans, zoning permits, construction, staff training, etc is enormous.

these new ethanol plants are totally unnecessary of course, since everyone now agree the entire subsidy program has been a waste.

but tell that to everyone who got a federally guaranteed loan - including corn farmers, refinery operators, and rail operators who built spurs to serve the new refineries.

with the algae the federal governments best position would be to license the process/technology to companies (on a royalty basis - per barrel sold, or something), and completely eschew the federal loans, mandates, subsidies, etc. the most efficient operators will get it to market without any of those taxpayer funded boosts.
What I worry about, with a story like this, is that it gets taken the way news of a possible miracle diet pill gets taken: "Quit your gym membership. Go ahead and have that second serving of icecream. A company has filed for a patent on something that will let you lose those extra pounds effortlessly in a few years." If we use the possibiity of some future technology making our problems more easily soved as an excuse for not using today's solutions to begin getting on top of them we may be causing long-term harm, and that miracle cure may never actually materialize.
 

nork

Council Member
That Breitbart article is about two years too late. Algae to bio-fuel has been researched for quite some time. But it hasn't gotten anywhere. A California company was supposed to go online with production a couple of years ago but nothing came of it.

There is a lot of promise in making diesel fuel from oil bearing seeds like rape and from palm oil. For some reasons these projects were mostly dropped. Now it's electric cars and fracking that seem to lead the energy parade.
 

fairsheet

Senator
That Breitbart article is about two years too late. Algae to bio-fuel has been researched for quite some time. But it hasn't gotten anywhere. A California company was supposed to go online with production a couple of years ago but nothing came of it.

There is a lot of promise in making diesel fuel from oil bearing seeds like rape and from palm oil. For some reasons these projects were mostly dropped. Now it's electric cars and fracking that seem to lead the energy parade.
The world already has a problem with parts of the world like Brazil and Indonesia cutting down their forests to grow things like palm oil for current usage, let alone for diesel fuel. Let's hope to HELL that idea never gets traction. I'm sure something similar would pertain in terms of algae. In order to grow the necessary volume of algae, we'd cause all manner of unintended consequences.

In any case, ALL earthly energy, from petro, to coal, to wind, ethanol, algae or whatever, derives from the sun. At this point, our mandate should be to access that energy more directly and efficiently. So in that vein, "growing algae" is a bit of a step backwards.

The "fun" one I read about awhile back, was some sort of "electrified slurry" that could be pumped into a tank on an electric car. Then when it was depleted, you could pull into a station where'd they drain (and recharge) the old stuff and fill you up with charged stuff.
 

NightSwimmer

Senator
The world already has a problem with parts of the world like Brazil and Indonesia cutting down their forests to grow things like palm oil for current usage, let alone for diesel fuel. Let's hope to HELL that idea never gets traction. I'm sure something similar would pertain in terms of algae. In order to grow the necessary volume of algae, we'd cause all manner of unintended consequences.

In any case, ALL earthly energy, from petro, to coal, to wind, ethanol, algae or whatever, derives from the sun. At this point, our mandate should be to access that energy more directly and efficiently. So in that vein, "growing algae" is a bit of a step backwards.

The "fun" one I read about awhile back, was some sort of "electrified slurry" that could be pumped into a tank on an electric car. Then when it was depleted, you could pull into a station where'd they drain (and recharge) the old stuff and fill you up with charged stuff.

"Making oil" is an interesting, if inefficient technology. That said, burning oil is a primitive method for generating energy, and we should put more emphasis on longer term advancements, rather than stop-gap measures.

Still, it's hilarious to see how the wing-nuts attempt to generate negative spin for any story that might be seen as a success story. They live for Gloom&Doom©.
 
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