Exxon Mobile has been selling off its depleted oil fields to the Chinese and going into Algae production expecting a yield of about 2000 gallons per acre per year. To produce enough oil to satisfy current demand with this process would require an area about 1000 miles to a side
Joule’s process can yield 20,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, said Sims, at a cost of around $50 a barrel including existing subsidies. Its process is designed in a modular fashion so it can be easily expanded for large-scale production of fuels and chemicals. The initial focus of the venture will be ethanol, said Sims.
To produce enough oil to satisfy current demand with this process would require an area about 316 miles to a side, about the length of the Ghwar basin in Saudi Arabia which has produced most of our oil for the last half century.
Exxon Mobile is going into Algae production expecting a yield of about 2000 gallons per acre per year. Where 1 barrel of oil = 42 gallons thats almost 48 barrels per acre per year. The World consumes 85 million barrels a day or so to equal that demand would take 31,045,400,000 barrels a year or 646,779,167 acres. With 640 acres to a square mile thats
1,010,592 square miles or an area of about 1000 miles to a side suggesting that perhaps they have in mind covering the pacific ocean or a polar ice cap with production algae. Joules process would require about 1/10 the area or a region about 316 miles to a side.
We still have some energy left before we need to have brought our large scale alternative energy on line, about enough oil to last the next 16 years, and some natural gas and coal remains also...
World reserves of our fossil oil are on the order of 1.5 trillion barrels. Of that we have used half a trillion so far and another half trillion are not economically feasible to recover. Dividing 500 billion by 85 million we can figure on having enough known reserves to last another 5882 days or 16 years till the last drop is gone. After that we will still have natural gas and coal and we can use the methane hydrates global warming is already causing to be emitted into our atmosphere to convert Trans Canada's shale oil and what remains of the runoff from the snow pack into some dirty fuel.
At least algae isn't taking corn out of the mouths of hungry people.
By Mara Lemos-Stein
First came corn and cane as biomass for renewable fuel, then cellulosic materials and algae. Now Joule Biotechnologies Inc. has emerged from stealth mode with a recipe for making transportation fuel without biomass by simply harnessing solar power and carbon-dioxide emissions.
This is the sort of startup In-Q-tel ought to be investing in if they aren't already.
Joule Biotechnologies The Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up, which is backed by its founders and venture-capital firm Flagship Ventures, has developed a technology using microorganisms that make fuels and chemicals from the photosynthetic conversion of sunlight and CO2. Joule’s scientists incorporated solar converters into the technology to optimize the process that makes what the company calls "solar fuel."
Now while the Chinese are without the technology to recover more oil from depleted oilfields they do have some leading edge solar technology and are investing already in large scale solar electric projects. The US also has recently set aside large tracts of government land that might be used for solar energy production. King Ranch in West Texas which belongs to Exxon Mobile and covers a region of hot desert 350 miles to a side is another large area that might be used.
"We’re not a biofuel company, because biofuels are biomass-derived; our technology leverages a highly synthetic organism to create transportation fuels and chemicals," said Bill Sims, Joule’s chief executive. "We don’t have an intermediary that has to be grown or transported, it’s a direct-to-product process."
The concept of a synthetic organism that excretes oil interacting with other organisms over the large area of the proposed projects might be of some concern, will these production facilities be open to the air like oil spills?
Biofuel technology developers are rushing to meet the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, which calls for the production and blending of up to 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels into the gasoline supply by 2022. Of that total, 21 billion gallons are to come from advanced fuels – meaning they have to be made from non-food sources, but the technologies used in production of cellulosic and algae-based ethanol are yet to be scaled up to commercial level.
The US uses about 1/4 of the World's supply so 36 billion gallons a year would be about what 1/10 of what the US presently uses
Joule’s process can yield 20,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, said Sims, at a cost of around $50 a barrel including existing subsidies. Its process is designed in a modular fashion so it can be easily expanded for large-scale production of fuels and chemicals. The initial focus of the venture will be ethanol, said Sims.
The company has been operating in stealth mode for two years; Joule will turn out its first product, solar ethanol, from a pilot plant next year. After that, it will seek funding from investors and strategic partners to reach industrial scale, said Sims.
Joule didn’t disclose how much money it has raised so far from Flagship Ventures.
My gues would be that when this report was prepared, possibly a couple of weeks ago, Oil was at $40 a barrel. Today its at $67 and climbing. That puts the price for this technology in a nice range except that we now have some computer nerds from the record industry who have discovered a way to peg pricing not to cost but to demand.
The company has applied for a U.S. Department of Energy grant under the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, which focuses on "high risk, high payoff concepts," according to the DOE’s Web site.
Sims declined to give more details on the microorganisms for competitive reasons, saying further information about the production process will be made public once the patent is registered. He said the raw material is "not algae, not cellulose, not corn," but rather "highly-engineered photosynthetic organisms."
Prior to joining the start-up last year, Sims was the chief executive of Color Kinetics Inc., a developer of light-emitting diodes that was acquired by Royal Philips Electronics in 2007 for approximately $800 million.