14_Nuclear

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Chapter 14.
Carbon-neutral Oil - Our Gateway to the End of Global Warming
Our best carbon-neutral hopes: Dry Ice and Biogenic Oil Nuclear Oil
Trees are far too dangerous to harvest in the volumes needed to replace oil. It's either Dry Ice or Algae.
Either process requires large amounts of nuclear energy

(Right) Algae on China's Yangtze river.

THIS PAGE: Biogenic GTL Oil from Sewage + Algae + Wood Pellets,
                    Nuclear Oil from Dry Ice
Introduction: Gateway to the End of Global Warming
Part 1 Universal Recipe for "Green Gasoline"
Part 2   "Dry Ice" oil, the Nuclear Oil.
Part 3 The Logistics of Biogenic GTL Oil.
Part 4 Cultivating Algae for Liquid Fuel Production
Part 5   Increasing the Yield from Gasification.
Part 6   Why nuclear heat must be used to make Biogenic GTL Oil.
Part 7   Biogenic Oil and Ending Global Warming

Further Information

Introduction

Carbon-neutral Oil is the Gateway to the End of Global Warming
Nuclear energy has to be added to carbon-neutral vehicle fuels at the refineries.
We will always have Global Warming as long as we are burning pumped oil.

The prerequisite to overcoming Global Warming from pumped oil is the ability to economically make carbon-neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel
from either biomass or dry ice from the air, along with the ability to split hydrogen from water, all powered by nuclear heat.

The previous chapter, "gas2gasoline" describes the ideal way to synthesize oil. You take carbon and hydrogen, both in gaseous form, react them with a catalyst in a process that produces both hydrocarbon molecules and heat. Natural gas is the ideal source feedstock.

When you do not have natural gas as a feedstock, but rather must create both the gaseous carbon and hydrogen from other sources - this gas is called syngas or producer gas - and then the energy costs can go up astronomically. Nuclear energy, while being virtually infinite in quantity, is not infinitely cheap. Unlike fossil energy nuclear energy has no emissions that impact the environment other than heat so the feasibility of making carbon-neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel clearly exists if the economics are practical, i.e., carbon-neutral gasoline will retail at about $3 a gallon in today's prices.

This is the application area where the very high temperature gas-cooled reactors such as the Pebble Beds and Prismatics will shine.

Would 10,000 Nuclear Power Plants Cook the Planet?. pdf Syngas - Bioproducts from Syngas .pdf Excellent overview of syngas.

George Olah's Book: "Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy." http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312757.html

FACTOID: ExxonMobil’s massive refinery in Baytown, Texas. With a capacity of 562,000 barrels per day, is the nation’s largest. We have about 140 refineries.

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Part 1:

The Universal Recipe for "GREEN GASOLINE"
This process for synthetic oils is common to both biogenic clean oils and fossil carbon dirty oils
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Bergius

(A chemical process, nC + (n +1)H₂ → C_nH_2n+2, developed in 1913 by the German chemist Friedrich Bergius makes this possible as long as you have carbon, hydrogen, and abundant 1,000°F+ energy. The reaction occurs at between 700 and 900°F and 3,000 to 10,000 psi hydrogen pressure. The reaction produces heavy oils, middle oils, gasoline and gasses depending on process variable choices.

Feedstock frugal, overall 97% of input carbon can be converted into synthetic fuel. Both TRISO and fast-neutron reactors are hot enough to power this reaction.)

1. As a plant grows, it's photosynthesis process causes CO2 to be taken from the air and combined with water to make cellulose fibers (a hydro-carbon).

2. The biomass is harvested, shredded, dried (using electricity and electric heat from a nuclear reactor).

3. A second ingredient, the gas, hydrogen, is taken from water, by using heat and electricity from that same reactor.

4. The "clean carbon" biomass and the hydrogen are then combined with heat and turned into a carbon vapor gas (mostly) methane (CH₄) using electrical heat from that same nuclear reactor.

5. Then, in the presence of pressure and a catalyst, such as tin or nickel oleate, the methane is catalytically converted to produce a liquid synthetic crude oil - with the process producing lots of heat. This heat is removed by a cooling system powered by that same nuclear reactor.

6. The synthetic crude oil is then refined to extract liquid hydro-carbons called gasoline, diesel, etc., again using heat from that same nuclear reactor.

As you can tell, massive amounts of heat are needed to make this happen. Fortunately, nuclear heat costs less than coal and produces much less CO2 than coal ( 9 to 21 g/kW-hr nuclear vs. 950 to 1,300 g/kW-hr coal - World Nuclear Association ).

Gasoline averages 9 carbons with 20 hydrogens attached. Diesel averages 14 carbons with 30 hydrogens attached, and, as you can imagine, contains a little more energy than gasoline. Synthesized diesel yields are larger than gasoline yields when using carbon-neutral biomass feedstocks.

Synthetic gasoline in your car: When you start it up, the engine's burning process will attach two oxygens from the air to each carbon to make CO2. The burning also attaches one oxygen from the air to each pair of now-available hydrogens to make some water - H2O. Burning takes the hydrocarbon "gasoline" apart and re-assembles it into other chemicals - CO2 and H2O - along with producing heat.

Burning carbon-neutral (Green) gasoline. The CO2 your car engine will produce contains the carbon that growing biomass removed from the air a few years ago. When running on carbon-neutral gasoline, your car is not adding any new CO2 carbons to our environment that were not already circulating in it. That's what carbon-neutral means. Think about a forest fire - it's carbon neutral and our biosphere's plants and water are soon able to pack those CO2s away again to keep the amount of CO2 in the air the "trace" chemical - 300 parts per million - it must be to keep our planet capturing just the right amount of heat from the sun - not too hot, not too cold.

Coal, crude oil, and natural gas from the ground are from plants that grew and died - but did not decay because there was no oxygen ( Anoxic ) in the oceans then - during the Jurassic Age, the time of dinosaurs. Fossil fuel's carbon is being transported across time and is added to our air. Almost as if extra CO2 were being brought here from another planet. Our biosphere simply can't cope with the large amounts of CO2 coming from our burning of hydro-carbons from both our time and Jurassic time. Please look at the CO2 balance diagram again.

If coal or natural gas were used to produce the heat used in our example, the CO2 produced by their burning would be enormous. Tragically, something like this is happening in Canada now. The Canadians burn natural gas (three oil barrels worth of heat from natural gas to make 5 barrels of liquid crude) to convert the tar in their tar sands into the 1 million barrels of liquid crude oil the United States buys from Canada each day.

Coming clean about "Green." Biomass has only about 1/4 the carbons per pound as diesel so all our cars would have to be extremely high mileage plug-ins kept charged up by nuclear electricity, the same energy we are already using to light, cook, heat and cool.

____________ "People will do anything to save the world ... except take a course in science." -- Howard Hayden ____________

Since energy is the master resource, if the world has sufficient clean electrical energy to provide the needed CO2-free heat and mechanical energy, we can make abundant synthetic crude oils - and synthesize almost any other needed substance - from almost any fossil fuel or biomass feedstock - using CO2-free synthesis processes and carbon-neutral feedstocks that do not harm the environment.

Typical Energy Values: Wood = 3,500 BTU/lb, Coal = 12,000 BTU/lb, No. 2 Diesel = 20,000 BTU/lb. See also: http://www.greenspirit.com/trees_answer.cfm Examples: The 2.5 billion people who now cook on wood fires are already carbon-neutral, Carbon-neutral Fischer-Tropsch synthetic oils from Air and Water ELCAT Syntroleum is already doing it from biomass

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(I really hate to make a mechanical method the leading candidate but this is how it has come out to date. Man's demands always seem to exceed nature's abilities.)

Part 2:

"DRY ICE" Oil, the Nuclear Oil

Non-Fossil Based, Carbon-Neutral Synfuels:
From CO2 Extracted from the Air and Hydrogen from Water
Liquid carbon dioxide from air is going for about $300 per ton or about $1.08 per gallon of synthetic oil.
(April, 2010, Continental Carbonic contract). http://www.continentalcarbonic.com/lco2/index.php

We have TWO goals: 1., Produce vehicle fuels that will never run out, and, 2., The burning of the fuels must not harm the environment in any way.

If the CO2 used in this process comes from coal burning power plant carbon capture ("Clean Coal"), there would not be any environmental advantage over using fossil pumped oil since the process would not be carbon-neutral.

One big advantage of making nuclear oil from dry ice's CO2 is that unlike using an alternate carbon source such as coal or biomass is that dry ice CO2 is very pure to begin with and will not harm the catalysts used to combine the carbon and hydrogen.

The key to:                                                              Oil from Air and Water

Electrocatalytic Gas-Phase Conversion of CO₂ in Confined Catalysts (ELCAT).

We can make low cost, and CO2 neutral, oil fuels forever.    No Fossil Fuels Needed!       Make Oil. Not War.

We don't need oil wells!                                           We don't need oil wars!

Our technology isn't failing us in our quest for a steady supply of oil forever.

Because this is so important, I have cited four different sources of the same general idea:

1., General Atomics: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/H2__Synfuel_poster.pdf A slide show describing the chemistry.

http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/HydrogenSynfuel.pdf The slide show's narration.

2., George Olah's Book: "Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy." http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312757.html

3., Oak Ridge National Laboratories: http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/125102.pdf

4., The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems: http://mit.edu/canes/publications/abstracts/nes/mit-nes-006.pdf

This is the most environmentally-friendly fuel source yet for real-life vehicles. Far more realistic and practical than fuel cell automobiles.

Remember DRY ICE? Dry ice is carbon dioxide frozen solid. Carbon dioxide can be removed from the air and added to hydrogen removed from water. This combination can be reacted in the presence of a catalyst and, if you do it right, you have the hydro-carbon called oil. Think about it. Burning hydrocarbons makes carbon dioxide and water. Everyone has seen water dripping from a car's exhaust pipe every now and then. Gasoline is a hydrocarbon. Making oil from air and water is the burning process running backward. Instead of giving off heat energy, it consumes a lot of heat energy. That's where massive amounts of nuclear heat comes in.

If the carbon dioxide comes from the air and is returned to the air when the synthetic gasoline is burned in your car it is considered "carbon dioxide neutral" like ethanol or biodiesel. We can continue to drive ordinary gasoline cars but not add to the greenhouse gas problem anymore.

As I understand it, the above is a proposal that was made in March, 2006. They claim it's do-able at reasonable cost if you've got enough nuclear energy. Note the sponsor.

The United States doesn't need more gasoline refineries. It's time to build 25 or more synthetic gasoline-from-air-and-water manufacturing plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process Details about the basic process used to turn carbon and hydrogen into oils.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage How carbon dioxide is captured and stored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gas_shift_reaction Using water in industrial processes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hydrogen_production Making hydrogen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_electrolysis Making hydrogen in industrial quantities.

Critically Important Book:

Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. Nobel laureate George Olah, PhD, Alain Goeppert, PhD, G.K. Surya Prakash, PhD. Intended for the general public, it's an easy-for-anyone-to-read book sorting all energy forms out and describing an energy future that's reasonable and attainable. One of the most important books ever written about our energy future. People involved with any aspect of energy or energy investing ignore it at their peril.

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312757.html

Concerned that since I'm an Electrical/Electronics engineer I might be misunderstanding the above, I asked S.T.A.R.T. member Jerry M, an expert in chemistry, to evaluate what's being said above. Here is his (gray-highlighted) reply:

Your email was timely. I'm reading George Olah's new (2006) book, co-authored with Goeppert and Prakash (all from USC), Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy.  Answers to your questions are based largely on information from this book. If you can, check it out of your library. If they don't have it, ask them to order it, as I did. It's one of the best I've read on the general subject of energy. Olah was awarded the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1994.

The reverse watergas shift reaction is discussed on page 212. It's endothermic, and requires heat. How practical it is for commercial use is questionable. Fischer-Tropsch is commercially proven. Olah isn't sanguine about it as a promising future technology. It consumes too much energy and yields a poor product mix.

The second equation ( CO + 2H2 = (CH2)n + H2O ) is not balanced, except when n = 1, and is used merely to show that long chain hydrocarbons are formed using Fischer-Tropsch (F-T)

I believe a better chemical route for the Air + Water + Nuclear pathway is provided by Olah et al. Briefly it goes like this:

1. Carbon dioxide is reduced by hydrogen to produce methanol ( CO2 + 3H2 ---> CH3OH + H2O )

2. Methanol is converted to dimethyl ether ( 2CH3OH ---> CH3OCH3 + H2O )

3. Dimethyl ether is converted to ethylene ( CH3OCH3 ---> CH2=CH2 + H2O )

4. Ethylene is polymerized to oils/gasoline ( CH2=CH2 ---> hydrocarbon products )

5. Methanol can be directly converted to high octane gasoline

Reactions 2, 3, 4 and 5 are referred to as Methanol to Olefin Process (MTO) and Methanol to Gasoline Process (MTG), and collectively are a "major new route to synthetic hydrocarbons", i.e. new after F-T.

The challenge is to obtain sufficient quantities of the two raw materials CO2 and H2 used in reaction 1, if operated on a large scale. Hydrogen would be generated by electrolysis of water, using electricity from any number of energy sources, nuclear, as you suggest, or renewables, including wind (see WindHunter!).

Carbon dioxide in short and medium time scales would be available from fossil fuel sources (rather than sequester it). Later on, when fossil fuels are no longer available or too expensive, Olah envisions using atmospheric carbon dioxide. Its concentration in air is about 0.037% and can be isolated chemically with potassium hydroxide, requiring regeneration.

I suspect other routes would be developed when really needed.

Using routes to H2 and CO2 from water and air to make methanol (reaction 1) and MTO/MTG technology (which have been used commercially) we would indeed be making oil and gasoline from air and water. An appropriate modification would be: Air + Water + Energy (nuclear or renewable) ---> carbon neutral synthetic Oil and Gasoline

Hope the above is clear. Olah's book has much, much more to add.

My personal point of view is that we are going to need a great many energy sources across the globe in the next 50 to 100 years. With the world population expected to grow to 9 billion by mid-century and energy demand doubled, no one energy source will be able to meet future demands for electricity and transportation. I need not elaborate further to someone who knows the field as well as you do.  When those with a favorite energy source downplay other sources by emphasizing their shortcomings, however real, it gives me a heavy heart with disappointment at scientific infighting. Enough said.

Please do not hesitate to ask for clarification regarding the chemistry or to provide other points of view.

(After checking additional references, Jerry sent me a follow-up note a few days later:)

I had some reservations about my opinion that the reverse watergas shift (RWGS) was not likely to be practical.  A Google search revealed that it has been studied extensively and has interest at present for the Mars mission. There is plenty of CO2 on Mars. Hydrogen would be imported and/or produced by electrolysis. Based on what I read, my uneducated guess is still that RWGS is not practical for large scale production of CO and water.

You might want to look at the following:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~meyertr/rwgs/rwgs.html

http://www.sbir.nasa.gov/SBIR/successes/ss/9-070text.html

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/iecred/1999/38/i05/abs/ie9806848.html

The length of the addresses are about equal to the information they contain. The last one shows a RWGS reactor aligned to a methanol synthesis reactor to yield methanol.

In a sense, this bridges your original proposal and Olah's use of methanol to make oil products.

Jerry M.

This review is something darn few folks out there in cyberspace could do for us. Thank you, Jerry. -- JH

What a great way to remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere! Of course, we'll return it to the atmosphere again when we burn it in our cars, but at least the scheme is CO2 neutral.

To summarize, here is what's being looked at: CO2, Hydrogen, and a heck of a lot of heat and electricity are what you need. In the extreme case, CO2 could be obtained by absorption from the air through the chemical process mentioned above. Hydrogen looks to be best obtained by high temperature electrolysis - the most frequently encountered process idea for that these days is by very high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactors (VHTR. Then, using Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and subsequent oil refining, the gasses can be turned into gasoline, diesel fuel, and any other simple hydrocarbon that people will buy.

In the beginning, it will be cheaper to use CO2 from some sequestration facility, such as a so-called "Clean Coal" power plant (they'll be glad to give it away) and Hydrogen made by high temperature electrolysis driven by a small Very High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (VHTR) such as a Pebble Bed reactor. This same reactor could also provide the heat and electricity needed to drive the processes to its final hydrocarbon products.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/03/a_proposal_for_.html A good overall introductory description of the idea.

http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/H2__Synfuel_poster.pdf A slide show describing the chemistry.

http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/HydrogenSynfuel.pdf The slide show's narration.

http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/125102.pdf Similar idea from: Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

http://mit.edu/canes/publications/abstracts/nes/mit-nes-006.html Similar idea from: The MIT Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.

It's important to remember that the Fischer-Tropsch synthetic oil process produces a spectrum of oils, not unlike crude oil itself, so F-T oil must always be further refined (using additional local nuclear heat) to produce specific oils like diesel or gasoline.

-----> Air + Water + Energy = Oil is the really important message of this web page. <-----

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Part 3: Biogenic GTL Oil, The carbon-neutral oil. The Logistics of Biogenic GTL Oil. (From earlier web site.)

The Logistics of Biogenic GTL Oil

Sewage + Algae + Wood Pellets + Nuclear Heat could be our unlimited source of carbon-neutral oil
but the logistics of oil is staggering.
Getting Real: Becoming Oil Independent and Secure

Algae, sewage, or wood pellets could be our unlimited source of carbon-neutral oil but the logistics of biogenic oil's mass plus 160 nuclear boilers is staggering.

Biogenic GTL oil must have the heat of nuclear to gasify biogenic carbon sources without adding CO2 to the environment.

As an energy source, oil has no equal. Oil's simple, quick, concentrated, precision energy is what makes it so valuable. Natural gas is, by far, the best feedstock for synthetic oil.

Every day the U.S. consumes 21 million barrels of crude oil. A gallon of crude oil weighs 7.1 pounds. A barrel is 42 gallons of oil. That's 6.25 billion pounds, or 3.13 million tons, of crude oil every day.

Wood Pellets.

The author doesn't know anything about making crude oil from wood pellets, so here goes a wild guess using BTU equivalents:
From: fuel-value-calculator .pdf we find the most crude-like commercial oil, #6, has a net BTU value of 124,000 BTU per 7.1 pound gallon or about 35 million BTU per ton. We also find wood pellets produce a net 13.6 million BTU per ton. So that means we need about 2.6 tons of wood pellets to equal the heat made by 1 ton of oil. Using nuclear energy for process heat, we can ignore the heat needed to turn the wood into producer gas so that its carbon can be catalyzed into oil. Assuming we get a feedstock synthesis efficiency of 80%, we would need 3.25 tons of wood pellets to make 1 ton or 6.7 barrels of oil (at 42 gallons of oil per barrel). This means we would need about 0.49 tons of wood pellets to make one barrel of oil using nuclear energy to supply the process heat.

Since we burn 21,000,000 barrels of oil every day, we would need 21 million times 0.49 tons of wood pellets a day, or about 10 million tons of wood pellets a day.

Since 3.25 tons of wood pellets are going into the converter and 1 ton of oil is coming out, we have 2.25 tons of waste per ton of oil or 670 pounds of waste per barrel.

The average 28 year old, 300 per acre, Loblolly slash pine tree has about 1,500 pounds of wood in it. 10 million tons of biogenic mass (13 million trees) every day to replace all the oil we are using is a huge amount of feedstock being hauled to the synthesizing refineries and 7 million tons of biogenic waste is a lot of waste to haul away from the synthesizing refineries.

That's 43,000 acres (67 sq mi - 8 miles by 8 miles) of trees a day or 15.7 million acres (25,000 sq mi - an area slightly smaller than South Carolina) a year. At 28 years per harvest, this ties up 440 million acres (688,000 sq mi or almost 3 Texas').

"The United States has a total land area of nearly 2.3 billion acres. Major uses in 2002 were forest-use land, 651 million acres (28.8 percent); grassland pasture and range land, 587 million acres (25.9 percent); cropland, 442 million acres (19.5 percent); special uses (primarily parks and wildlife areas), 297 million acres (13.1 percent); miscellaneous other uses, 228 million acres (10.1 percent); and urban land, 60 million acres (2.6 percent)." From: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB14/

The nation has built a wonderful network of railroads to bring the Wyoming's Powder River region coal to all America's corners. Time to begin running trains with biowaste from synthesizing oil in the other direction to the new National Landfill in Wyoming or Nevada.

This might strike the reader as being a paralyzing large number but remember, the United States has about 250 supersized coal burning power plants that each consume as many as three 130 car, 16,000 ton loads of coal, or 48,000 tons of coal a day. To make oil, we'd have 625 130 car trains hauling wood pellets to synthesizing refineries, 440 130 car trains hauling waste to the new National Landfill.

Algae.

Assuming algae has about 50% the oil energy density as oil, natural gas-to-oil refineries would consume 5 MILLION TONS OF ALGAE EVERY DAY.

Algae is currently being sold in laboratory starter quantities only. http://www.algagen.com/ http://www.ecogenicsresearchcenter.org/

Sewage.

The United States could expect perhaps 20 days of biogenic oil per year from sewage.

There are approximately 13,000 to 15,000 publicly owned treatment works in the United States which generate 110 - 150 million wet metric tons of sewage sludge, annually. -- From -- "Sewage Sludge Use and Disposal Rule" (40 CFR Part 503) - - Fact Sheet.

This all brings to mind General Atomics' proposal of several years ago about just pulling carbon from the air in the form of dry ice.

Additional OILS Items (Items 1 and 2 are other pages.)
1. Mixing in some nuclear energy. 'NUCLEAR OIL' tech to make tomorrow's oils cleaner >
2. FURTHER OUT: ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING OIL: CO2 carbon-neutral "Algae" oil > http://www.choren.com/en/

China's verified natural gas reserve exceeds 2 Trillion cubic meters. Figures for China's natural gas reserves vary wildly.

As an energy source, oil has no equal. Oil's simple, quick, concentrated, precision energy is what makes it so valuable. Natural gas is, by far, the best feedstock for synthetic oil.

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Part 4: Top

Cultivating Algae for Liquid Fuel Production
Thomas F. Riesing, Ph.D.

WITH THE INCREASING INTEREST in biodiesel as an alternative to petrodiesel, many have looked at the possibility of growing more oilseed crops as a solution to the problem of peak oil. There are two problems with this approach: first, growing more oilseed crops would displace the food crops grown to feed mankind. Second, traditional oilseed crops are not the most productive or efficient source of vegetable oil. Micro-algae is, by a factor of 8 to 25 for palm oil. and a factor of 40 to 120 for rapeseed, the highest potential energy yield temperate vegetable oil crop. Michael Briggs at the Univ. of N. Hampshire Biodiesel group estimates that using open. outdoor, racetrack ponds, only 15,000 square miles could produce enough algae to meet all of the USA's ground transportation needs. Transportation accounts for 67% of US oil consumption according to the Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2005. We'll say more about the 15,000 square mile number below. If all of this land were in one rectangular piece, it would be 120 miles by 125 miles—about 1/7th of the area of the state of Colorado.

Gallons of Oil per

Acre per Year

Corn

18

Soybeans

48

Safflower

83

Sunflower

102

Rapeseed

127

Oil Palm

635

Micro Algae

5000-15000

In this article we will first look at some of the publicly available research that has been done on the use of algae as a source for biodiesel. We will then examine some current projects that are using or trying to use algae to produce biodiesel. Finally, we will look at the implications of these for our energy future.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory

During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Congress funded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) within the Department of Energy to investigate alternative fuels and energy sources. Between 1978 and 1996, the Aquatic Species Program (ASP) focused on the production of biodiesel from high lipid-content algae growing in outdoor ponds and using CO₂ from coal-fired power plants to increase the rate of algae growth and reduce carbon emissions. Prior to this program, very little work had been done to understand the growth process and metabolic composition of algae. As a result of the ASP there are now some 300 species, mostly diatoms and green algae, in a collection stored at the Marine Bioproducts Engineering Center that is available to researchers interested in developing algae as an energy source. (2)

Some results listed in the Close Out Report of the ASP are:

· Under optimum growing conditions micro-algae will produce up to 4 lbs./sq. ft./year or 15,000 gallons of oil/acre/year. Micro-algae are the fastest growing photosynthesizing organisms. They can complete an entire growing cycle every few days.

· One quad (1015 BTU or 7.5 billion gal.) of biodiesel could be produced on 200,000 ha of desert land (equivalent to 772 sq. mi., roughly 500,000 acres). (To produce one quad from a rapeseed crop would require 58 million acres or 90,000 sq. mi.)

· The outdoor race-track pond production system is the only economically feasible approach given the cost of petroleum in 1996. (One of the problems with growing algae in any kind of pond is that only in the top 1/4" or so of the water does the algae receive enough solar radiation. So the ability of a pond to grow algae is limited by its surface area, not by its volume.)

· Algae contains fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Some of the micro-algae contain up to 60% fat. Once the fat is 'harvested'— some 70% can be harvested by pressing—what remains becomes a good animal feed or can be processed to produce ethanol.

· The desert test location in New Mexico had sufficient sunlight, but low nighttime temperatures limited the ability to achieve consistently high productivity.

· There were problems getting lab-cultured algae to grow in the outside pond environment.

· No tests were carried out on mechanisms and procedures for harvesting the algae nor on the extraction of oils from the algae.

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Part 5: Biogenic GTL Oil, The carbon-neutral oil. Increasing the Yield from Gasification.

Increasing Yield from Gasification

By Kevin Bullis Friday, March 19, 2010

A new process can make more fuel from biomass.

Biomass can be converted to fuels via a process called gasification, which uses high temperatures to break feedstock down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can then be made into various fuels, including hydrocarbons. But there's a major drawback--about half of the carbon in the biomass gets converted to carbon dioxide rather than into carbon monoxide, a precursor for fuels. Now researchers in University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed a method for gasifying biomass that converts all of the carbon into carbon monoxide.

In the new approach, the researchers gasify biomass in the presence of precisely controlled amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, the main component of natural gas, in a special catalytic reactor that the researchers developed. When they did this, all of the carbon in both the biomass and the methane was converted to carbon monoxide. "In the chemical industry, even a few percent improvement makes a big impact. The increase from 50 percent to 100 percent is profound," says Dionisios Vlachos, the director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Delaware.

To increase the yields from gasification, researchers at the University of Minnesota and UMass Amherst added carbon dioxide, which promotes a well-known reaction: the carbon dioxide combines with hydrogen to produce water and carbon monoxide. But adding carbon dioxide isn't enough to convert all of the carbon in biomass into carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. It's also necessary to add hydrogen, which helps in part by providing the energy needed to drive the reactions. It's long been possible to do each of these steps in separate chemical reactors. The researchers' innovation was to find a way to combine all of these reactions in a single reactor, the key to making the process affordable.

The process could both greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the amount of fuel that can be made from an acre of biomass using gasification. Many companies are pursuing biological approaches to converting biomass into fuel (using enzymes and yeast, for example), rather than thermochemical methods such as gasification, in part because biological approaches tend to convert more biomass into the desired fuel than thermochemical methods. But biological approaches are each designed to work with just one type of biomass. Gasification has the advantage of being more flexible. The same facility could potentially process grass, wood, and even old tires.

The researchers found that to make the process work, it was necessary to precisely balance three variables: the amount of carbon dioxide, the amount of oxygen added, and the amount of methane relative to the amount of cellulose--a material derived from biomass. The mixture is fed into a high-temperature reactor that consists of a rhodium- and cerium-based catalyst. In the reactor, particles of cellulose are quickly converted into a liquid, which spreads over the catalyst, enhancing the reactions that lead to the production of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases.

Paul Dauenhauer, a professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, and one of the researchers involved in developing the new process, says a commercial version of the process could be set up near an existing natural gas power plant, which would provide ready access to methane and carbon dioxide. But the process isn't yet ready for commercialization. The researchers will need to demonstrate that it works with biomass, not just with cellulose derived from biomass. Biomass contains various contaminants not found in pure cellulose. Those contaminants could have a negative effect on the catalyst, and this could make it necessary to reengineer the reactor, he says. And there could be challenges scaling up the process, including ensuring that heat moves through the reactor the same way it does on a small scale.

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Part 6: Carbon-neutral oil. Pebble Bed Reactor pyrolisis: Why nuclear heat must be used to make Biogenic GTL Oil.

Pebble Bed Reactor pyrolisis:
Why nuclear heat must be used to make Biogenic GTL Oil.

Replacing pumped oil with algae would be a massive task. We currently have about 150 oil refineries in the United States refining 22 million barrels of oil a day. To turn algae into the equivalent of pumped oil, you need to gasify it and then hydrogenate it - think very thin cooking oil. So far, the world's largest hydrogenation facility is Shell's "Pearl" natural gas-to-oil facility in Qatar. It is designed to produce 140,000 barrels of oil a day from natural gas. We would need 160 of them to make our daily dose of oil.

This is why the author is not advocating attempting commercial scale biofeedstock oil any time soon. Hopefully, some day huge "race track" algae ponds big enough to do the job will be built along the Gulf coast. There are already many refineries in that area and some of the natural gas-to-oil synthesis nuclear reactors and refinery equipment we would use to make oil from natural gas could be re-used to make the transition from fossil synthetic oil from fossil natural gas to carbon-neutral synthetic oil from gasified algae.

The Gulf Coast has the potential to become the world's "Saudi Arabia" of carbon-neutral synthetic oil made using pebble-bed reactor heat.

(Until the author gets a drawing made showing algae ponds and pumps instead of coal conveyers and coal trains.)

Bonne Posma's nuclear Mine-Mouth Coal-to-Crude Oil hydrogenation facility idea: ( from http://www.liquidcoal.com/ )

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Part 7:

Biogenic Oil and Ending Global Warming

Ending Global Warming: First, end natural gas burning to end Global Warming CO2 and to free up our natural gas. How?

(1) Wherever we are burning natural gas to make electricity, convert that electricity generation to nuclear. To ending electricity from natural gas. >>>
(2) Wherever we are burning natural gas to make heat, convert that heating equipment to either "tiny nuclear" for multi-building complexes or electric for residential. All we need do is substitute electric heat rods for gas burner pipes in our residential furnaces. To ending gas heat. >>>

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And Obama is wondering how the United States could achieve oil independence?
Simple. Replace all our natural gas burning with nuclear heat and convert all our natural gas to oil.
Nuclear energy would have to supply both the heat and the hydrogen needed to hydrogenate natural gas into diesel.
Natural Gas (and perhaps coal) are obsolete as fuels but, as oil feedstocks, too valuable to use for simple heat of any kind.

Below: Coal, Gas, and Oil's CO2 reduced by 75%.

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15% bite: Replacing Large Industrial and Commercial Sized Natural Gas Boilers
Then making oil from the left-over Natural Gas for Energy Independence

ENDING NATURAL GAS COMBUSTION BY REPLACING LARGE GAS BOILERS WITH NUCLEAR BOILERS,
THEN USING THE NATURAL GAS AS FEEDSTOCK FOR OIL SYNTHESIS
Shell is using natural gas feedstock at its "Pearl" synthesis refinery in Qatar to make 140,000 barrels per day of synthetic diesel.
We could build 20 such synthesis refineries in the United States in several years. We've got plenty of natural gas.

Capitol Building Complex      NATURAL GAS REPOWERING EXAMPLE: Repowering Congress with a reactor as an example of ending natural gas burning's CO2.
Ending Natural Gas Heating      Replacing natural gas heating with Hyperion size reactors for building complexes, using nuclear electricity for residential heat.
Ending Natural Gas Electricity Replacing natural gas electricity with the new mini-nuclear modular electricity reactors about to come on the world's markets.

Oil Energy Security                  Stop burning natural gas for electricity and heat. Instead, use it as feedstock for synthetic oil to replace mideast oil.
Carbon-Neutral Oils                  Nuclear heat can be used to cleanly synthesize carbon-neutral oils from both biofeedstock and CO2 from the air / hydrogen from water.

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BIOFUELS Notes

Norway Launches 4-Year Wood Gasification Research Project

15 May 2010

Norway has launched a four-year, 25-million kroner (US$4-million) wood gasification research project led by SINTEF, the largest independent research organization in Scandinavia. The project is a joint public and private-sector effort, to which the Research Council of Norway (Norges forskningsråd) contributes 80% of the funding, while the remaining 20% comes from industry.

The project is being led by SINTEF Energy Research, and NTNU is also active on the research side. Industrial participants include Xynergo, a Norwegian wood biomass-to-liquids startup, as well as Norske Skog and the Finnish equipment manufacturer Netso.

Xynergo was established by the Norske Skog company and four forestry companies in 2008; the two-year-old company is aiming to start Norwegian production of synthetic diesel with a Fischer-Tropsch process using wood as the feedstock.

Gasification is the key technology in the production of second-generation biodiesel, and this is still not commercially available as a scaled-up technology.

—Gjermund Røkke, Xynergo’s technical director

This joint research venture is one of the Research Council of Norway’s “Competence Projects with User Participation”.

Chief scientist Lars Sørum of SINTEF Energy Research, who is leading the project, says that there are two main types of wood gasification technology that differ in terms of complexity and their requirements for pretreatment of the raw materials.

The project will enable us to perform technoeconomic studies of both solutions. We will develop laboratory-scale equipment for optimizing the gasification process and identify the best raw materials.

—Lars Sørum

Kansas University Seeks To Turn Sewage Into Biofuel.
The Belleville (IL) News Democrat (11/13, Fagan) reports, "Kansas University researchers are working to turn microbes from treated sewage into a commercially viable biofuel." The researchers are using algae, "fattened up with treated waste from the city's sewer system, then harvested after absorbing organic pollutants and yielding oil for transformation into clean-burning biodiesel." The KU project "is among those worldwide looking to tap into a global thirst for alternative fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. military and a lengthening roster of commercial enterprises are among those investing in the promise and potential of algae-to-fuel efforts." The university's project "is being financed by the university's Transportation Research Institute, using money from the U.S. Department of Transportation."

Example:

Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Monofunctional Hydrocarbons and Targeted Liquid-Fuel Classes
Edward L. Kunkes, Dante A. Simonetti, Ryan M. West, Juan Carlos Serrano-Ruiz, Christian A. Gärtner, James A. Dumesic ^*

It is imperative to develop more efficient processes for conversionof biomass to liquid fuels, such that the cost of these fuelswould be competitive with the cost of fuels derived from petroleum.We report a catalytic approach for the conversion of carbohydratesto specific classes of hydrocarbons for use as liquid transportationfuels, based on the integration of several flow reactors operatedin a cascade mode, where the effluent from the one reactor issimply fed to the next reactor. This approach can be tuned forproduction of branched hydrocarbons and aromatic compounds ingasoline, or longer-chain, less highly branched hydrocarbonsin diesel and jet fuels. The liquid organic effluent from thefirst flow reactor contains monofunctional compounds, such asalcohols, ketones, carboxylic acids, and heterocycles, thatcan also be used to provide reactive intermediates for finechemicals and polymers markets.Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dumesic@engr.wisc.edu

LiveFuels Starts Operations at Pilot Algal Biofuels Facility

12 August 2009

LiveFuels, Inc., a developer of renewable algae-based biofuels, started pilot operations at the company’s test facility in Brownsville, TX. Consisting of 45 acres of open saltwater ponds, the facility will be used for research on optimizing algal productivity and increasing the rates of conversion of biomass into renewable oils.

While many algae-to-biofuels companies grow monocultures of algae within expensive enclosures, LiveFuels grows a mix of native algae species in low-cost, open-water systems. To harvest the algae, LiveFuels uses a proprietary mixture of oil-rich “algae grazers,” such as filter-feeding fish species and a variety of other aquatic herbivores, in place of expensive and energy-intensive mechanical equipment. These species are then collected and processed into renewable oils and many other valuable co-products.

Current approaches to generating algal-biofuels are resource intensive and face fundamental science and engineering hurdles. LiveFuels’ approach is ingenious in its simplicity. By turning natural food chains into productive systems, LiveFuels eliminates many of the costs and risks plaguing other approaches to using algae for biofuels.

—David Kingsbury, former chief program officer for the Science Program of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and chairman of the LiveFuels scientific advisory board

To date, LiveFuels has filed ten US patents for its proprietary approach to growing and harvesting algal biomass.

At the Brownsville facility, LiveFuels will conduct research on optimizing the productivity of natural aquatic ecosystems through biological and environmental conditions. The results will be used for an expansion to full-scale commercial operations along the coast of Louisiana. The commercial facilities will be designed to harness flows of agricultural pollution from the Mississippi River that can be used as nutrients for generating algal blooms. By removing these nutrients from river flows, LiveFuels’ systems also mitigate the impacts of agricultural pollution in the open ocean.

DOE Announces Funding Opportunity of up to $200 Million for Pilot and Demonstration Scale Biorefinery Projects - Projects Will Demonstrate Continued Commitment to Develop Sustainable, Cost-Competitive Advanced Biofuels: U.S. Department of Energy, December 22, 2008

http://www.energy.gov/news/6817.htmThe U.S. Department of Energy today announced the issuance of a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for up to $200 million over six years (FY 2009 – FY 2014), subject to annual appropriations, to support the development of pilot and demonstration-scale biorefineries including the use of feedstocks such as algae and production of advanced biofuels such as bio-butanol, green gasoline and other innovative biofuels. The projects will support the Administration’s comprehensive energy strategy of increasing the nation’s energy, economic and national security by reducing our reliance on foreign oil, and reducing greenhouse gases. While supporting deployment and increased biofuels usage, DOE continues to focus on research and development of advanced biofuels technologies

Algae-To-Jet Fuel Startup Raises $10.5 Million.
The Denver (CO) Business Journal (11/12) reports, "Algae-to-jet fuel startup Solix Biofuels Inc. said Tuesday it has raised $10.5 million in its first round of outside funding and has another $5 million pledged to build a demonstration algae biofuel plant near Durango," CO. Solix "uses algae to produce liquid fuel for use in airplanes and diesel trucks." The company "said the biofuel pilot plant will be on a 10-acre site on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in southwest Colorado. It will be built in two phases, with the first to be completed in 12 to 18 months and consisting of four acres of photo-bioreactors for growing algae, and one acre for a lab facility." After "completion of the first phase, Solix will build an additional five-acre expansion that will allow the pilot facility to produce at commercial scale."

The San Antonio Express (11/12, Vaughan) notes, "Solix plans to harvest oil from algae that can be used to produce 'biocrude' that can be shipped to oil refineries in place of crude oil."

Pond Scum Power?

Posted by Keith Johnson

Like the rest of Big Oil, Royal Dutch Shell is like a party-goer on St. Patrick’s Day: desperately looking for something green. Its latest move? A joint-venture with a Hawaiian firm to develop biofuels out of algae.

Power source of the future? (Wikipedia)

What’s interesting about Shell’s plan is that it bucks recent trends in the field and harkens back to Carter-era efforts to coax oil out of algae, relying on open ponds of the green stuff which can then be mashed or chemically-treated to wring out oil.

Shell is no stranger to the green game. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant is already fairly active in wind power and dabbles in second-generation solar panels. (Maybe not for long: the Guardian reports that Shell is selling out of its unprofitable Asian solar business.)

It’s no stranger to biofuels, either — the company says it is the world’s biggest distributor. And with gas prices soaring, biofuels are the new frontier, even for Big Oil.

So-called second-generation, or celluosic biofuels — green fuels made out of stuff no one wants to eat anyway — are all the rage, given concerns in much of the developing world that thirst for biofuels derived from edible plants like palm oil, corn, canola, sugar cane, and the like is stealing farmland and water from people who need to eat.

In that sense, algae always seemed promising as a biofuel feedstock. They devour CO2, multiply like rabbits, are oily, and don’t need much land. The U.S. Department of Energy spent almost twenty years studying more than 3,000 varieties of algae to see what would work. Nothing did; Clinton pulled the plug in 1996.

That is because algae-to-oil is a balancing act: Only the hardiest strains thrive with temperature variations, and they have fewer lipids. Really greasy algae aren’t outdoors types. So a lot of small algae biofuel companies prefer “photobioreactors,” or grow closets for algae. Others go back to the farm, but keep algae under wraps.

Shell says its pilot project will determine which strains of algae are commercially viable and which will best be able to suck up CO2 emissions from power plants. In the meantime, its Hawaiian project will be using bottled CO2.

his chapter on NuclearOil is extremely current.

Midwest Research Institute to establish algae research center.
The Kansas City Business Journal (10/14/08) reports that "Midwest Research Institute (MRI) will establish a new center to research the use of algae to reduce greenhouse gases and produce biofuel." The facility "will conduct a broad range of research on systems for using algae to take in carbon dioxide and produce biofuel." According to Linda Cook, MRI vice president of communications, "the center will operate within the organization's existing facilities and through its researchers and engineers."

Colorado researchers develop system to grow algae at high rates.
WISC-TV Madison, Wisconsin (10/16/08) reported, "Researchers in Fort Collins, Colo., are calling algae the fuel of the future," and are "growing their own using an algae generator. The algae grow into a paste-like substance that's about one-third oil." Bryan Wilson, of Colorado State University, noted, "We're bubbling a mixture of air and carbon dioxide. It's a system we've put together to grow algae at very high rates under the conditions we need to accumulate significant amounts of oil."

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Gallons of Oil per	Acre per Year
Corn	18
Soybeans	48
Safflower	83
Sunflower	102
Rapeseed	127
Oil Palm	635
Micro Algae	5000-15000