Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=1029

by nreece • 13 years ago

141 126 13 years ago

seren• 13 years ago

The system runs at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit) at a pressure of around 3,000 PSI, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification.

I wonder what it the energy ROI of the whole process. It is not mentioned in the article, so it is not sure it is positive.

misnome• 13 years ago

Right, it was my understanding anyway that it was pretty simple to turn any kind of biological into oil, but the issues were energy efficiency, and scaling the process up.

VLM13• 13 years ago

Well, I wouldn't call it simple. The term to google for is hydrocracker or cracker in general (uh, cracker in petroleum chemistry, specifically). For the first 50 years or so from 1890 to WWII they only did it thermally and since WWII its been all about exotic catalysts.

Its not viable to thermal crack other than weird situations (Like I don't care if its net energy positive, we need feedstock to produce methane to produce ammonia to produce fertilizer so if you want to eat next winter, get crackin' today said the Kaiser to .. somebody .. in WWI). If its ridiculously expensive to thermally crack and crude is cheap, its simpler to just refine more crude and kill the market price of asphalt by dumping it on the market. So thats how we get blacktop roads, which seems to be a stupid use of valuable crude, yet... So this is a gross generalization but you can't thermally crack as a primary energy source, you've gotta cat crack. Unfortunately catalytic cracking is still something of an art or craft rather than a science because its horrifically complicated. Since day one there has been slow continuous incremental improvement, to the point that in 2010-ish its finally reasonable to finally start cat cracking algae on an industrial scale, or at least kinda sorta.

The problem with cat cracking is the catalysts are sensitive to trace contaminants so just pitching in crap from a field is an excellent way to destroy the catalyst. It is almost exactly like how carbon monoxide kills people, in that "stuff" gets stuck in the important parts which jams the whole works up and then nothing works ever again. On the other hand algae grown in glass tubes can have all its inputs controlled to not destroy the catalyst... more or less... plus or minus required trace elements... some of which kill some catalysts...

The best HN analogy I can provide is its kind of like 3D FPS games in the early 90s, no one suddenly shockingly invented out of whole cloth "the 3d chip" and that's how we got endless WWII sequels, its more like the smooth and gradual ramp up in performance from 1800s punch card unit record equipment up to the present day, where a phase change or whatever happened in the market in 1990 where suddenly the state of the art in 1990 made 3D FPS video games a reasonable application. But nothing really "new" happened in 1990 other than a century of computational performance gains continued as usual. Its the market that shifted after a certain performance level was achieved.

True, you can point to the days before and after the bipolar transistor demonstrated amplification and say the world changed on a certain date. But smooth growth in computer performance or cat cracker performance means there is no such sudden change date for FPS video games or algae based feedstock for hydrocrackers. And thats why we've been hearing about algae crackers as a "new" thing for about two decades and probably have to keep hearing about them being "new" for at least another couple decades because it becomes commonplace for people to run their cars on algae based biofuel.

The difference in the situations makes it an interesting HN topic more so than the trivia about someones recent lab experiment.

pjc502• 13 years ago

The algae->oil part of the process necessarily loses energy, so it all comes down to the process of turning sun into algae. Which is not itself very efficient, but may be cheaply scalable.

I think if you just care about renweable EROI and not about storage in convenient petrol form then wind and solar are still the winners.

awjr• 13 years ago

Somebody needs to come up with a better way of converting solar energy into a transportable liquid. I'm guessing this is as good as it gets for now.

VLM13• 13 years ago

"storage in convenient ... form"

If you can't store it, you can't use it, so it doesn't matter how green it is, it won't be used.

The ideal transportable liquid fuel is diesel with gasoline a very close second. Some peculiar and temporary engineering and economic issues make gasoline ideal for passenger cars but in a very long run perspective the whole world is going diesel, its just the future has arrived a little quicker for some parts of the world than others. A common sci fi (and tech) theme.

Originally the diesel engine was developed by the Diesel bros (no kidding) to run on nut oil not crude oil. The Diesel bros had a political axe to grind about farms having self sufficient tractors much like they had self sufficient ox drawn plows. To say things didn't turn out that way would be an understatement, but there's no scientific reason it won't work that way in the future.

The primary problem with nut based biodiesel is you can't scale the production up to reasonable economic levels by shoving entire walnut trees thru a pipeline... but you can pump algae thru a pipeline...

So that's the big pix of why people are trying to turn algae into diesel.

charlieflowers3• 13 years ago

Science fiction story just popped into my head:

The story starts with people terraforming a planet and turning it into a giant algae-growing factory, for the purpose of creating oil from it. Whole plots with interesting characters occur. Then, suddenly, towards the end, those people abandon the whole project to go fight a war in their own galaxy. Then, the story ends with the shocking twist ... somehow you find out the abandoned algae factory is Earth. :)

dagw2• 13 years ago

it is not sure it is positive.

It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.

AndrewDucker• 13 years ago

But is it better than turning that geothermal energy into electricity and transmitting it to a battery in an electric car?

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying there isn't a need for oil. Just wondering what the efficiencies are for each route, and whether this process means that we don't even need electric cars any more (doubtful, but I thought I'd ask)

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

Nuclear. You want to generate a lot of heat and you don't have geothermal energy handy, you go nuclear.

You could make the whole facility mechanical - the heat from the reactor is used to heat the algae and use steam-driven pumps to create the pressure. Eliminate the electrical middleman.

philwelch• 13 years ago

Forget the energy content; there are already tons of uses for petroleum that don't require burning it for fuel.

charlieflowers3• 13 years ago

Wonder if this could be done in space? A few months ago I read about the idea of solar energy being captured in space, and I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it.

If the algae could grow in space, and this process could occur in space, then we could wastefully convert solar to oil in space, and spacecraft could use that oil in space.

Lot of if's and speculation there, but it's an interesting line of thought.

salient• 13 years ago

So just get rid of the internal combustion engine...Surely that energy could be used in a more efficient way - such as filling up batteries for electric cars, and then power 10x more electric cars than oil-based cars.

tim333• 13 years ago

Using algae to make ethanol seems a much easier way to go and uses little energy eg. algenolbiofuels.com

valarauc4• 13 years ago

As somebody who works in the fuel industry. We easily can keep about 3-5 liters of fuel at ~15,000 psi for injector testing in about ~1kw to 2kw watts of power (with 350F heating). So not super far off.

wil4214• 13 years ago

Gasification is a fascinating process I was just recently aware of. Some guy got his truck to run on a certain type of oak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYGKn12Weu4

beat5• 13 years ago

Scalability is a fascinating process, too. But oak trees aren't scalable.

There are lots of ways to generate local "renewable" energy optima from waste products. Unfortunately, none of them scale.

lucaspiller• 13 years ago

Assuming you get the energy for the process to make it from renewable sources, how 'green' would the useful energy in terms of fuel be at the end?

kaybe• 13 years ago

As green as it gets, since the CO2 that is released from burning the fuel has been taken out of the atmosphere by the algae a short time before that. The only issue is to take care of the byproducts and algae production process, which can create local pollution issues - cheaper not to do it, but nothing that hasn't been done before in sufficient scale.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

And it sounds like this particular process is less reliant on dangerous chemical catalysts and produces less byproducts, so it's a plus in that regard.

VLM13• 13 years ago

Don't forget capex... need the plant to depreciate slowly enough / be ecologically profitable enough that the ecological value of the biofuel produced exceeds the coal burned to make the concrete and steel to make the plant.

Its not just bulk concrete but SCADA control systems and catalysts and exotic stuff like that.

Without crude oil, its an open question if the high capex algae plant will win, or just have humans sow and harvest and press sunflower seeds into sunflower oil which works perfectly well in Diesel engines and the "plant" doesn't really have a capex (a wood press and some cloth filters?). Of course its not as if only capex has an environmental cost, a couple thousand human ag laborers has a certain environmental impact too, even if (especially if?) you treat them inhumanely.

During the recent ethanol bubble, some stills never refined enough EtOH to make up their cost of production much less the ecological costs of building the plant. If it takes 100K barrels of diesel equiv to make an ethanol bubble era plant, and the plant only refines 10K barrels of EtOH before the bubble crashes, that's a net loss of 90K barrels from the planet not a gain to the planet of 10K barrels. Those numbers are kind of made up, but not as much as you'd think.

njharman• 13 years ago

As green as it gets

The massively polluted by oil derivative combustion atmospheres of L.A., Mexico City and Beijing beg to differ.

okeemokee• 13 years ago

This article is a reminder of why our planet is doomed. This is probably as good as it gets today in terms of renewable fuels. The competition? Dig a deep hole and attach a hose. We are so screwed.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

and with the Mexican government stepping away from restrictions of foreign investment in their oil fields will technology like this ever take off or need too?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-16/north-america-to-dr...

VLM13• 13 years ago

LOL no Mexicos Hubbert peak was about a decade ago. Cantarell is bouncing along empty, Chicontepec is useless, economically unviable for geological reasons. And they don't have much else worth mentioning. (edited to add, duh I'm obviously talking about geological petroleum reserves not some kind of racial/cultural commentary)

Its kind of like guano "production" from a century ago... Once its removed and shipped out, its gone, and all the money in the world isn't going to make shippable product appear out of thin air.

You're talking about two different scales. MX will never pump more oil than they did at peak a long time ago. That doesn't mean fat stacks of cash can't be made on the downslope or political intrigue can't be useful. For example, petroleum revenue declines are already causing a financial / political crisis in MX so transferring the blame from PEMEX to "vague groups of rich foreigners" is a wise political move as its always better for a local to blame the foreigners than the other locals. So the Cantarell tank is almost empty, almost entirely pumped out; better to blame Exxon than the CEO of PEMEX, at least if you're the leader of MX, at least on paper (the actual guys running MX are the drug gang leaders, which is a whole nother topic... take away petroleum revenues and legalize weed in the USA at the same time and MX would make Somalia look rich which is a crisis not just for MX but their neighbor to the north, which as a real political issue is why the USA will never legalize weed until long after the oil downslope is all resolved in MX... intentionally collapsing a neighboring country with a completely permeable land border is almost as dumb as the idea of the war on some drugs)

maxerickson3• 13 years ago

What's the case for marijuana being more than 5% of Mexico's economy?

(I read a little bit that suggests that is a reasonable estimate of the maximum size of the U.S. market; the numbers are wishy-washy because use is not especially well characterized. U.S. tobacco consumption is ~7% of the Mexican economy, for the sake of establishing some sort of scale.)

peg_leg• 13 years ago

I'm still against it. Burning caloric mass for energy when so much energy is around us is just plain ignorant. We need to move to solar and wind power.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

The energy content in algae comes from the sun, so this is solar energy, just being captured in the form of liquid hydrocarbons instead of electricity.

xexers• 13 years ago

I understand that... but aren't you still going to have smoggy cities with biofuels? Even if they are net carbon neutral, they suck up carbon while being produced and then are burned in cars driving in the city, thus creating smog in the city... smog which has all kinds of health problems.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

Burning caloric mass for energy when so much energy is around us is just plain ignorant.

No it isn't. What the algae does is exactly it: harness all that "energy around us", which is scattered around and hard to get, in a more efficient manner.

toomuchtodo4• 13 years ago

Burning the resulting synthetic petroleum is still highly inefficient; you're only going to get 1-5% total efficiency with most of the energy being converted to waste heat.

I could see this being used to generate fuel on-site at remote airports or places where its difficult to truck liquid fuel, but electricity is still going to be the way to go. Its just too easy to move it (with HV transmission lines) compared to large amounts of liquid fuel.

angersock• 13 years ago

You can't beat the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels for many applications. Sorry.

jl6• 13 years ago

One of the main problems humanity would have in recovering from a collapse of civilization would be the absence of fossil fuel reserves that we used to bootstrap civilization the first time round. Could this process be run in a low-tech manner to synthesise the oil necessary to get us back up running again?

mesaaz2• 13 years ago

At the risk of overgeneralizing our particular species/planetary history, the point you raise has been suggested as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox by Ugo Bardi and John Michael Greer.

If another life-bearing planet eventually evolves an intelligent species, than it certainly evolved an equivalent of our phytoplankton, zooplankton, and plants, the precursors of fossil fuels

As the intelligent species develops it eventually discovers its planet's equivalent of fossil fuel. But it does not understand that this extremely power-dense source has no true substitute, until it is too late.

crpatino6• 13 years ago

If you find this idea interesting, you may want to check Greer's online sci-fi novel: Star's Reach - A Novel on the Deindustrial Future. http://starsreach.blogspot.com/

The idea is, agrarian societies 300-odd years ago were very "evolved" forms of human environments. Current industrial civilization is the first raw, buggy attempt of a different kind of human ecology... and we have a bumpy ride ahead of us (much like men after the latest Ice Age had to learn this agriculture thing over centuries/milenia to get it right)

beat5• 13 years ago

Something to keep in mind, and the source of much misunderstanding in alternative fuel discussions... there are really three different systems involved! Energy capture, energy storage, and energy conversion (converting stored energy to work).

Energy capture: Fossil fuel has the unpleasant problem that the energy was captured long ago, over very time-consuming (millions of years) natural processes. So it carries two flaws: burning it destabilizes the atmosphere, and it's a fixed resource that will eventually run out. In the long game (>100 years, when humans could be around for millions more), nuclear fission has the same problem. So the only really stable, long-term sources of energy are solar (including indirect solar like wind) and geothermal (including indirect gravitational energy like tidal).

Energy storage: This is where liquid and gas fuels have a huge win and battery storage has a huge lose. It's probably impossible for batteries to achieve the density and convenience of gasoline and other liquids. They're safe, easy to handle, etc. Even though electric motors are several times more efficient than combustion motors, liquid fuel storage efficiency more than makes up for it. Plus it requires no change to existing infrastructure.

Energy conversion: This is more about how it's used. We want vehicles, right? So we have to consider the operational goals and constraints of vehicles.

robhu• 13 years ago

If we're talking about stable long-term energy sources that aren't yet ready/cost effective, then nuclear fusion is another option.

beat5• 13 years ago

Nuclear fusion isn't an option because it's not technologically feasible at positive EROEI (that may change someday, but it's basically science fiction now).

Positive EROEI on numerous forms of solar is already there and in production. It just can't beat fossil fuel on a cost/power basis. That's an economics problem, not a technical problem.

ars• 13 years ago

Energy conversion: This is more about how it's used. We want vehicles, right?

No.

A small amount of energy is used for vehicles, but far far far more is used for fixed installations. Vehicles get all the press though.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

And this boys and girls:

""Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research. "We believe that the process we've created will help make algae biofuels much more economical."

Is why we won't run out of 'oil' at any time. Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Of course at that point its a 'renewable resource' which is kind of funny.

I am glad the PNNL guys have gotten this down to a continuous process. The NASA folks who were showing it at Yuri Day a few years ago were still making algae in batches.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

>Is why we won't run out of 'oil' at any time. Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Of course at that point its a 'renewable resource' which is kind of funny.

Well, yes. We won't run out of oil in the ground either. The Earth actually has enough reserves to last us for thousands of years.

When people say we will "run out of oil" what they actually mean is that we will run out of cheap, easily affordable oil (i.e. oil that can be extracted and transported to refineries easily). I mean, do you know what would happen to gas prices if we had to pay $500/barrel?

So yeah, we will probably always use petroleum, since it has a lot of byproducts used in other industries. But using oil as a fuel? That is going to have to stop soon because of price pressure alone.

farinasa3• 13 years ago

I mean, do you know what would happen to gas prices if we had to pay $500/barrel?

Hmm, I truly wonder if we would actually still run around like headless chickens still denying the viability of electric or if we would actually see it as a viable alternative. It seems people will fervently argue a side no matter how glum/impractical/uneconomical the situation is.

tedsanders• 13 years ago

Cars, ships, and trains may be electrified, but I don't think planes will ever be electrified. A huge advantage of fossil fuels over batteries is energy density, and energy density is very important for planes.

crpatino6• 13 years ago

Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price.

Sorry, but this is just ignorant nonsense. EROEI is what counts here, not raw "profits".

If your $500/barrel price point was calculated using inputs that require total energy investment equivalent to 2 barrels of oil @ $150/barrel... this is a stupid way of burning perfectly good and relatively cheap natural oil in order to get half the amount of expensive, artificial oil. You are basically engaging in a price arbitrage scheme between yesterday's oil market and tomorrow's oil market (and betting your shirt that you can safely surf the wave ahead of the price adjustments).

The only reliable way to make a profit out of this is to secure government grants, subsidies, or some other type of funding that lets you hedge your looses. Wait... PNNL, NASA.... never mind.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

Its a way to convert one sort of energy to another. E.g. solar to petro. Its sensible, has a place in our economy, and is not ignorant, though the article didn't make this all clear.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

My claim is that the energy equation is independent of oil availability. We aren't going to "run out of energy" as some people postulate. Knowing that is helpful sometimes.

You might want to check the EROEI numbers for algae fuels, the NASA paper suggests that they are lower than they are for oil. They make that claim based on lower transportation costs (feedstock is made 'onsite' of the refinery), and a simpler refining process. None of the drilling or pipeline investment but the "farming" aspect (moving the water around) offsets that pretty much.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/

Symmetry4• 13 years ago

EROEI only matters if this is your only source of energy. At $500/barrel it would make sense to use solar power for the energy intensive bits. Nothing says your conversion plant has to run day and night.

PaulAJ• 13 years ago

Thanks for answering the question I was going to ask.

However, if you move the process out into the desert and use concentrated solar power to provide the heat then you have a solar power process running at 50% efficiency to produce a stable portable store of energy, which makes a lot more sense.

dclusin2• 13 years ago

Oil is a wonder molecule that is used as an input in thousands of industrial processes. Burning it to extract energy is just the use case people understand. Which is unfortunate.

maxerickson3• 13 years ago

If you are going to say something like that you should at least say "extract energy".

dclusin2• 13 years ago

Good point. Fixed that.

ARothfusz• 13 years ago

I don't understand the introduction: "0:15 as part of an effort to reduce use of traditional fuels like oil 0:19 which contribute to climate change"

How would using algae as a source of oil not contribute to climate change? You'd still burn it in all the old familiar ways.

tsomctl• 13 years ago

Because in the process of creating the oil algae uses carbon dioxide. The net cycle is 0.

th3byrdm4n• 13 years ago

I don't see any posts about it and I'm naturally curious. Can someone explain why this doesn't impact our understanding of where the crude oil of nature comes from?

wil4214• 13 years ago

Doesnt this take away from the real issue of fossil fuels? Pollution, increased CO2 and climate changes.

Lets say this could scale and be economical tomorrow. Does anyone think the oil companies would let that happen or let their price per gallon at the pump decrease.

shortly• 13 years ago

Doesnt this take away from the real issue of fossil fuels? Pollution, increased CO2 and climate changes.

No. Any CO2 released when these fuels are burned has to come from the algae. The algae gets it from the air. So CO2 is cycled, but not added to the atmosphere.

wil4214• 13 years ago

For my understanding, the problem with the fossil fuels is that they are trapped in the ground and we are releasing the carbon that was trapped in the ground into the atmosphere.

patrickdavey• 13 years ago

If there's one book I would encourage people to read on this subject: http://www.withouthotair.com/ .. written by a Cambridge Theoretical Physicist. Free download.

It simply puts real numbers against various different ways of getting our energy, and in terms of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested).

Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

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