Big-oil's competition?

July 20, 2006 1:52 PM

Newsfilter: Spanish firm claims it can make oil from plankton. A Spanish company (Bio Fuel Systems) claimed on Thursday to have developed a method of breeding plankton and turning the marine plants into oil, providing a potentially inexhaustible source of clean fuel.
posted by Nquire (66 comments total)

Making fuel out of one of the foundations of the entire foodchain! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
posted by keswick at 1:54 PM on July 20, 2006

"Our system of bioconversion is about 400 times more productive than any other plant-based system producing oil or ethanol," it said, referring to currently available biofuels made from plants like maize or oilseeds.

Bio Fuel Systems is working with scientists at the University of Alicante on the project. It has drawn up industrial plans to make the fuel and says it will be able to start continuous production in 14 to 18 months.

Looked for other information (well, Googled) regarding this new process, but came up short.
posted by Nquire at 1:54 PM on July 20, 2006

Vehicle tests are some time away because the company, Bio Fuel Systems, has not yet tried refining the dark green coloured crude oil phytoplankton turn into, a spokesman said.

I'm not getting my hopes up yet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:57 PM on July 20, 2006

you can breed plankton without sucking it directly out of the ocean.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 1:58 PM on July 20, 2006

Bio Fuel Systems has developed a process that converts energy, based on three elements: solar energy, photosynthesis and an electromagnetic field

What?
posted by phrontist at 2:00 PM on July 20, 2006

Fertilizers -> watershed pollution -> phytoplankton blooms -> Oil -> More Industry -> More fertilizers -> Sustainable loop!
posted by voidcontext at 2:00 PM on July 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Fertilizers -> watershed pollution -> phytoplankton blooms -> Oil -> More Industry -> More fertilizers -> Sustainable loop!

Oh come off it!

This is a perfect solution if it works! It's essentially a perfect way to (quickly) make energy dense combustible fuel from solar energy. I'll believe it when I see it, but I can't believe anyone would be down on this idea (except, perhaps, big oil - and even then they would prefer it to other alternatives).
posted by phrontist at 2:02 PM on July 20, 2006

I think it's really cool. But I couldn't resist making a joke.

If they can pull it off, they'll grow phytoplankton in vats or holding ponds, it doesn't make sense to suck them out of the ocean.
posted by voidcontext at 2:04 PM on July 20, 2006

1) Fertilizers -> watershed pollution -> phytoplankton blooms -> Oil -> More Industry -> More fertilizers -> Sustainable loop!

2) ???

3) Profits!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:04 PM on July 20, 2006

cold fusion is a perfect solution if it works...
a perpetual motion machine is a perfect solution if it works...

see where i'm going with this?
posted by keswick at 2:04 PM on July 20, 2006

BTW, burning phytoplankton-derived oil doesn't solve the CO₂/global warming problem, just the cost-of-oil problem. Come to think of it, it could exacerbate the CO₂/global warming problem if it's cheaper!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:07 PM on July 20, 2006

One of the current criticisms against biofuels is the amount of energy reguired to extract fuel from traditional crops (e.g. ethanol from corn). Algae seems a much better solution, and can be coupled with traditional powerplants to reduce CO2 emissions. More here and here.
posted by Nquire at 2:07 PM on July 20, 2006

I've developed a way to make oil out of embryonic stem cells.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:11 PM on July 20, 2006 [12 favorites]

it doesn't make sense to suck them out of the ocean.

I didn't RTFA, but the FPP said "...claimed on Thursday to have developed a method of breeding plankton and turning the marine plants into oil..."
posted by hellphish at 2:12 PM on July 20, 2006

One can no doubt breed plankton in a vat; sorta like making beer...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:12 PM on July 20, 2006

Who said solar power wasn't a viable large scale power source?
posted by caddis at 2:13 PM on July 20, 2006

ZenMasterThis: I don't follow your logic here. The primary problem with global warming is the addition of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon in plant matter and algae is fixed from atmospheric carbon.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:15 PM on July 20, 2006

You know, I think I was too quick to snark. This is actually really exciting. Algae is an easily renewable resource and turning it into combustible fuel shouldn't take any great leaps of science (I'm looking at you, cold fusion). Plus, Big Oil should love this-- they're not stupid; they know petroleum is getting scarce. They'll love to have something new that they can sell to us, with possibly even a higher profit margin than what they're making on gasoline.

All that old science fiction that thought we'd be eating algae in the twenty-first century-- I wonder if we'll just burn it instead?
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:21 PM on July 20, 2006

Pah. Petroleum isn't scarce -- the costs of extracting it are just getting higher and higher.

(If you believe some of them there librul books, that is... it's akin to the artificially high costs of diamonds).

However, I'd LOVE to see this plankton fuel work out!
posted by bitter-girl.com at 2:32 PM on July 20, 2006

Yeah, this could be awesome. :)
posted by Foosnark at 2:35 PM on July 20, 2006

I've developed a way to make oil out of embryonic stem cells.

*Bush's head explodes from severe cognitive dissonance*
posted by pardonyou? at 2:36 PM on July 20, 2006

Faint of Butt: I have noticed that British Petrolium is a major supplier of photovoltaic panels.

bitter-girl.com: But isn't that the definition of scarce? Aluminum was more valuable than gold in spite of its ubiquity in mineral compounds, until someone developed a cheap way to refine it. Oil scarcity is a different prospect from the price fixing that happens with diamonds.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:42 PM on July 20, 2006

Clearly we need to invade Spain and spread democracy all over it.

...like warm democratic butter.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:43 PM on July 20, 2006

"...like warm democratic butter."

In this case, I think that would be "...like warm democratic margarine." Now made from 100% Plankton Oil:

I can't believe it's not Socialism!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:48 PM on July 20, 2006

I can't believe it's not Socialism!

I believe I might get that tatooed on me.
posted by lumpenprole at 2:51 PM on July 20, 2006

So it is win win? The fuel production process reduces C02 as well as solving our NRG problems?
posted by A189Nut at 2:53 PM on July 20, 2006

So it is win win? The fuel production process reduces C02 as well as solving our NRG problems?

Pretty much, yeah, depending on how much energy it takes to convert the algae into consumer-useable fuel.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:55 PM on July 20, 2006

"Our system of bioconversion is about 400 times more productive than any other plant-based system producing oil or ethanol..."

Just how productive are the other plant-based systems?
posted by Iridic at 2:57 PM on July 20, 2006

Is this the same thing as scraping hog waste ponds and deveoping fuel out of that?
posted by NoMich at 3:01 PM on July 20, 2006

Iridic writes "Just how productive are the other plant-based systems?"

Depends who you ask. Ethanol skeptics will say that ethanol production actually requires more energy than the product contains. Others disagree!

Here are a bunch of links to various analyses of the ethanol energy balance.

It's impossible to tell which numbers this semi-anonymous press release is based on, but we can probably assume they're from one of the more skeptical estimates.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:06 PM on July 20, 2006

Carbon in...carbon out.
posted by dash_slot- at 3:10 PM on July 20, 2006

I'm reminded of that bit from Kentucky Fried Movie about the oil company that extracts oil from teenagers' faces.
posted by brain_drain at 3:17 PM on July 20, 2006

Don't remember that. But I hope they were named "ZitCo."
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:20 PM on July 20, 2006

Sponge Bob is going to be happy about this. Mr. Plankton, meet your maker!
posted by drstein at 3:25 PM on July 20, 2006

Will this make my car smell like fish?

If I, like, had a car.
posted by Sparx at 4:05 PM on July 20, 2006

Not bad. Assuming this works, it would be a carbon neutral energy source. Any CO2 which results from the combustion of the algae-oil would've come from what is already in the atmosphere. On the other hand, fossil-based oil adds to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Something tells me the oil squeezed out of a few algae farms would be a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of barrels of fossil oil that are consumed each day. Even better: Remember folks, when the oil runs out, the food runs out. In the long run (heck, in the short run as well given the path oil prices are taking) we've seriously got to get our shit together and dump massive capital into nuclear power, solar, and wind. It's abundantly clear that given the problems we'll face in the coming decades, historians will be describing the current administration's breathtaking wastefulness on war with phrases like 'monumental blunder' and 'complete lack of foresight.'
posted by mullingitover at 4:05 PM on July 20, 2006

Yeah, but carbon neutral is a step in right direction. The next problem after that is figuring out how to get atmospheric carbon dioxide back to "normal" levels. Current levels are over 5 standard deviations higher than average levels over the past 600,000 years, and it's pretty clear that this is due to using fossil fuels as our primary energy source.

The snarky answer is that algae farming will become such a huge industry that, in 150 years, carbon dioxide levels plummet, and we start worrying about global cooling. (But because it might hurt the algae industry, corporate lobbyists argue that algae farms do not cause global cooling, and the drop in temperature is merely part of a "natural" cycle.)
posted by Nquire at 4:33 PM on July 20, 2006

Link to an El Mundo article on the topic, with pretty pictures.

The idea is basically that they've found really oily algae (20% oil) and they grow lots of it and then use an organic solvent and a photoconverter machine (whatever that means) to extract the oil from the cellulose and whatnot. It will apparently cost 35 eurocents/liter to make, or 1€/L with taxes, slightly less than gasoline. And they claim that an area twice the size of Valencia of these algae farms would be capable of putting out as much biofuel as the current world petroleum output. But of course, they haven't refined it yet.
posted by matematichica at 4:40 PM on July 20, 2006

Plankton, huh. Well, it works when I ride my whale around.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:44 PM on July 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Well, yeah, any society tends to grow to the capacity of its energy resources - which is sorta the thing here. I mean I don’t want the whales coming after us because we’re stealing their food. But if it works, great. It’d take care of a lot of problems.
I’m not sure we wouldn’t be swapping some problems for others. For example where is the farming to be done? Is space consumption an issue? Any harm to the ocean or coasts?
I suspect though those would be minor compared to the massive problems (apparently) from petrochemicals.
posted by Smedleyman at 4:56 PM on July 20, 2006

The fact that this may be "inexhaustible" (which remains to be seen) doesn't necessarily mean it can be scaled up enough to actually make a difference.

An infinite number of joules at a rate of 1 watt is a waste of time. The question is not whether it is "inexhaustible", the question is how much usable energy it can produce per year. It's not a question of the number of joules, it's a question of the number of watts.

Or to be more precise, the number of terawatts. (The US currently uses energy at an average rate of more than 3.3 terawatts.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:58 PM on July 20, 2006

I’ve got me a Chrysler it’s as big as a whale (seats about 20).
posted by Smedleyman at 4:58 PM on July 20, 2006

Hurry up and bring your jukebox money.
posted by klangklangston at 5:27 PM on July 20, 2006

I'm growing plankton in my Love Shack
posted by CynicalKnight at 6:17 PM on July 20, 2006

This is nothing new, it just hasn't been feasible on a large scale to date. To make it even better they could probably feeed the algae vats on wasterwater and farm runoff if they did it right. Eutrophication is a problem everywhere but a HUGE problem in the Med so that would be pretty cool.

(btw "algae" does not equal "plankton").
posted by fshgrl at 6:41 PM on July 20, 2006

To answer Steven's questions I imagine it would be done like current commercial algae growing operations ie in big vats someplace real sunny with a lot of available waste water.
posted by fshgrl at 6:43 PM on July 20, 2006

Best. Thread. In ages.
posted by klaatu at 7:07 PM on July 20, 2006

I used to work for a nonprofit think tank that did research on these sorts of things (and many others). And while I always want to feel hopeful when I see this kind of thing, I can't help but remember all the companies I saw during that time making very optimistic claims about how their cellulose to ethanol system was going to revolutionize everything, how their new system for refining biodiesel was going to cut the price in half, how...

I'm an optimist, but I'm a realist. This is a press release from a company, nothing more. Without independent scientific verification and practical demonstration of industrial-scale refinement of a usable fuel it doesn't mean anything.
posted by nanojath at 7:50 PM on July 20, 2006

Prediction: Peak Plankton By 2025.
posted by Jerub at 8:20 PM on July 20, 2006

Who said solar power wasn't a viable large scale power source?
posted by caddis at 2:13 PM PST

How do you think the oil/coal came about in the first place.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:25 PM on July 20, 2006

Plankton, huh. Well, it works when I ride my whale around.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:44 PM PST

That is how it used to be done. Plankton -> whale -> oil for lamps
posted by rough ashlar at 8:28 PM on July 20, 2006

How do you think the oil/coal came about in the first place.

All we need is a magical time accelerator, then.
posted by Kwantsar at 8:37 PM on July 20, 2006

fshgrl writes "btw 'algae' does not equal 'plankton'"

But the press release and the El Mundo article both say it's plankton. Do you know something else about this?
posted by mr_roboto at 9:07 PM on July 20, 2006

All we need is a magical time accelerator, then.

Hmmm. So if we can build devices that mess around with relativstic speeds, then we're set!
posted by weston at 9:12 PM on July 20, 2006

fshgrl writes "btw 'algae' does not equal 'plankton'"

But the press release and the El Mundo article both say it's plankton. Do you know something else about this?

algae is a specific type of organism that may or may not be in planktonic form (kelp is algae too). Plankton is a term for "small stuff that floats around" and includes tiny plants and animals and larval forms of bigger things. So while some algae is plankton, and some plankton is algae they are not at all interchangeable terms.
posted by fshgrl at 9:23 PM on July 20, 2006

algae is a specific type of organism that may or may not be in planktonic form (kelp is algae too). Plankton is a term for "small stuff that floats around" and includes tiny plants and animals and larval forms of bigger things. So while some algae is plankton, and some plankton is algae they are not at all interchangeable terms.

But I don't think its wrong to say that its plankton either. Just like if you were to say "Spanish firm claims it can make oil from algae." They wouldn't be referring to kelp, or hair algae. I suppose you could demand they say "from planktonic algae" but why bother? There's no more confusion if there was an article entitled "Ford releases new car" and the article when on to explain the specific type and make of the car.

Sure, it might be more accurate to say phytoplankton, or even better, dinoflagellates, diatoms, or whatever algae type it is, but that would leave the reader wondering before they even got to the headline.

(I just figured if we're picking nits. . .)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:36 PM on July 20, 2006

To answer Steven's questions I imagine it would be done like current commercial algae growing operations ie in big vats someplace real sunny with a lot of available waste water.

That's fine, as long as "big" means "hundreds of square miles". If "big" means "a few acres" then it's a drop in the barrel.

The good news is that you don't need wastewater. What you need is seawater, which is easy. But you do need a huge amount of open space (currently unused) which is sunny all the time and close enough to the sea horizontally and vertically to pump water from there.

In other words, the coast of Saudi Arabia. (heh)

Actually, Namibia would be a good choice, too, and there are reasonable sites in Australia which would work. But the problem with solar energy is that it is diffuse. One way or another you need to use a huge amount of area, on the order of hundreds of square miles, to collect power at the rate we use it.

(The conversion rate of this kind of system will be dreadful. If it reaches 0.1% I'd be surprised.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:14 PM on July 20, 2006

Yeah if it's oceanic planktonic algae then they need salt water. If possible it would make more sense to locate it in a desert with a giant artificial saline lake though- say right next to the Salton Sea?
posted by fshgrl at 10:27 PM on July 20, 2006

Why can't we harvest the oil that comes off of teenager's faces? There must be enough to meet at least all of North America's energy needs, and the social scourge of acne would be eliminated forever!
posted by slatternus at 10:29 PM on July 20, 2006

It'd have to be bigger then the Salton Sea, I'd think. Pumping sea water all the way inland to put these things in the desert would be massively damaging - you'd be introducing a lot of salt into the watershed. The excess used water would either have to released downstream or left to evaporate, and then what?
posted by voidcontext at 8:39 AM on July 21, 2006

slatternus:

But then, my car would smell like high-school drama.
posted by trigonometry at 11:17 AM on July 21, 2006

Why can't we harvest the oil that comes off of teenager's faces? There must be enough to meet at least all of North America's energy needs, and the social scourge of acne would be eliminated forever!

"Here at our multi-billion dollar refinery in Fairbanks, we're extracting 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil each day from teenagers' faces."
posted by pardonyou? at 11:53 AM on July 21, 2006

It'd have to be bigger then the Salton Sea, I'd think

Nope, not really because algae only grow where there's light and they grow fast so a series of vast shallow vats that were fed from the sea and the water returned at the end would work well. The SS is reasonably deep in the middle so contains a lot of water and it's massively eutrophic which is kind of key to growing algae at that density.
posted by fshgrl at 2:56 PM on July 21, 2006

The amjor problem with that scenario is disposing of the "bodies", or what's left of the algae after they are done ref. But that volume of organic matter would be a problem anywhere.

Maybe they can pump it down old oil wells!
posted by fshgrl at 2:58 PM on July 21, 2006

Next up: Lil' Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry!
posted by darkstar at 2:20 PM on July 22, 2006

The amjor problem with that scenario is disposing of the "bodies", or what's left of the algae after they are done ref.

Errr, the bodies are the food for the new ones.

Photons provide the energy.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:57 PM on July 23, 2006