BioDieselNow - Renewable biodiesel fuel

Lately, I have given up the idea of making any sort of profit from biofuels and alternative energy. The reasons for it are many - I don't have the degrees to get hired in the area University research labs. The local private companies in the field are not hiring (Green Fuels Technologies had a financial meltdown and had to lay off people, i don't know if Jonathan Gal's projects are moving forward with any place for me). I'd love to get my hands dirty and do it myelf, but I lack the land and other resources at the moment, and I'd still need a way to economically support myself during the development phase. This doesn't mean i've given up, though. I am still going to continue to contribute what I can, such as my maintenance of the Botryococcus braunii article on Wikipedia and the Microbial Fuel Cells discussion group on Yahoo Groups. I'll continue to download articles from scientific journals and keep them around for future use.

You see, the sad truth of life is, that inspiration is not enough. Even if the research initiative as I described it in previous posts existed, I wouldn't have the qualifications to be employed at such research. I am a computer scientist by 25 years of experience and training, and it is to that field that I need to focus my career. I do have some ideas in that are which have the outside possibility of making me wealthy enough to endow some research institute in the future. If I do end up with vast capital to put towards fixing the world, you can rest assured that it is in this field of carbon fixation and renewable fuel sources via algaculture that I would invest it.

 I'll still be here, on there forums, to make noise and suggestions.  Perhaps someday,  the economic climate will change and I'll be back trying algaculture for a living. But I am not holding my breath for it.

 Bobk,

You don't need a lot of land to start experimenting.  We need to learn how to grow and harvest the algae in 2 liter soda pop bottles.  Once we work that out, then we can start scaling it up.

I hope you will take part. 

Thanks for the encouragement Bobby, but I only have one window in my very small bedroom, and it faces another building with very little access to light.  I hope to not always be so resource-poor, and to get my hands in the muck so to speak. But in the meantime all I can do is sit by on the sidelines and do what i can in the techie sense. for instance, i just did some cleanup to the wikipedia article on Botryococcus braunii.

bobk:

I wouldn't have the qualifications to be employed at such research. I am a computer scientist by 25 years of experience and training, and it is to that field that I need to focus my career.

you might find that you can do computer modelling of predictive rates of growth for different algae under certain conditions - this needs programming skills if you have them.

i chose the log in name techscavenger so that everybody would know exactly why i am here....i work as a volunteer in community projects for people who can barely feed themselves (through lack of resources) let alone consider the environmental implications of fossil fuel burning.  so any information which i can find that i can synthesize together to help the extreme poor living in marginalised lands who don't even understand climate change and global warming and yet who will be most negatively affected by its occurrence is typically a godsend.

and funnily enough, quite often we end up improvising very simple and effective solutions out of waste materials, when there exists a much more highly engineered, expensive alternative.  we have just started manufacturing raincoats by hand ironing landfill plastic bags together, cutting and hand-sewing the resulting "fabric".  you can by a production line machine which grinds, pelletises, extrudes a recycled plastic and costs enough money to pay the salaries of a village for a decade.  or you can scout the internet for other people's ideas and fiddle with these ideas to create your own solutions.

 Teck,

I hope you will have patience.  One of my objectives is to develop the instructions so that a village can gorw its own energy.  Something like - dig a 6 in. deep pond, fill with fresh or brackish water, add a measured amont of human feces and urine, add the algae seed, stir daily, harvest after ten days, squeeze the oil out of the algae. 

Unfortunately, we are not ready to fill in the details. 

Tech, if you are scavenging for ideas to help the poor then I hope this may be useful.

This page describes a much smaller village sized integrated alge farm, may be adaptable to only a couple acres of desert?

This mentions a practical back yard algae farm, also names free E-book (in French)with growth info.

Liberty, I don't mean to sound disparaging of your suggestion, but the immediate thing that I thought when I read this was mosquito's. Most areas of the world that need this kind of assistance, also have problems with pools of water becoming havens for malaria, dengue, ross river virus, japanese encyphalitis etc.

Add in poo and you are adding dysentry, giardia, dhiarreoa etc.

It is for this reason no aid/charity/church/(insert whatever here) organisation will ever touch this kind of suggestion with a 10 foot bargepole in order to prod you while you are holding a 10 foot bargepole.

I sincerely hope you come up with a solution.

Mælinar:

  ... mosquito's. ...  malaria, dengue, ross river virus, japanese encyphalitis etc.  ...  poo ... dysentry, giardia, dhiarreoa etc.  ...   touch this kind of suggestion with a 10 foot bargepole in order to prod you while you are holding a 10 foot bargepole.  

I agree that algae will never become a digester. Yes there are largescale projects like Lima,Peru whereas they are using

wetlands and harvesting some biomass well downstream but this whole 'feed with manure' concept is a very poor one IMO. One step further... a manmade wetlands that is digesting alot of fertilized up biomass that falls to the bottom of a poorly run system will emit a boatload of CH4.

And I know this seems like a crazy process, there are many tropical places in the world that have much too much biomass and use water digestion to rid themselves of the issue. Rice patties and production of Cocoa and Coffee and Banana produce a tremendous amount of biomass. Much of this gets digested away in pits. Which means that much of that fixed C turns into CH4. AD systems for one and all in the tropics would a tremendous amount for human GHG emissions. That is one solution.

 Maelinar,

They are going to burn it in their diesels, not eat it.  Hard to catch dysentry from a diesel.  :-)

To keep down the mosquitos, maybe it has to have a paddlewheel or put some oil on the water.

I hope no aid organization would take this idea - it isn't ready yet.   I was just trying to suggest what the instructions might be like - I have no idea what the instructions will say.

Well, against all better sense (I need to concentrate on making money), here I am again. I just started another thread, on how to find the information you need in books and periodicals, because I know there's a great deal I have learned that's not on this forum or others, or web pages for general public consumption. It's in the technical journals and books. It's in the patents and patent applications. Yes, there are secret processes but they don't remain secret forever. I posted, and will add to, the information I have about trying to squeeze the most out of libraries because there is a lot of hidden value in them. Reading mass-market publications for knowledge on algaculture is almost useless. You need to find keywords, and know what they mean. You need to find authors, institutions, journals, patent numbers - and then expand, looking at their references. collect all the data you can easily get for your own archive -- and to share with others. Believe me, if I were not worried about the legal implications of doing so, I would post up a couple hundred megabytes of PDFs which I have collected from online journals having to do with topics related to algaculture. There's more (books) that I have scanned copies of. Lots awaits me in libraries. Lots of it useful, much of it not. Research skills are key. There are a few pages from select works that I will pay the 25 cents per page at the library to photocopy - but certainly not the whole 900 page book. I wish i could 'open source' the information I have gathered - but the law says I can't. I've done the next best thing, which is show you how to get access to them.

Are any of you familiar with the company "Lindsey publications"? They have a great catalog of books, how-to manuals on home industrial processes and reprints of books so old they are public domain. they're cheap and useful. They carry many books by this fellow Gingery on various small-scale industrial and tooling topics. I'd like to produce a book on small-scale algaculture and biodiesel along these lines - not free for the taking, but a general work which will produce practical results, and won't cost an arm and a leg for the buyer.

 But it won't all be oil-from-algae. As I've mentioned lately, I have become fascinated by Microbial Fuel Cells as of late. Perhaps I'll write a small book on those.

Speaking of MFCs - I recently read a new article wherein researchers managed to keep a rice paddy from venting methane (which is a huge problem for global warming) and create a constant and reliable 150 watts of electricity per acre in the process. Now, if THAT can be reduced to practical design for the developing world, we'd see a lot of problems solved. We could power a TV off of 150 volts, and sell them cheap consumer crap with ads in "The Simpsons" reruns.

bobk - please read this with the huge grain of salt that I'm definetly no expert on American information security/patents/trademarks legislation.

From my understanding, if you preface the text with 'my opinion is' and end it with 'I agree/disagree with this statement', there is no legal recourse as you are putting forward your opinion - still yet to be a crime here in Australia.

Naturally, in the place where the likes of OJ Simpson, Crazy Jackson and Jerry Springer reside, you may be in a different kettle of fish. At least in your defence you can say you were tailoring your comments for an international audience...

Mælinar:

bobk - please read this with the huge grain of salt that I'm definetly no expert on American information security/patents/trademarks legislation.

From my understanding, if you preface the text with 'my opinion is' and end it with 'I agree/disagree with this statement', there is no legal recourse as you are putting forward your opinion - still yet to be a crime here in Australia.

Naturally, in the place where the likes of OJ Simpson, Crazy Jackson and Jerry Springer reside, you may be in a different kettle of fish. At least in your defence you can say you were tailoring your comments for an international audience...

 I know that in the U.S., it's not as simple as you describe. What you are arguing for is the defense of "fair use". In the US, violating a copyright for "fair use" will only work if the new work you create does not replace the original in the marketplace. The way you describe what is acceptable in Australia would certainly not pass muster in US courts. I am surprised that it would be accepted in Australia.

 Bob,

Telling us how to get access to libraries is a service and I appreciate it.  But the second best thing would be to publish an annotated bibliography with explicit references to each article and your comments on why it is important.  (If you have a PDF or HTML, give us the URL for where you got it.)  You don't have to complete it before you pass it on - put it on this forum as you complete a few items.

Then we could try to find the items through our local avenues. 

 Bobby - this is a good idea. I will do this. Of course, my areas ointerest may be a bit further than the rest of yours, but it's still worthwhile.

I hope others will do the same.

" but i need to clarify something else... this is not about the money.... there is an assumption that money is what motivates successfull entreprenuers.. the fact is that it is innovation and an intense comittment to an idea and the difference it can make,that is what drives them. in fact money is the byproduct, not the  main goal"

That is what separates the Businessmen who seek money and profit using any means neccasary and an entreprenuer.  If you people can't understand what Marc is writing about giving great information I dont' know.  

 Put simply there is just not a good workable manner to disseminate knowledge without it being abused by "bloodsuckers"  

 I am sure it would be a different manner if the entreprenuers could somehow be compensated fairly or something but if too much information is divulged of his secrets or sells his knowledge he is essentially making himself worthless and have no part of what he has done thus far to achieve and given away the future of what he worked on to someone else who might not care about what the purpose of what he invented purpose was to be.  If he can guard it he will have a say in the future of it.  If not and it doesn't fall into a like minded person it will either sit on a shelf and rot or be turned into profit by businessmen.   

 Jonathan,

If Marc had a perfected process and was selling algae oil at a competitive price, your analysis would apply.

Marc knows a lot and has learned a lot.  But he does not know enough to start selling algae oil.  If he shares his knowledge, the rest of us can help him and we can develop the process for growing and harvesting algae oil.  So we would more rapidly have a non-fossil fuel energy source.  If he keeps secrets, big oil continues to rape you at the gas pump. 

Bobby

the only factor holding me back from commercialisation is the financial  needs in order to scale up the equipment needed to produce the oil on a larger scale,  enough to start selling as fuel not oil  since we have  the plant built already capable of 7500 gallons of biodiesel evry three days at this time and  needing only a few more tanks to reach that capacity evry day, we can also make bioethanol at a rate of 15 GPH. 24/7/365. this we have done for many years,

, my business plan is to make the biofuels from the algae we grow in consort with a well organised network of associated growers using our growing and production systems. and sell the fuel at a cost dramatically lower than petrofuel and once in for all bury the petrobandits that have exploited, and virtually destroyed the economy of the world.

.we are currently in negotiations with an ever growing diverse group of interested parties in florida, texas, california, new jersey, and other locations and we are conducting back to back seminars to train even more people so they can make INFORMED DECISIONS as to wether they want to enter this exciting field..monday we held another very successfull seminar sponsored by the  UGA  and the TIES program... more people getting fired up and going out of here with new ideas and inspiration. and in may ,well have yet another seminar.

 many people play it close to the chest about sharing information.... evryone talks about" open source" well how much more open can you get than Ecogenics holding algae production seminars for close to 25 years for people all over the world, offering algae cultures, training manuals?? how much more open can you get?? what most people are referring to as open sourcing ,is wanting  FREE  info well  theres plenty of that available in the internet. but advanced education costs...... doesnt it now.???...

so rather than open sourcing being a topic of conversation on these forums I think that topic should be redefined to imply FREEBIE information and you know what they say.... you cant get something for nothing, at least not state of the art, up to date information. so you asked why were not selling  algae  oil ? cause we dont dont have the money for the equipment to scale up to production levels yet and our business plan  involves producing biofuels in our already existing hybrid ethanol-biodiesel plant. and then establishing a nation wide of producers and fuel suppliers

 Marc 

 Marc,

I hope you will quickly get into production and get rid of the petrobandits.  We need the relief.

 Marc,

Open source does mean that the information is free.  (Confusion factor - sometimes there is a charge for reproduction and distribution - the free is like the free in free speech, not necessarily like the free in free beer.  The important point is that the information is readily available and is not being kept secret.)

If you would like up to date, state of the art infromation - it is readily available.  If you would like to know the details of the latest operating system, it is readily available for Linux.  If you would like to know the details of the latest Web Server, it is readily avaliable from Apache. (There are many other examples of open source - these are two that you have probably used - PVR and TIVO run Linux - when you look up something on the Web, it probably came from Apache.)

Your competition is not going to be other algae oil growers, it is going to be the petrobandits.  If you want to quickly beat out the petrobandits, release your information to open source - you will get people all over the world helping you develop your process. 

"you will get people all over the world helping you develop your process. "

Thats the problem those people you speak of don't exist.  The Chinese and Indians are well known hacks who will copy it and steal without caring.  Obviously you don't know what your talking about.  I think there is nothing wrong with mutual partnerships by "Contributing" parties but "Open Source" is more applicable for computers not "Industry" trade secrets.  

 What you are saying is that Coke should give away their secret formula to the world as "open-source."  Do you think that will benefit coke?  Hacks all over the world would feast for a long time.  It's the same with other industries. 

You need to distinguish between "Academic" scientific study with "Industry Trade Secrets" 

 I can explain the difference if you want, but hopefully what I have explained will be more than enough to help you understand.