NZ firm makes bio-diesel from sewage in world first

[jpak]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10381404

A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold.

Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds.

It is believed to be the world's first commercial production of bio-diesel from "wild" algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April.

To date, algae-derived fuel has only been tested under controlled conditions with specially grown algae crops, said spokesman Barrie Leay.

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[patricia92243]

1. What would be its use? Heat, cars, ??? And, what effects on environment

environment?

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

2. Bio diesel is an organic diesel fuel

The immediate use would probably be to partially replace diesel fuel made from petroleum. I'm sure there are issues with supply that others can explain better than me, but it's a substitute for diesel fuel that can be used in diesel engines.

As for the environment, it is supposedly less toxic than table salt.

For greenhouse gas emissions, it is net CO2 neutral. Since it comes from plants, it is not adding carbon to the ecosystem. The plants that created it used CO2 from the atmosphere in the process.

OTOH, when we pump oil out of the ground or mine coal and burn it, the carbon that was locked up underground for millions of years is added to the ecosystem as CO2 as a net increase.

[jpak]

3. It also removes dissolved nutrients from sewage effluent and produces

nutrient-rich solids (after processing) that could be used for fertilizer.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

4. University of New Hampshire scientists using algae to mitigate emissions

These guys are/were experimenting with forcing exhaust from coal fired power plants through ponds with algae in them.

The algae would soak up some of the CO2. They were working with varieties of algae that are oil rich and using the oil produced for bio diesel production.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

[JohnWxy]

6. very interesting article at link provided:

Biodiesel really needs to be much more aggressively investigated. I'm not convinced it (diesel fuel) would be appropriate for all our transportation needs but it looks like it has great potential to improve the situation. Unfortunately, while the GOP (i.e. Oil and Coal industries) control the Government that isn't too likely to happen. Anyone so motivated can go to www.congress.org and easily email your Government reps (all you do is enter your zip and the site gives you your representatives and senators) and tell them research into bio-diesel (and other bio-fuels) needs much more governmnent support (we are running out of time). We need to investigate any and all likely fuel candidates to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

The Office of Fuels Development, a division of the Department of Energy, funded a program from 1978 through 1996 under the National Renewable Energy Laboratory known as the "Aquatic Species Program". The focus of this program was to investigate high-oil algaes that could be grown specifically for the purpose of wide scale biodiesel production1. The research began as a project looking into using quick-growing algae to sequester carbon in CO2 emissions from coal power plants. Noticing that some algae have very high oil content, the project shifted its focus to growing algae for another purpose - producing biodiesel. Some species of algae are ideally suited to biodiesel production due to their high oil content (some well over 50% oil), and extremely fast growth rates. From the results of the Aquatic Species Program2, algae farms would let us supply enough biodiesel to completely replace petroleum as a transportation fuel in the US (as well as its other main use - home heating oil) - but we first have to solve a few of the problems they encountered along the way.

NREL's research focused on the development of algae farms in desert regions, using shallow saltwater pools for growing the algae. Using saltwater eliminates the need for desalination, but could lead to problems as far as salt build-up in bonds. Building the ponds in deserts also leads to problems of high evaporation rates. There are solutions to these problems, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus instead on the potential such ponds can promise, ignoring for the moment the methods of addressing the solvable challenges remaining when the Aquatic Species Program at NREL ended.

NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.

The algae farms would not all need to be built in the same location, of course (and should not for a variety of reasons). The case mentioned above of building it all in the Sonora desert is purely a hypothetical example to illustrate the amount of land required. It would be preferable to spread the algae production around the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in transporting the feedstocks. Algae farms could also be constructed to use waste streams (either human waste or animal waste from animal farms) as a food source, which would provide a beautiful way of spreading algae production around the country. Nutrients can also be extracted from the algae for the production of a fertilizer high in nitrogen and phosphorous. By using waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially also provide a means of recycling nutrients from fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer. Extracting the nutrients from algae provides a far safer and cleaner method of doing this than spreading manure or wastewater treatment plant "bio-solids" on farmland.

~~
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The above is a description of the potential algae has to offer. The current state of the technology is not yet capable of achieving yields as high as theoretically possible, and the economics need further improvement. The UNH Biodiesel Group and a few other groups across the country are working on improving the technology for growing algae and processing it into biodiesel. Due to the lack of government funding for this field of work, UNH and its collaborators are seeking private partners to finance the continued development of the technology. For more information contact:

Michael Briggs ;
email [e-mail]

[orwell]

5. But hey...

...we make better weapons!

We're Number 1...

[Oerdin]

7. That is in no way a first.

There have been thermal depolymerization plants working for years.