Algenol Biofuels, a Florida biofuels startup and DOW Chemical Company announced a pilot-scale algae-based integrated biorefinery that will convert CO2 into ethanol. The patented technology developed by Algenol Biofuels uses CO2, salt water, sunlight and non-arable land to produce ethanol, which can be used as a fuel or as a feedstock, replacing natural gas in the production of plastic. The algae is grown in long plastic covered troughs, called bioreactors that are filled with salt water that has been saturated with carbon dioxide gas, which provides the carbon the algae needs for photosynthesis.
Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI) – also sometimes referred to as EROI — is a key energy accounting metric that measures the net usable energy that can be obtained from some potential energy source after all of the various energy costs necessary to produce usable energy from the potential energy source have been subtracted from the estimated life time energy production of the potential source.
It is rapidly becoming a rather widely quoted statistic, but remains poorly understood by many people who are starting to use it or are becoming exposed to it for the first time. ERoEI is deceptively simple and seems very straightforward, but it masks a complex underlying computation that is subject to some important and arbitrary decisions. These underlying assumptions and boundary decisions have profound effects on the resulting ERoEI figure. For this reason, if for no other, it is important that as wide an audience as possible become more educated about what ERoEI means and how the many assumptions that go into a particular ERoEI calculation can lead to significantly different ERoEI figures for the same energy system.
US Department of Energy Secretary Chu announced plans to provide nearly $800 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act targeted towards advancing biofuels research and development and for commercial-scale biorefinery demonstration projects. The $786.5 million in Recovery Act funding a mix of new funding opportunities and additional funding for existing projects, will be allocated over four main areas. Integrated pilot- and demonstration-scale biorefineries projects are to receive the bulk of the funding with the remainder going to commercial-scale biorefinery projects, fundamental research in key areas to advance cutting-edge conversion technologies, including generating more desirable catalysts, fuel-producing microbes, and feedstocks and to ethanol research.
In this first post of the BIOFUEL UPDATE — a newly introduced feature of The Green Economy Post — I write about how so called first generation Biofuels such as Corn Ethanol that are derived from food crops or grown on land that otherwise would be used for food crops may be worse for global warming than burning gasoline is! This reconfirms in my mind the pressing need for the biofuel sector to move towards non-food biofuel crops that also are grown on marginal land; crops such as algae, switchgrass, jatropha etc. In other news the Danforth Science Center in Saint Ls. MO gets $15 million in federal funds. Fedex announces plans to get 30% of its fuel from second generation non-food crop biofuels by 2030. OriginOil has developed a simpler and more efficient way to extract oil from algae.
