Pollution, Bloom, or not, Jed, all of the water from watershed runoff contains algae.
Figure out how much algae is available per unit volume after you've allowed for feeding aquatic life and available natural plant nutrients. Cost effective harvesting using stream (gravity) flow since maximum production is near the surface, doesn't seem intractable. Fred > [Original Message] > From: Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[email protected]> > Date: 4/2/2007 10:44:46 AM > Subject: Re: [Vo]: Biofuel Bonanza > > Frederick Sparber wrote: > > >Jones Beene did a Google satellite view of the area where the Colorado River > >enters the Gulf of California last year. > > Let me amend that: my statement applied to plant life grown outdoors > on land in North America, not in water. > > However, the huge algae blooms in water in rivers and in the ocean > are caused by pollution, so let us hope we eliminate them in the > future. I suppose they might be harvested in the meanwhile, but the > long-term goal should be to get rid of them. > > > >Enough Algae Bloom biofuel potential to run all the trucks and cars > >in the USA for months, not to mention the algae bloom on Lake Meade > >a few years ago. > > Well, you would have to find a way to keep the bloom there > permanently, which might not be easy, and I am sure it would violate > National Park rules. It might mess up the generators, too. But let's > check the numbers. > > Lake Meade, on the Colorado River, has a surface area of 620 km^2. > That's 620,000,000 square meters. It is arid, and solar energy > reaching the ground in North America arid places is about 500 W at > peak, or 1.5 kWh/m^2/day. > > This is outdoors, so we are talking about natural algae, not a bred > or domesticated species or genetically altered version. (Most > domesticated species are inherently weak, and cannot survive in the > wild.) Also, production will be seasonal. I believe natural algae > photosynthesis efficiency is . . . what? 2% overall? So that comes to: > > 18,600,000 kWh or 18.6 GWh. This is 86% of the output of a typical > U.S. nuclear reactor (900 MW running 24 hours = 21.6 GWh). That's an > impressive amount of energy to be sure, but the U.S. consumes 384.7 > million gallons/day of gasoline for transportation. See: > > http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html > > According to an on-line energy converter, that comes to > 14,080,020,000 kWh, so it is too low by a factor of 800. > > http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm > > This estimate seems wrong to me. I have double checked these numbers, > but I do not find the error, but this seems to indicate it would take > 651 nuclear reactors to supply liquid fuel for automobiles. That's > ~200 more generators of all types than the U.S. presently possesses. > Looking at it another way, the Annual Energy Review Diagram 1 shows > that in the U.S. nuclear plants contributes 8.15 Quads per year. > There are about 100 nuclear plants. Transportation consumes 26.52 > quads, so if you could magically convert nuclear electricity into > transportation energy, it would take 325 reactors. Taking into > account the comparative inefficiency of internal combustion engines, > perhaps it would take twice as many, after all. > > Lake Meade is the largest man-made body of water, and we would need > 800 more like that, all filled with noxious gunk. > > You can see from this how horribly inefficient internal combustion > gasoline based transportation is. Compared to other major energy > consuming technology, such as lightbulbs and power generators, > automobiles are stuck about 50 to 100 years behind the times. Rather > than trying to supply these ridiculous machines with liquid fuel, it > makes far more sense improve the efficiency of the machines, and > reduce or eliminate their need for liquid fuel. > > - Jed
