Engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced that they have created a process that takes algae and turns it into crude oil in less than an hour.
Just waiting for the EPA to ban cleaning your pool in the name of protecting America’s precious natural resources.
When you said “pond scum” I assumed this was another story about government officials.
The new process also dispenses with the use of toxic chemicals and solvents to separate the energy-rich oils from the algae. The process uses high heat and pressure instead.
“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,”
Hmmmm, where does the “high heat” come from?
Another ‘solution’ that uses 10 times more energy to produce than the end product can at 10 times the price.
@2
“Another ‘solution’ that uses 10 times more energy to produce than the end product can at 10 times the price.”
you do realize that in the history of everything that works, there was a time that it didn’t, don’t you?
@3 – True, but not working isn’t necessarily a sign that it eventually will 🙂
@3
You realize that even when something ‘works’, when it costs 10 times more to make than it produces, the fact that it ‘works’ is irrelevant, don’t you? like…ethanol…windmills, solar panels, government health care etc.
Unless you get the heat from …..NUKES!!1!!1! I don’t see that happening.
More nukes, less kooks!
Thorium!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
If for no other reason than it sounds like that one dwarf from “The Hobbit”
… or the chant of the Wicked Witch of the West’s soldiers in “The Wizard of Oz ‘ . . .
this really seems to me like nothing more than modification of the Haber (aka Haber-Bosch) Process which has been around since the early 1900s. the engineering of high pressure reactions has long been understood. this particular reaction may even be exothermic as the Haber reaction is, i don’t know.
i don’t know if this conversion will work, but it looks really really interesting and the engineering looks long settled. the energy is actually a minor problem. oil today is not an energy source, it is a carrier of energy. witness the canadians using a nuke plant to extract ultra heavy crude in the north.
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/equilibria/haber.html
Not the dreaded Thorium-G !!!!
@6: More on Thorium:
http://www.chemicool.com/elements/thorium.html
oh, what a dilema for the EPA – on the one hand it’s an opportunity to seize control over every backyard pool in America, on the other hand they’d be “saving” something that is used to create dreaded OIL!!!1111!!!111111!. What’s a bloated over-reaching government agency to do?
Washington D.C. now rivals Texas in energy reserves.