It seems the more we drill the more those reserves of Nat Gas keeping going up.

Look at the tremendous amount of rich organic waste emanating from beef, pork and poultry Confined Animal Feeding Operations. Waste management could switch roles from liability to asset if bioreactors could be coupled with CAFOs.

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RE Greg: It sounds like you are involved in a fascinating project. Is there any public source of the data you have collected or other info you have generated?

Most of these leaders are stock price plays/scams – lots of razmataz but little substance. Three of the leaders are primarily managed by good scientists with no commercial background – this shows in company’s like GreenFuel who burned through over $70MM in research but is gone today. One of the supposed leaders is artifically pricing their “production system” installed cost to capture as much of the stimulus money as possible – very tough for any governement or owner’s engineers to detect the funny business when there is no history on facility costs.

A well-deigned system should have about 10% of the energy requirements of corn farming on the same farmland area – that is the result of my team’s pre-commercial facility – my corn data came from the adjacent 200 acre field that we had contract farmed and collected all of the energy input data including fertilizer use (and back-caled the natural gas use to produce the fertilizer that was used with the manufacturer’s data), the direct farming fuel use and the transportation/ethanol production energy use at the ethanol plant that the corn went to. And yep, the corn energy balance was negative – produced less useful fuel than the nat gas and liquid fuel it took to produce the crop and transform it.

Combining oxygen and hydrogen to create usable energy is like releasing a wound spring. Someone has to wind the spring first. Liberating hydrogen from oxygen is the process of winding that spring. So in that sense it is a zero sum game. Even worse though, just like in a real spring, the spring heats up a little each time you bend a release it, thus losing energy, you also can’t have a 100% efficiency process from h2o -> h+o2 ->h2o.

A petroleum refinery is off the grid. It makes its own electricity and steam from the cheapest fuels around – its own wastes and outputs. Athabasca, Canada is the largest natural gas consumer in Canada. If its tar sands’ petroleum output is much more expensive/joule than natural gas, why is it producing any at all? NO fuel ethanol plant runs on fuel ethanol. They run on Federal subsidies.

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html

“Dr John Benemann, the scientist who literally wrote the book on biodiesel from algae, has called some of the claims being made for the technology and yields ‘bizarre’ and ‘totally absurd’.”

“A biodiesel-from-algae plant using the much-hyped industrial photobioreactor approach and operating at maximum efficiency is not economically feasible at fuel prices below US$800 per barrel.”

Agri-giant maize pimp Archer-Daniels-Midland’ corn produces 172 litersl/ha biodiesel. Oil palm produces 5950 liters/ha biodiesel. Replanted Lousiana could have a (lawful) multi-$billion/year crop, no Federal subsidies required, with every man a king. But who wants that?