Chapter 14.1
NUCLEAR BIOGENIC OIL
Fast Pyrolysis of Biomass to Make
Carbon-neutral Oils
Our Gateway to the End of Global Warming
The Nuclear Biogenic N-Oil
Trees are far too dangerous to
harvest in the volumes needed to replace oil. It's either Captured CO2 or
Algae Sludge.
Either process requires large amounts of nuclear energy
to add the necessary hydrogen "punch" to equal fossil fuels.
(Right) Algae on China's Yangtze
river.
THIS PAGE:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6 Biogenic GTL Oil and Ending Global
Warming
Also: http://www.kior.com/
Here it is, kids (as of June, 2010 draft):
15 billion gallons equal 360 million barrels. 500 million gallons equal 24
million barrels. 5 billion gallons equal 120 million barrels.
Full 214 page paper - pdf.
Algal Biofuels
Roadmap - DOE June 2010.pdf
FYI: The United States burns about 21 million barrels of oil a day. That's
7.6 Billion Barrels of Oil each year.
Part 1: The
Original Universal Recipe for "GREEN
GASOLINE"
(A chemical process, nC + (n +1)H2 → CnH2n+2, developed in 1913 by the German chemist Friedrich Bergius makes this possible as long as you have carbon, hydrogen, and abundant 1,000°F+ energy. The reaction occurs at between 700 and 900°F and 3,000 to 10,000 psi hydrogen pressure. The reaction produces heavy oils, middle oils, gasoline and gasses depending on process variable choices.
Feedstock frugal, overall 97% of input carbon can be converted into synthetic fuel. Both TRISO and fast-neutron reactors are hot enough to power this reaction.)
1. As a plant grows, it's photosynthesis process causes CO2 to be taken from the air and combined with water to make cellulose fibers (a hydro-carbon).2. The biomass is harvested, shredded, dried (using electricity and electric heat from a nuclear reactor).
3. A second ingredient, the gas, hydrogen, is taken from water, by using heat and electricity from that same reactor.
4. The "clean carbon" biomass and the hydrogen are then combined with heat and turned into a carbon vapor gas (mostly) methane (CH4) using electrical heat from that same nuclear reactor.
5. Then, in the presence of pressure and a catalyst, such as tin or nickel oleate, the methane is catalytically converted to produce a liquid synthetic crude oil - with the process producing lots of heat. This heat is removed by a cooling system powered by that same nuclear reactor. 6. The synthetic crude oil is then refined to extract liquid hydro-carbons called gasoline, diesel, etc., again using heat from that same nuclear reactor. As you can tell, massive amounts of heat are needed to make this happen. Fortunately, nuclear heat costs less than coal and produces much less CO2 than coal ( 9 to 21 g/kW-hr nuclear vs. 950 to 1,300 g/kW-hr coal - World Nuclear Association ).Gasoline averages 9 carbons with 20 hydrogens attached. Diesel averages 14 carbons with 30 hydrogens attached, and, as you can imagine, contains a little more energy than gasoline. Synthesized diesel yields are larger than gasoline yields when using carbon-neutral biomass feedstocks.
Synthetic gasoline in your car: When you start it up, the engine's burning process will attach two oxygens from the air to each carbon to make CO
2. The burning also attaches one oxygen from the air to each pair of now-available hydrogens to make some water - H2O. Burning takes the hydrocarbon "gasoline" apart and re-assembles it into other chemicals - CO2 and H2O - along with producing heat.Burning carbon-neutral (Green) gasoline. The CO2 your car engine will produce contains the carbon that growing biomass removed from the air a few years ago. When running on carbon-neutral gasoline, your car is not adding any new CO2 carbons to our environment that were not already circulating in it. That's what carbon-neutral means. Think about a forest fire - it's carbon neutral and our biosphere's plants and water are soon able to pack those CO2s away again to keep the amount of CO2 in the air the "trace" chemical - 300 parts per million - it must be to keep our planet capturing just the right amount of heat from the sun - not too hot, not too cold.
Coal, crude oil, and natural gas from the ground are from plants that grew and died - but did not decay because there was no oxygen ( Anoxic ) in the oceans then - during the Jurassic Age, the time of dinosaurs. Fossil fuel's carbon is being transported across time and is added to our air. Almost as if extra CO2 were being brought here from another planet. Our biosphere simply can't cope with the large amounts of CO2 coming from our burning of hydro-carbons from both our time and Jurassic time. Please look at the CO2 balance diagram again.If coal or natural gas were used to produce the heat used in our example, the CO
2 produced by their burning would be enormous. Tragically, something like this is happening in Canada now. The Canadians burn natural gas (three oil barrels worth of heat from natural gas to make 5 barrels of liquid crude) to convert the tar in their tar sands into the 1 million barrels of liquid crude oil the United States buys from Canada each day. Coming clean about "Green." Biomass has only about 1/4 the carbons per pound as diesel so all our cars would have to be extremely high mileage plug-ins kept charged up by nuclear electricity, the same energy we are already using to light, cook, heat and cool.
Since energy is the master resource,
if the world has sufficient clean
but t
Getting Real: Becoming Oil Independent and Secure
Biogenic GTL oil must have the heat of nuclear to gasify biogenic carbon sources without adding CO2 to the environment.
Every day the U.S. consumes 21 million barrels of crude oil. A gallon of crude oil weighs 7.1 pounds. A barrel is 42 gallons of oil. That's 6.25 billion pounds, or 3.13 million tons, of crude oil every day.
Wood Pellets.
The author doesn't know anything
about making crude oil from wood pellets, so here goes a wild guess using BTU
equivalents:
From:
fuel-value-calculator .pdf we find the most crude-like commercial oil, #6,
has a net BTU value of 124,000 BTU per 7.1 pound gallon or about 35 million BTU
per ton. We also find wood pellets produce a net 13.6 million BTU per ton. So
that means we need about 2.6 tons of wood pellets to equal the heat made by 1
ton of oil. Using nuclear energy for process heat, we can ignore the heat
needed to turn the wood into producer gas so that its carbon can be catalyzed
into oil. Assuming we get a feedstock synthesis efficiency of 80%, we would
need 3.25 tons of wood pellets to make 1 ton or 6.7 barrels of oil (at 42
gallons of oil per barrel). This means we would need about 0.49 tons of wood
pellets to make one barrel of oil using nuclear energy to supply the process
heat.
Since we burn 21,000,000 barrels of oil every day, we would need 21 million times 0.49 tons of wood pellets a day, or about 10 million tons of wood pellets a day.
Since 3.25 tons of wood pellets are going into the converter and 1 ton of oil is coming out, we have 2.25 tons of waste per ton of oil or 670 pounds of waste per barrel.
The average 28 year old, 300 per acre, Loblolly slash pine tree has about 1,500 pounds of wood in it. 10 million tons of biogenic mass (13 million trees) every day to replace all the oil we are using is a huge amount of feedstock being hauled to the synthesizing refineries and 7 million tons of biogenic waste is a lot of waste to haul away from the synthesizing refineries.
That's 43,000 acres (67 sq mi - 8 miles by 8 miles) of trees a day or 15.7 million acres (25,000 sq mi - an area slightly smaller than South Carolina) a year. At 28 years per harvest, this ties up 440 million acres (688,000 sq mi or almost 3 Texas').
"The United States has a total land area of nearly 2.3 billion acres. Major uses in 2002 were forest-use land, 651 million acres (28.8 percent); grassland pasture and range land, 587 million acres (25.9 percent); cropland, 442 million acres (19.5 percent); special uses (primarily parks and wildlife areas), 297 million acres (13.1 percent); miscellaneous other uses, 228 million acres (10.1 percent); and urban land, 60 million acres (2.6 percent)."
The nation has built a wonderful
network of railroads to bring the Wyoming's
This might strike the reader as being a paralyzing large number but remember, the United States has about 250 supersized coal burning power plants that each consume as many as three 130 car, 16,000 ton loads of coal, or 48,000 tons of coal a day. To make oil, we'd have 625 130 car trains hauling wood pellets to synthesizing refineries, 440 130 car trains hauling waste to the new National Landfill.
Algae.
A
Algae is currently being sold in laboratory starter quantities only. http://www.algagen.com/ http://www.ecogenicsresearchcenter.org/
Sewage.
The United States could expect perhaps 20 days of biogenic oil per year from sewage.
There are approximately 13,000 to 15,000 publicly owned treatment works in the United States which generate 110 - 150 million wet metric tons of sewage sludge, annually. -- From -- "Sewage Sludge Use and Disposal Rule" (40 CFR Part 503) - - Fact Sheet.
This all brings to mind General Atomics' proposal of several years ago about just pulling carbon from the air in the form of Captured CO2.
Additional OILS
Items (Items 1 and 2 are other pages.)
China's verified natural gas reserve exceeds 2 Trillion cubic meters. Figures for China's natural gas reserves vary wildly.
Cultivating Algae for Liquid Fuel Production
Thomas F. Riesing, Ph.D.
|
Gallons of Oil per |
Acre per Year |
|
Corn |
18 |
|
Soybeans |
48 |
|
Safflower |
83 |
|
Sunflower |
102 |
|
Rapeseed |
127 |
|
Oil Palm |
635 |
|
Micro Algae |
5000-15000 |
In this article we will first look at some of the publicly available research that has been done on the use of algae as a source for biodiesel. We will then examine some current projects that are using or trying to use algae to produce biodiesel. Finally, we will look at the implications of these for our energy future.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory
During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Congress funded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) within the Department of Energy to investigate alternative fuels and energy sources. Between 1978 and 1996, the Aquatic Species Program (ASP) focused on the production of biodiesel from high lipid-content algae growing in outdoor ponds and using CO2 from coal-fired power plants to increase the rate of algae growth and reduce carbon emissions. Prior to this program, very little work had been done to understand the growth process and metabolic composition of algae. As a result of the ASP there are now some 300 species, mostly diatoms and green algae, in a collection stored at the Marine Bioproducts Engineering Center that is available to researchers interested in developing algae as an energy source. (2)
Some results listed in the Close Out Report of the ASP are:
· Under optimum growing conditions micro-algae will produce up to 4 lbs./sq. ft./year or 15,000 gallons of oil/acre/year. Micro-algae are the fastest growing photosynthesizing organisms. They can complete an entire growing cycle every few days.
· One quad (1015 BTU or 7.5 billion gal.) of biodiesel could be produced on 200,000 ha of desert land (equivalent to 772 sq. mi., roughly 500,000 acres). (To produce one quad from a rapeseed crop would require 58 million acres or 90,000 sq. mi.)
· The outdoor race-track pond production system is the only economically feasible approach given the cost of petroleum in 1996. (One of the problems with growing algae in any kind of pond is that only in the top 1/4" or so of the water does the algae receive enough solar radiation. So the ability of a pond to grow algae is limited by its surface area, not by its volume.)
· Algae contains fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Some of the micro-algae contain up to 60% fat. Once the fat is 'harvested'— some 70% can be harvested by pressing—what remains becomes a good animal feed or can be processed to produce ethanol.
· The desert test location in New Mexico had sufficient sunlight, but low nighttime temperatures limited the ability to achieve consistently high productivity.
· There were problems getting lab-cultured algae to grow in the outside pond environment.
· No tests were carried out on mechanisms and procedures for harvesting the algae nor on the extraction of oils from the algae.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
A new process can make more fuel from biomass.
Biomass can be converted to fuels via a process called gasification, which uses high temperatures to break feedstock down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can then be made into various fuels, including hydrocarbons. But there's a major drawback--about half of the carbon in the biomass gets converted to carbon dioxide rather than into carbon monoxide, a precursor for fuels. Now researchers in University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed a method for gasifying biomass that converts all of the carbon into carbon monoxide.
In the new approach, the researchers gasify biomass in the presence of precisely controlled amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, the main component of natural gas, in a special catalytic reactor that the researchers developed. When they did this, all of the carbon in both the biomass and the methane was converted to carbon monoxide. "In the chemical industry, even a few percent improvement makes a big impact. The increase from 50 percent to 100 percent is profound," says Dionisios Vlachos, the director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Delaware.
To increase the yields from gasification, researchers at the University of Minnesota and UMass Amherst added carbon dioxide, which promotes a well-known reaction: the carbon dioxide combines with hydrogen to produce water and carbon monoxide. But adding carbon dioxide isn't enough to convert all of the carbon in biomass into carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. It's also necessary to add hydrogen, which helps in part by providing the energy needed to drive the reactions. It's long been possible to do each of these steps in separate chemical reactors. The researchers' innovation was to find a way to combine all of these reactions in a single reactor, the key to making the process affordable.
The process could both greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the amount of fuel that can be made from an acre of biomass using gasification. Many companies are pursuing biological approaches to converting biomass into fuel (using enzymes and yeast, for example), rather than thermochemical methods such as gasification, in part because biological approaches tend to convert more biomass into the desired fuel than thermochemical methods. But biological approaches are each designed to work with just one type of biomass. Gasification has the advantage of being more flexible. The same facility could potentially process grass, wood, and even old tires.
The researchers found that to make the process work, it was necessary to precisely balance three variables: the amount of carbon dioxide, the amount of oxygen added, and the amount of methane relative to the amount of cellulose--a material derived from biomass. The mixture is fed into a high-temperature reactor that consists of a rhodium- and cerium-based catalyst. In the reactor, particles of cellulose are quickly converted into a liquid, which spreads over the catalyst, enhancing the reactions that lead to the production of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases.
Paul Dauenhauer, a professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, and one of the researchers involved in developing the new process, says a commercial version of the process could be set up near an existing natural gas power plant, which would provide ready access to methane and carbon dioxide. But the process isn't yet ready for commercialization. The researchers will need to demonstrate that it works with biomass, not just with cellulose derived from biomass. Biomass contains various contaminants not found in pure cellulose. Those contaminants could have a negative effect on the catalyst, and this could make it necessary to reengineer the reactor, he says. And there could be challenges scaling up the process, including ensuring that heat moves through the reactor the same way it does on a small scale.