Biofuel, Algae, Water, and Money

By Todd McCune Bray © 2007


If you use biodiesel as an alternative to straight diesel in your automobile, you are burning a cleaner fuel. B100 would be a pure veggie oil fuel that burns 70% to 80% cleaner than regular diesel and produces an exhaust that has a carbon identical to ash, which inadvertently fertilizes the ground it settles on.

Not too shabby, until you start looking at where the original veggie oil comes from. The source for used cooking oil is normally restaurants and homes, but where does that product originate? If you've read recent articles by Fred Pearce, "Forests Paying The Price For Bio Fuels" or George Monbiot’s "The Most Destructive Crop On Earth Is No Solution To Energy Crisis," you would learn that demand for veggie oil and biodiesel is causing clearcutting of equatorial rain forests in both hemispheres to make way for plantations that grow palm oil plants.

It is a kick in the teeth to the promise of biodiesel, no doubt, but there is light at the end of the tunnel that is not an oncoming freight train. A startup company call GreenFuel Technologies is using algae to scrub the noxious gases from power plants that drastically cut down on power plants’ CO2 emissions.

According to GreenFuel Technologies Corporation's PR rep Ms. Jenny Viscarolasaga during a phone conversation, its technology is being used in a power plant at an undisclosed location in the Southwest to prove the technology. GreenFuels Technologies uses a very tenacious algae grown in bioreactors used to filter the power plant’s exhaust. Imagine a long row of giant test tubes filled with green algae gurgling away, happy as clams, digesting the power plant’s CO2 exhaust. The byproduct happens to be tons of algae that are later crushed to extract the algae’s oils, in much the same way olives are crushed to make olive oil, to create biodiesel. The crushed, dried algae is then mixed in with the power plant’s coal to make a bio-coal, or as Ms. Viscarolasaga defines it, a green-fired power plant fuel.

GreenFuels technology, developed by Dr. Isaac Berzin of MIT, is in its infancy but is a working technology that holds a lot of promise for biofuel and CO2 reductions from coal-burning power plants. As the emerging economies of China and India boast of bringing new coal-fired power plants online every day for the next year and a half, it is important to remember that any advances we make in our emissions control will be offset by these two growing giants.

It would be a tremendous advancement toward the health of the planet if GreenFuels Technologies’ system can be made practical and, if so, become a requirement worldwide. It also would create a renewable sustainable supply of biodiesel that could end the competitive need to clearcut equatorial rain forests to make way for biofuel production.

If coal can be made CO2-clean by an algae, it begs another question. With the right algae in the tailpipe of a gasoline-powered car, maybe it too can become a low-emissions vehicle. When asked, Ms. Viscarolasaga of GreenFuels Technologies didn't rule out the idea, and encouraged dreamers of the future to stretch their imaginations to the limit: "Where would we be without dreams?" Not choking on CO2 or drowning in rising oceans, one hopes.

One such dreamer is startup veteran Denny Klein of Clearwater, Florida. His company, Hydrogen Technology Applications, Inc., is a research and development firm on its way to changing the way we burn fuel without changing the machinery or infrastructure we use to power our cars. His invention Aquygen™ is a novel gas produced inexpensively from water. It is an additive to any standard fuel vehicle powered by either diesel or gasoline that increases the engine’s power and efficiency.

“I always believed that water held the solution to the world's energy problems. I have made it my life's work and our company's mission to solve that problem,” says Klein on the company’s Web site www.hytechapps.com.

Klein’s technology uses electricity created by an automobile alternator to power an “Electrolyzer,” which separates H2O into Aquygen™—a hybrid hydrogen/oxygen gas that is added to the fuel line at the fuel injector.  Thus, Aquygen™ is created on demand by the vehicle.

Simply put, you will be able to increase your car’s fuel efficiency up to 40% by adding distilled water.  The company anticipates conversion kits being ready for consumers by the summer of 2008.

For vehicles, natural gas power suppliers, and anyone who burns large quantities of petroleum-based fuels, Aquygen™ can significantly increase energy production and efficiency while decreasing polluting emissions. Aquygen is here and now and does not require years of retooling the world to fit the technology. Denny Klein has made this new technology fit the world.

There are solutions to CO2 generation that are here now.  The mother of invention is indeed necessity, and one mother helping another “Mother” is a wonderful thing.

(Todd McCune Bray is a member of Pacifica Riptide’s grassroots collective.)

Comments

[Summer Rhodes]

Regarding Hydrogen Technology Applications, Inc. invention/product Aquygen™ and other products, including "H2O 1500 Aquygen Gas Generator (AGG)(industrial gas for brazing, cutting, heating"

--
if the product still ultimately results in production of Carbon Dioxide, Methane, or other greenhouse gases, the product is still contributing to global warming.

Oxidation of Coal will ALWAYS produce carbon dioxide, at the rate of 4 tons of carbon dioxide to one ton of coal oxidized or burned.

So-- yes-- we have to stop burning coal and other sources of carbon and go to non-carbon based fuels.

and, yes, we burn coal in Morro Bay, California:
http://tinyurl.com/2osx44

Wikipedia coal facts
http://tinyurl.com/2okq7f

-----------
There are many other technologies available that do not require:
1) burning carbon fuel including coal
2) raising the rainforest to grow carbon producing fuel sources
3) using gasoline for automobiles

.

[bill]

Perhaps a bit off this subject, but why is it still legal for people to hose off sidewalks here?

Yesterday I chided my neighbor, but he continued to waste precious, imported drinking water to remove every spec of dirt he imagined to infest the sidewalk. He continued for about 15 minutes.

Is water too cheap? De we need a public education campaign?

[Summer Rhodes]

The dirty secret about biofuels, even recycled veggie oil, as is mentioned above:

"demand for veggie oil and biodiesel is causing clearcutting of equatorial rain forests in both hemispheres to make way for plantations that grow palm oil plants".

Do you really want to drive a car at the expense of loss of biodiversity in the Pampas or a rain forest? And how long do you think that would last?

The incredible biological diversity in the rain forests alone holds keys to new drugs-- just one good thing about rain forests.

[Mary Keitelman]

The air car is scheduled to roll out to the French market in a year or so. Apparently many engineers have been working on a car that is propelled by compressed air. It does have a lot of advantages, if it works!

Link the air car website: http://www.theaircar.com/