Grow your gas!

In the millions of ideas that plague my clouded and hectic mind I've wondered about a lot of things. One of them is our ongoing energy crisis.

A good friend once told me that If i could find a way to access the frozen methane under the continental shelf I'd be rich a few billion times over since this is the worlds largest deposit of natural gas, it's just below a thousand feet of water a few hundred meters of rock and frozen.

Then there's the psudeo science crowd claiming that Maxwell, Planck and Einstien were wrong and that Tesla was right and that we can pull energy from static charges or the zero point.

ZPE does exist and it is real, the only effect that has been measured by physicists is the Casimir one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

This force is more akin to gravity than anything else, the brilliant folks at the university of St. Andrews in the united kingdom figured out how to levitate things with it, I posted about it earlier last year.

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/levitation.html
Here's their page, above and some cool photography (not doctored) below.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/physicists-use-.html

In the world of science theoretical physics reigns king, I came across this site in the search of interesting reproductions of ball lightning:
http://www.electronpowersystems.com/

The sad part is their e-mail does not work, or needs to be changed since I wanted to start a dialouge with the owner, I seriously hope he's not a fake, for someone trained at westpoint I'd hope he's still around and that he's getting funding.

They claim to have found a way to blend toroidal plasmas to facilitate fusion. As in the only "Holy grail" of energy physics that promises to help humanity cease being Dependant on deposits of sunlight. Anyhow let's hope he gets his products to market and that he's not another "scientist-ion". They have enough weight to be examined by NASA's group for advanced concepts (NIAC) for a potential award. His method claims to have produced a self contained torrid of plasma utilizing an aerosolized form of Boron and Hydrogen, and that he stumbled upon this in 1992 as a result of studying ball lightning.

The truth is gas, oil, jet fuel the backbones of our daily lives are in the current form being exhausted. Whilst exhausting this we are also raising the global temperature, any fan of Al Gore and the inconvenient truth knows that the ecosystem and biosphere is tiny and fragile and we are choking ourself to death. Oddly enough the NREL in the united states has spent millions studying Algae, one of the funny aspects of this is that the following algae may be responsible for our current deposits of sunlight.

Algae and phytoplankton over the period of the lives of the seas from the pre-historic age have produced stored and left the energy that we currently use today . It's a natural bi-product of photosynthesis of various strains.

Botryococcus braunii - This slow growing algae traps phosphor and produces up to 805 of it's weight in hydrocarbons, it grows best at 23 degrees centigrade and at 60W/Meter square of sunlight. This algae doubles every 72 hours (that's slow for algae) and traps a number of rather toxic substances from the air, it's an excllent candidate for carbon sequestering, you can even process it into Kerosene, Benzine (Gas) Diesel and Low Pressure gas, it would be like a NO Sulfur content crude. It's just not economically viable to do this yet, when Crude hits $110 / barrel you'll see the green houses going up everywhere. A lot of current biologists believe that this algae is what made all of the oil so many years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botryococcus_braunii

Now you can't make your car run on this unless you have a cracking and refining plant close by and no one has made any of those since the 60's. in fact I have hear rumors that current oil producers and sales companies in North America pay people off that wish to produce more refineries, since that would increase supply and reduce their profit margins.

Heres something everyone can do though, bio-diesel can be made from algae ponds, they are the most cost effective way to produce bio-diesel, the best method of production in my mind is to enclose raceway ponds in green houses. One acre of green houses (or one acre of ponds) would produce around 100,000 L of algal oil which may be tansesterfied into diesel (B100) and glycerin. The strains that are ideal for this are listed in many places but I like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
According to them it would take around 3 Belgums or somthing a little larger than the state of Maine in aquaculture space to meet the current demand for fuel, it's only going to get worse.

Enter my favorite problem from Texas, Prymnesium Parvum. Or "Toxic Gold Algae" as it's called, due to it's inadvertent killing of fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prymnesium_parvum
According to the guys at Oilalgae, it's got 22% to 38% lipid content, however the cautionary note is that it produces DMSP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylsulfoniopropionate

This is actually beneficial to aquaculture when all you want is the fatty lipids from the algae, since the algae kills everything around it that way bio-reactor contamination is not an issue, and it has a high lipid content to boot, it has a bit of sulfur but nothing close to toxic levels when compared with crude pulled from Alberta.

Once you've got that your 1 Acre of green house could produce up to 100,000L of bio diesel / year. Raw biomass and algal oil can be cracked just like raw crude, in fact after processing you could actually use the algal cake left over (after removing the sulphur) as a feed, that is pelletize whatever isn't turned into glycerin or B100.

This brings me to my next question, why isn't anyone doing this? (they are actually) but it's happening very quietly and behind the scenes and the companies that are starting it are big.