Community Activism and the Capital Region Energy Forum (Part 3)

Sharkles has written a blog entry that may interest you, april05. It's called Algae Biofuels: Better Than Ethanol?

Hi Moose - Nice piece Sharkles wrote - definitely worth following your link for those wishing to learn more about key companies and individuals researching and developing algae biofuel technology. - april05

Author's Note: Part 4 is now available: click here.

I think he needs to revisit the idea that lignocellulosic and cellulosic ethanol won't compete with food production. The competition between food production and energy production relating ethanol has little to do with the source, since current ethanol production technology doesn't have to compete with food production. The competition is based on the investment markets for futures, and financing. You can make ethanol from waste food, even if you do not recover the cellulosic ethanol. However, garbage as a resource for energy doesn't really exist on the futures market and does not have the stable homogeneous production that food production does. If cellulosic ethanols were to be produced the land used for growing food crops would be changed over to production of better cellulose content to production cost crops like switch grass. So you would compete for land to grow food, thus still competing energy against food. Farmers will grow waht makes them the most money, and futures speculators will drive any investments into energy (and they are going to want energy to be derived from something they can manipulate the prices and market availability of). So the real solution is to create a market sector for garbage on the futures market. But how do you do that when such energy production depends highly on the quality of the waste material, and futures market speculators know nothing about the product quality just the gross quantities traded and values.

Possibly we could start markets for purer forms of energy? Carbon derived from biomass. Purified Methane, etc?

While it sounds good, it isn't really the way futures markets develop. The investment markets come when a industry has developed such that there is demand from investors in the market. Unfortunately, this mean new emerging industry sectors with little established market history and potentially high volatility won't receive the influx of investment monies seen by well established older industries with a well known history. Waste as a fuel source represents a high risk long term investment program, unlike corn which will always have a stable supply of buyers. And, without any impetus from buyers that promote the value of the industry, they won't generate much interest for investment. Lacking large amounts of capital inflow, the industry will grow much slower.

Also there is a company of researchers from UCB that aredeveloping method to go into production of bio-diesel from hybrid algae. So there has been recent research in the field since the Late 1990s.

Hi RCE,

Thanks for letting us know about the research that continued, in California, into hybrid algae as a fuel source. It's good to know this research didn't stop entirely in the US.

Touching on your comment on landfills: Here in NYS/Albany, a friend of mine from France was studying (as part of his master's or PhD work?) the feasibility of mining energy from landfills (methane, etc.?) back as far as 1992-93, I think for the State of New York/Wadsworth Labs.

Seemed like a nutty idea to me back then, but now I realize he was ahead of his time. I understand the City of Albany extracts energy (from methane) from a landfill just outside of the city limits (ANSWER's facility - Pinebush area). A little bit of upside from all the smell I get as I often pass by that landfill in my car. :)

- april05

Actually I saw the Berkeley researchers on the discovery channel or something discussing there research and the company they were forming last year. They had developed some hybrid algae that was way more productive than natural algae for oil, and the show followed them to some interviews with investors regarding their start-up company. I am not sure though how well they have progressed with the start-up recently.

Yeah, now mining methane from landfills has become pretty common for many modernized facilities. Though it may not be the best way to go about collecting the wasted energy. A friend of mine from Holland told me that one facility he designed for ethanol production used vegetative food waste to generate ethanol. We could collect much more energy more rapidly by segregating out the vegetative matter for processing into such fuels. (Commercial food processing facilities waste a lot of food matter that could easily be segregated at the source for such energy recovery, as it is now for land disposal or composting). Since modern landfills use the dry cell design, they drastically impair the biological kinetics to generate methane, as infiltration of water is severely limited to protect underlying groundwater and exfiltrations to surface waters. This means the rate of energy recovery from materials is much, much slower than the rate at which we place energy bearing materials into landfills. Plus there are benefits from the State and Federal government for diverting more waste from entering landfills. One of the common diversions used currently, Composting, releases a large amount of the stored energy to the atmosphere, along with CO2. Maybe we could recover the carbon from the waste as a fuel. While in the end we would not gain anything on the CO2, we might not lose more and could recover some energy in a useable form for use. And, if a cellulosic ethanol process becomes available, we could just take the compost heaps, before bioreactions, and dump all that cellulose into the ethanol bioreactors. Of course there is no avenues for energy speculators to invest, so there could be substantial resistance to the idea of using waste to make fuel for general public use. Currently many operations are owned by public agencies, with some labor and operations contracted out. And, the few large companies deal more with the collection and transportation of waste, and sometimes with landfill operations, but have had some real issues in the recent past with stock manipulations and such. It seems like there would have to be some changes in the investment markets to facilitate such waste to energy recovery programs.

Hi RCE - Many thanks for all the detail on algae production, methane extraction from landfills, and composting. I'm grateful for your educating me on this.

I agree to a point and think the free-market/private sector will play a larger role at some point, assuming there's ethics training and background screening for the traders involved, to help get good people (I like to think of them as "Green Patriots") to participate in this. The private sector folks I know personally working in this field now seem like good people, and so I think the future is bright.

I also see improvements in source collection (for both homes and businesses) as a good place to look to that would yield good results (in terms of collecting bio-waste with energy value) for minimal changes. Ira Glass from "This American Life" (Chicago public radio) did a skeptical program on recycling a few years back, which made me re-think my personal recycling habits of the past 25 years or so, and so now I'm a believer in source-point collection reform:

For example, the city of Springfield, MA recently announced they were piloting a program to move from dual- to single- stream collection of household waste, and I believe there's evidence to support this yields more compliance from households, more material being recycled, and less energy being used to perform the recycling. All this because companies collecting the waste made it easier for the the folks in their homes to participate.

A tweak on Springfield's program or programs like it might be to get the recycling staff to also separate-out organic, energy-rich waste (maybe they're already doing this?) from homes, restaurants, and other businesses.

Bigger picture, I think we (the US) would need to take the remaining corruption out of garbage collection (akin to NYC's reform efforts in the 90's), and make it a more interesting field to attract more talent (higher salaries, tailored college courses). Canada (Toronto comes to mind) and Europe, along with what's going on in Springfield, might be good places to look to for how to do this.

- Larry

Yes many facilities are already separating organic wastes in order to meet state mandated waste reduction policies that were implemented to meet federal guidelines. The organic wastes are typically composted.