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A company based in Los Angeles, announced a potential breakthrough in getting oil from pond scum. One big difference from the spate of recent announcements in the algae-sphere: Origin’s new technology promises a better way to “milk” algae to extract their natural oils. Other approaches involve genetically-engineering algae to excrete hydrocarbon-like liquids' and cost is still a huge issue for algae-to-oil operations.
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Excrement from the billions of animals raised every year in America's factory farms fouled watersheds, especially in the South, feeding oxygen-gobbling algae blooms responsible for rapidly-spreading coastal dead zones.
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Corn is beginning to seem more and more like the has-been-that-never-was of the biofuel feedstock scene. It is rapidly losing its place (if it ever really had one) as the pivotal element in the biofuel picture. Non-food plants like crambe and algae are front and center in the next wave of fuel production. There is even a place for animal carcasses and human remains! Are dead bodies— human or otherwise— the next big thing in heating?
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The idea of harvesting algae from the open ocean keeps popping up each time oil prices reach records. In the 1970s, several similar ideas were launched and received modest funding, both in the USA, Japan as well as the EU. Seaweed is an energy rich, sustainable resource that does not use up agricultural land.
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Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generated, according to a Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study. The World desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future, but producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is the wrong way to do it, because you use more energy to produce them than you get out from the combustion of these product.
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Algae is the cheapest, highest yielding feedstock for biofuels and biomass for energy. It accumulates waste toxins, grows from polluting waste, does not require conversion of food crops to energy, does not lead to deforestation, and voraciously consumes carbon dioxide. Algae can produce lipid oils for biodiesel, carbohydrates necessary for ethanol, generate hydrogen, generate methane for electrical generation, be used as fertilizer, animal feed, and co-firing in coal electrical plants. Best of all, the energy produced by algae products is carbon neutral as the algae biomass is produced from CO2 in the atmosphere present today.
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We think of human pee as gross and something that ought to be vigorously “cleaned up” or sanitized. However, human urine is actually sterile (unlike faeces, urine is bacteria-free). This liquid by product of our daily lives can be a rich food source if it gets into the RIGHT part of the right ecosystem. Now, most human urine travels untreated into the waterways and the excess Nitrogen and Phosphorus in our urine overfeeds algae (like Red Tide) and effectively suffocates fish.
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