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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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100 million pigs are slaughtered each year in the USA alone, producing 110 million tons of waste. Much of these ends up in rivers and fed the expansion of a New Jersey-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Billions of dollars are spent on waste transportation and treatment, and regulations continue to become more stringent and cost-intensive to satisfy our desire for a clean environment. Meanwhile, we have a growing need for biofuels that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and the world's finite supply of crude petroleum.
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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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We’re already extracting biogas from sewage and spreading treated sewage solids on farms and open space, so it’s also possible to run our cars on biofuel from sewage, too. Specifically, running them on sewage grease. An enormous amount of grease enters our sewer systems - about 495 million gallons annually in the USA alone. Most of it gets captured and collected at sewage treatment plants.
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Many sources of energy are being wasted. This can be in the form of building air conditioners or refrigeration units that vent heat to the atmosphere, or even the heat given off automobile engines. The U.S. Department of Energy reports that the available seven quadrillion Btu of waste heat sources exceeds the current production of all other U.S. renewable power sources combined. This includes hydroelectric, wood, biofuels, geothermal, wind and solar photovoltaic.
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Ethanol is a rather controversial technology. While many automotive companies are heavily investing in developing ethanol production, releasing ethanol vehicles, and building up the ethanol infrastructure, the process has been much maligned by the United Nations and academia. The UN and various professors have released regular statements blasting the technology for threatening to raise food prices on basic food stocks such as corn. They say that this is already happening, and is causing an increase in famine worldwide.
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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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