Bio-Based Ideas

Recently, NPR radio was talking about a plan of how the military plan might become more sustainable and made the point that the plan was still nebulous apart from some general goals. This reminded me that I still wanted to summarize some of the talks from the SD-CAP 2011 meeting I went to earlier this year. The first talk came from the keynote speaker, General Kamin, who was talking about the NAVI’s efforts on reducing the dependence on foreign oil within the NAVI. He started by pointing out that with a large amount of submarines, operational aircraft, and troops, the NAVI is very energy dependent – most of which comes from petroleum. To put things in perspective, the NAVI uses 25% of all the energy within the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense itself uses 93% of all the energy the government is using. Because the price for energy was low historically, efficiency has not been an issue until now. General Kamin went on to highlight that the Navi has increased it...

This is still from the SD-CAP Symposium. Another talk I wanted to summarize was Professor Stephen Mayfield's talk titled "Where we are - where we are going" The presentation slides can be found at the following location for anyone interested: http://algae.ucsd.edu/documents/SD-CABsymposiumMayfield.pdf Professor Mayfield’s talk was more of an overview talk meant to introduce the audience to the topic of algal biofuels. It could be divided into 2 parts: the problem, and the solution. The Problem Professor Mayfield started by making the point that between 1900 and today energy has been a rapidly growing market reaching $5.8 trillion today from just $ 0.4 billion. The future energy market is predicted to double in value within just ten years. There is an interesting correlation between energy use and wealth of a nation. The United States according this chart is one of the wealthiest nations in the world while also using proportionally more resources. The future growt...

Introduction With prices for crude oil spiking in the recent past, and an unstable Middle East and intensifying effects of climate disruptions, the Obama administration and governments around the world have been promoting the development, and deployment of newer, more sustainable forms of energy generation, amongst which are biofuels . What are Biofuels? At the heart of every hydrocarbon based fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, coal) are anaerobic degradation processes of organic material. For fossil fuels , the source of organic material comes from planctonic life, plants, and animals that lived and died millions of years ago. For biofuels, the source of organic material comes from planctonic life, plants or other sources of much more recent origin. The important concepts to note are: 1.) Building up organic matter removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 2.) Burning hydrocarbon based fuels releases the carbon originally tied up in the form of carbon dioxide. So when we pump up t...