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MyspaceNot only is it incredibly risky, it’s financially irresponsible to drill more oil wells. Especially because there is more renewable oil on the surface of the planet than we could ever pump out of the ground.
Multiple companies in America are producing light-sweet crude oil from algae to make high-octane gasoline. I researched three of these: one in Silicon Valley, which Chevron recent bought out; one in San Diego, and one in Texas. The technology is already perfected and production has begun. If we would fund this like we subsidize the oil industry, we could be making 25 percent of our own oil in just five to seven years.
Drilling will never lower costs or produce energy independence for America. Today, only a small fraction of the oil produced in America stays here. Oil companies constantly manipulate stock around the world to cultivate the highest bidders and keep prices inflated. Giving independent oil giants control over U.S. oil reserves to sell on the world market only adds to their incredible wealth and makes us more dependent on them and foreign countries.
Growing algae for gasoline will lower costs at the pump very quickly. Plus it will give us the national security that comes with the independence of producing our own renewable energy supply.
There are strains of algae that are 50 percent light, sweet crude oil. It grows so fast it can double its bloom in an hour. You press the oil out and what’s left can be used for cattle feed or fertilizer. It doesn’t have the toxins that crude oil formed underground for millions of years has. All we need is to ramp up production. Do you know how many greenhouses and presses we can build for the price of one oil rig and a tanker?
I envision greenhouses in every water reclamation plant, purifying water and growing algae. It’s cheap. It’s low tech. It’s light-sweet crude oil, the good stuff, ready for the refinery. There is no change to our infrastructure. Keep your SUV. Algae uses no cropland, displaces no food crops, uses and purifies non-potable water, is carbon neutral, delivers up to 100 times more energy per acre than corn, is the same price as foreign oil, and it’s American.
It’s not just an environmental issue. Drilling for oil is a hundred-year-old archaic and obsolete practice that is way too expensive and unproductive to continue. Google “Algae for Fuel” yourself. The “alternative fuel” that everyone is waiting for is already here. It’s in production. It’s running cars and flying planes. Algae are what fossil fuels were originally made from. It’s always been the most prolific plant on Earth. We can grow it, cultivate it, and refine it just as fast and as cheap as we can drill for it, without any catastrophic environmental risks.
John Reilly, who grew up surfing, diving, and sailing on the ocean, came to Santa Barbara to go to school 27 years ago, and couldn’t leave. He is a material resource planner for a medical/aerospace based company in Carpinteria.
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Comments
On the surface -no pun intended - this sounds really great. What's missing is a complete analysis of the costs: pumping water, adding carbon dioxide (from where in a cost-effective manner?), sugars or whatever is used as food, and, ultimately, squeezing the useful stuff out. Much like the overly-touted hydrogen fuel craziness (the poster child of that lunacy being Arnold dumping it into one of his six Humvees with a sh!t-eating grin on his face), this too may well fall flat on its face under closer scrutiny. Still, I'm fairly confident that it cannot possibly be worse than the business of extracting geologic oil once we capture the true external costs of that nasty process.
tegrat (anonymous profile)
July 11, 2010 at 10:38 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I did tout the good parts. There are some start up costs and improvements in cultivation to be made. But pumping water, feeding and extracting are among the less expensive procedures. Water rec plants and most production facilities pump huge amounts of water already. Food comes from the polluted water. Free. Although you do have to monitor intakes it to increase productivity. So is carbon dioxide if you grow outdoors. In a bioreactor it comes from the same industry you set it up next to. Even breweries give off huge unused amounts of CO2. The only real draw back is that we have to be careful about the strains of algae we produce. We may come across a bacteria that could be a pollutant. The difference between this route and others like hydrogen is no change to infrastructure. You don't need to build or buy a new car and wait for someone to build a hydrogen fueling station near you. If we could support a portion of our gasoline intake it would be better then the 2% or so we produce for ourselves today. There is still a way to go but this is not pie-in-the-sky, "Alternitave fuel" buzz word type stuff. This works and it's here now.
Thanks for the rebuttal.
JR
JWR (anonymous profile)
July 13, 2010 at 3:51 p.m. (Suggest removal)
25% of USA daily oil use is roughly 5 million barrels of oil each day. How many acres of greenhouses will it take to produce that much algae oil?
According to http://peswiki.com/index.php/Director..., one acre of algae _might_ yield 5000 gallons of oil per year. That's about 120 barrels of oil per year, or a bit less than 1/3 barrel of oil per day. So, 5 million barrels of oil per day requires 15 million acres of algae. That's 23000 square miles, or a bit less than the area of the West Virginia.
At the current yield figure they give, 1850 gallons per year per acre, we're talking about 63,000 square miles, almost as much area as Wisconsin.
It's a good idea and worth pursuing, but no complete solution.
CharlesB (anonymous profile)
July 13, 2010 at 6:45 p.m. (Suggest removal)