New “Algoil” Frankenfuel a Good Thing?
Food aid is not being delivered because of fuel costs, and the cost of food is skyrocketing by itself. Biofuel from corn or even switchgrass requires turning agricultural land into not very efficient fields dedicated to fuel production instead. Kurzweil AI reports a Physorg article about genetically altered cyanobacterium (blue-green algae) that produces cellulose and sugars for easy creation of biofuels. Quoting from Physorg:
Brown and Nobles calculate that the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.
Note: That would be bad.
Work with laboratory scale photobioreactors has shown the potential for a 17-fold increase in productivity. If this can be achieved in the field and on a large scale, only 3.5 percent of the area growing corn could be used for cyanobacterial biofuels.
Note: That would be good.
Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.
Note: That would be awesome. Land for growing and grazing could remain unmolested, and I wonder if plentiful seawater (remember the rising sea levels from global warming?) could serve as the “salty water” they mentioned, perhaps after removing hostile or competing organisms.
