And the algae could be used in waste water treatment. An additional bennie.

That works out 0.4% of the lower 48 states being devoted to this algae. That’s doable and would gain the added benefit of reducing energy losses due to the need to transport.

The ground water that’s available in deserts of the southwest is often brackish.

Fortunately many algae species prefer brackish water.

Australia has abundant sunshine and idle land as well. The production base will be diverse enough to create a truly competitive market. We won’t need to worry so much about energy independence as we do today.

Actually, the southwest’s general lack of water is a problem if handled badly…. but still, there’s a lot of land not doing an awful lot, b/c it’s been split into parcels too small to be meaningful for ranching. This might relieve that if handled well.

The cost/gallon is a number you won’t find in any article on this subject written by an enthusiast, because if they new that number, they wouldn’t be a enthusiasts.

What you should look for in any article about closed-system algae farms is COST. Because that’s what will make or break it. Thats’s where the attention and focus of R&D must be. Withot solving that problem, none of the several advantages of algae matter.

There’s no question that it’s scalable in terms of land and water use. That’s the good news. But that isn’t the problem.

Current biofuels are rapacious users of land and fresh water per gallon of fuel, but they don’t require man-made structures on such an unprecedented scale. 12k square miles may look modest on a U.S. map, but that’s many times more area than all the buildings in the entire country. It’s relatively cheap to scatter seeds on millions of acres. It’s many, many times more expensive to cover the same area with man-made structures.

Building upward won’t help, because the limiting problem isn’t the cost of land. It’s the capital cost of the structures on that land.

The most thorough study I’ve seen concluded that algal fuel from closed systems like Greenfuel’s won’t be competitive with petro-oil until the latter hits $800/barrel. And that’s including generous allowances for economies of scale and improvements in yield.

instead of NIMBY, we will now have the NAIMBY’s

No
Algae
In
My
Back
Yard

I agree that it will be a huge undertaking, but its doable. A journey of a a thousand miles… And with gas prices pushing through the roof, the project is self-financing.

Also, when the US mobilizes to do something – really mobilizes like on an all-out wartime footing – don’t bet against it.

At some point – maybe its $5/gallon, maybe more, our very civilization will be threatened. At that point of desperation we’ll get busy.

At that point all sorts of unthinkable things become politically possible. Federal land in the southwest could be leased free to oil companies to run algae farms.

We have enough public land in the southwest for the whole project.

‘Planting’ an acre for algae isn’t quite as simple as throwing some seeds in the ground. Nonetheless, hopefully the difference in yield will convince people to invest in this technology.

The beauty of this kind of fuel production is that it could be distributed. Fuel could be ‘grown’ where it is needed, rather than shipped around the planet.