Algae Oil

Posted: October 14th, 2008
at 2:14pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: green

Comments: 1 comment



 

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  1. The numbers don’t work.

    1 acre = 4000 square meters
    8 hours a day max sunlight (overestimate)
    1kw per square meter sunlight (overestimate, ignores clouds)
    Thats 11680000 Kilowatt hours per year of sunlight max
    i.e. 11 mega watt hours
    1 litre of petrol contains 9.7kwh of energy
    So even at 100% algae efficiency with 100% of the light from the sun, we’re talking 1204 litres a year of petrol per acre not 20000.

    A more realistic measurement is 300 litres per year, which is 2 barrels of oil per acre per year. Pretty good, but no way near as good as he makes out.

    84 million barrels a day consumed, so we’d need 365*84/2 million acres = 15 billion acres

    So we’d need 23437500 square miles. Area of United states is 3537441 square miles, i.e. an area near the equator 7 times bigger than the United States to grow enough algae just to replace the petroleum we use (never mind the natural gas).

    Noone

    15 Oct 08 at 4:38 am

     


 

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