A combination of lots of old ideas
that nobody seems to have put together
I have an idea of how to manufacture oil cheaply. I don't mean how to suck it out of the ground, but how to actually make it. I started with the question:
Q: Where does oil usually come from?
A: The ground, stupid.
Okay, you probably guessed that that isn't the whole answer. Why in the world is there oil in the ground? You have probably heard the term "fossil fuel". That does not, in fact, mean that dinosaurs turned into oil. All it really means is that a lot of old life forms turned into oil. Exactly what sort of old life forms? Mostly it's the oil-producing types of algae. You see, in certain parts of the world, oil-producing algae flourished in the distant past, and a tiny fraction of that algae happened to be trapped in various ways underground. The stuff that was trapped well enough and stayed long enough eventually turned into several end products, mostly crude oil.
That leads to the question, why did it stop being produced? The answer is that it never did stop. It's just that we're extracting oil from the ground a few thousand times more quickly than it's being put back. The last question is: can we increase the rate of oil production? The answer is yes. Not only that, we can actually make oil from things that nature wouldn't normally turn into oil.
Recently, a process called thermal depolymerization has been, well I won't say perfected, but at least improved drastically by a company called changing world technologies. Their process is patented, but for a commercial venture it could probably be licensed from them. What they do is by carefully applying heat and pressure to a substance, they can mimic the process that takes place when oil-to-be is underground turning into oil. The end result is to have basically the same process happen, but in hours instead of millions of years. They weren't the first to come up with the idea of breaking down complex organic molecules this way, but they were the first to improve the technology to where it might be economically feasible. Mostly what they have been doing is to convert certain kinds of industrial wastes (turkey byproducts, sewage, etc) into oil and the kinds of minerals that are extracted. While this works, it is inherently limited to the supply of these kinds of byproducts. If the supply of oil from the ground suddenly dried up, this method couldn't supply our current demand for oil no matter how much effort was put into it; there just wouldn't be as much oil.
The final stage in my thinking was that these kinds of oil producing algae, if available in large quantities, could be fed directly into a thermal depolymerization plant. There are a few online folks who have investigated this idea, the best I've found being the UNH Biodiesel Group's paper. I've also found some intelligent discussion here. For this idea to work, you need both photosynthetically efficient and high growth rate plants. The best for this, to my knowledge, is algae.
Requirements
As I see it, for algae to grow quickly and efficiently, they need a few things:
- Proper nutrients
- Carbon Dioxide
- Water
- Lots of Sunlight
Since oil consists only of carbon and hydrogen, the things that will need to be constantly fed to a system like this would be carbon dioxide and water. The net effect of an oil-algae farm would be to turn CO2, water and sunlight into oil. One method would be to just use the ambient supply of these things. After all, part of the air is carbon dioxide, and it will rain eventually. You could just make sure to pump in some water and air, and let the algae fend for themselves. A more efficient idea, I think, would be to use ambient sunlight (it'd be very expensive to use mirrors, and it's probably not necessary), pump in the water, and locate near a carbon dioxide source of some kind. The most common such source would probably be a fossil-fuel electric power plant. A coal power plant that has a lot of sulfur in the exhaust would probably not be suitable (as it might damage the algae), but a plant that uses higher quality coal would probably be acceptable. Natural gas plants would be even better, as long as they're run most of the time (a lot of natural gas power plants are run only intermittently).
The way I see it is to make a constant stream of substance, starting with the water and nutrients and seed algae, and pump it through a series of tubes (or open ponds, if that's more efficient), at the end leaving a soup of a carrying capacity of algae, and minimal leftover water and other minerals. The algae would then be filtered out, the non-oil remains used for feedstock for the next cycle of algae.
The idea here is to have large transparent pipes which the whole stuff is flowing through, with initial inputs once at the beginning, and periodic inputs at various points along the way. This approach allows the sort of streamlining that doesn't really seem reasonable with the method of growing it in ponds. The point of forcing carbon dioxide into the pipeline only periodically is that if you dissolve all of the necessary carbon dioxide right away, you get carbonic acid, which will mess up the pH, probably far enough as to hinder the growth of the algae (or even kill it).
The most fundamental reason why this approach is better than growing actual plants is that algae can grow exponentially in only a few days. For ordinary plants to go through a single generation takes around 5 weeks for the fastest I know of. This means that algae production can be brought much closer to an industrial process, rather than a farm.
Heading Off Criticism from (ill-informed) Environmentalists:
I can hear it now: "But you're still burning oil! You're still killing the environment!". There is a fundamental misconception here. The big problem with burning fossil fuels isn't the fact that you're burning something. If I burn a dead tree, I have not released any new CO2 into the environment, only changed the form of some of it. The problem with burning fossil fuels is that you're pulling material that has been sequestered from the environment for, sometimes, millions of years out all at once. The idea is that too much of that in a short time could have drastic, and difficult to predict, consequences.
That really doesn't apply to a algae-oil facility, as the oil in this case did not come from underground sources, but rather from (one way or another) materials already in the biosphere. If I pull 30 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere to make about 10 tons of oil (since CO2 weighs about 3 times as much as the carbon it's associated with, and the hydrogen weighs very little), and then burn that oil, it will produce that original 30 tons of CO2, so the whole process is a wash for the carbon dioxide cycle. Besides that, this system is really a form of solar power.
Solar Power
This system is essentially an inefficient solar power plant. The way this differs from a conventional plant is that you don't have to use up the oil produced right away. The photosynthetic efficiency of these sorts of algae can be as high as 10% to 15%, so the overall efficiency of this system will be that 10-15% minus whatever amount of energy is required to run the operation. Since all of the pumping and refining processes can be run by electricity (which can be generated by solar or wind or nuclear facilities; it doesn't have to be fossil fuel), the efficiency at making oil will be somewhat higher than the overall solar energy efficiency. This may look bad compared to the high-end photovoltaic solar cells (some of which get over 20% efficiency), remember that this is also converting the energy into a form that's easy to store and transport.
Economics
This part is the real rub. I am pretty well convinced that you'll never see this system competing with $30 per barrel oil. There is just too much industrial effort involved to produce it that efficiently. Considering the issue of a Hubbert Peak in world oil prices, I think it's likely that we have recently passed or will soon pass the world's peak production of oil. Since after the peak, the demand for oil doesn't go away (but supply continues to diminish) the price can only go up. At some point, the price will become high enough (and stay there for long enough) that a system of producing oil from oil algae will become inevitable (unless an even cheaper method comes along first). Whether it'll be my pipelines I don't care to guess, but it will be something. This means that there will not be a perpetual increase in the price of oil. After it gets high enough, folks will start making it by other methods, effectively putting a price cap on oil.
Did I leave something out? Is there a problem that'll sink the whole plan? Comments welcomed at my email.
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