You know, in 2017, a scientific paper (1) explained that nitrogen depleted microalgae biomass is able to provide a stable figure of 500 L of methane / kg of biomass introduced daily in methanizer during the whole process of methanization (160 days) on the contrary of non nitrogen depleted microalgae biomass. Recycling of methanization digestate for microalgae culture (2) is something known. Conditions for high rate of microalgae biomass production (3, 4) are known. For example, 1 ha of open ponds can provide 90 t of biomass/year and space can be saved with vertical bioreactors. I have made a stupide calculation : with 200000 square kilometers of open ponds, enough biomass could be produced for methanization in order to produce 1000 billions cubic meters of methane or the production of natural gas in USA. In USA and for example in Texas, there is enough wasteland for that. For the record, the extent of Permian oil field is 200000 square kilometers and it doesn’t cover completely Texas. Any thoughts about this?
(1) https://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-017-0871-4
(3) https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/green-2013-0018/html
(4) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211926416300571?via%3Dihub
jean-francois,
Are you the gentlemen shown in this link?
https://www.fwd50.com/speaker/251/jean-francois-fleury
200,000 square kilometers of land is just shy of 50,000,000 acres of land. 10 of the largest counties in Texas are in West Texas. Brewster and Pecos Counties and ranked 1 and 2, respectively in land size. Brewster County is 6,184 sq miles which is just shy of 4,000,000 acres of land and it is also home to the Big Bend National Park which is the 14th largest national park in the USA.
This is a screen shot of a satellite photo of most of Pecos, Terrell and Brewster counties. Where would you suggest a 50 million acre microalgae biomass facility be located in this waste land?
200000 km of ponds. Caterpillar is going to love you. For the next 200 years while you build it. So what's the biomass that will feed all of that algae? While I applaud creative thinking, physics still apply. Remember, there is no free lunch. This would literally be a diesel to methane converter. The most dangerous sentence you will ever hear, starts with " all we have to do is. . ."
JFF , impractical .We are going to need a lot of boats to collect the biomass from the lakes and we are talking of 200000 sq km . I am not even talking about the conversion plants etc . Got some diesel ? Not going to happen .