Vertical Algae for Biofuel

[Garden Green]

You know it is amazing what you find when you're not looking. Apparently, algae have obscenely large amounts of lipids and because they grow quickly, a lot more oil is to be had from the pond scum than from corn or other biofuel driven food stuffs. They are saying that they can get 100,000 gallons of vegetable oil from the algae per acre per year.

Valcent wants to build something like a 30 story vertical farm in Texas for the stuff. They are working on these huge vertical hydroponic driven, solar powered, grey water recycling buildings for other large cities, too. Just one will be like 83.7 million to build but it can produce something like 4 million heads of lettuce per year verses the 350,000 to 450,000 one gets from farm land.

I think it's nice that its all actually in the works now. Investors, law makers, the designers and other officials have been meeting for the past few years and talking vacant lot or uninhabitable, unusable lands like the wind whipped, sun scorched, dry areas of Texas and New Mexico and one for the Hawaii islands, too.

There is enough area in the US in unusable land that they can use for these biofuel factories that it could completely end our dependence on petroleum. And a couple of those buildings in every major city would see an end to any type of food shortages.

They have a lot of it on their website: http://www.valcent.net/s/Ecotech.asp

[gardengirl72]

I think we are pretty lucky to live in this technological era. There are so many things that are being developed. One of the keys is figuring out how to deal with our waste. There are a lot of landfills and farmers that produce large amounts of manure which both produce methane. That methane is "harvested" and used as fuel.

[GoldenAcres]

Growing algae vertically makes so much sense.

New Mexico is one place that is leading the race in this technology.
http://www.koat.com/video/19923021/index.html

Here is the website for the project. They are now running test trials and really hope to have this in use in about two years.
http://www.cehmm.org/

Fascinating, makes me more and more interested in a bio diesel car. It would be so cool if at some point we all could be growing algae on a small scale for our own cars.

[Garden Green]

Thanks for the links. I think this is really awesome technology that should be realized a lot sooner than they are projecting. Like last decade or so. :D

But I could really imagine this on the skyline in my city. And several of them in other larger cities that surround my area. Like Atlanta.