50 Responses

1. Algae is the by-product of bacterial growth – the green slime you see on cut flowers in water or fish tanks is psuedomonas bacteria – google it and you’ll see how powerful the little critter is.

2. oh my, this is so exiting!!!!!! I have a lot of faith in the future, this technology will help clean the planet while keeping us on the road at the same time, and I read that plastics can also be made from these algae oil, I think that in a not too far future cars will be hybrids using algae fuel and electric generators, hydrogen seems to be quite too expensive to obtain and difficult to handle to be cheap enough to be commercially viable, this technology is wondrous!!!!!!!

3. @corduroy99 I believe all you need is water and sunlight , as algae always grows in my fish tanks after a few days , and I always put some algae eaters in there to clean the tank , but we still need to get past the oil companies and they will lie there ass off and kill people or threaten them to keep there game going , even when it pollutes the whole gulf and beyond , very insane , we need to get some real laws passed now that mandates oil usage ending , we dont need it , watch FUEL .

4. @supperstorm
   all kinds of industry gases contain comparatively huge amounts of CO2 and are able to serve well for the algae growth. There also have been projects about this but it wasn’t “profitable” because of the low oil price in comparison to the algae product! What irony!

5. where they get their CO2? the air CO2 is it enough for large production?

6. “Something you might find in ponds or rivers, or even your bathroom.” If you have algae in your bathroom you need to do some cleaning. o_O But anyways, I really hope this takes off like fuck so we can stop stealing oil under the guise of counter-terrorism.

7. wow awesome

8. Disgustingly green gold

9. szuper…….. dr.Rémay László algamen

10. @criticallistenphile

    And while I’m no biologist (just a mere chemistry major, focus on explosives) I know the basics of algae. This is why I’m so interested in trying a home made version of the system myself, with some naturally occurring algae. I know it won’t be as effective as lab produced algae, but hell, I still want to see what happens.

11. @criticallistenphile

    This I know. But you said that you replaced the water in your system with city tap water, which means that the system is not closed 100% of the time. This means that “fuel” could get into the system which would allow the algae to continue it’s metabolic processes.

12. @AndrewDeLong Essentially, algae can grow in the harshest of environments, it doesn’t require actual land, and requires less energy input per hydrocarbon output than grass, corn, soy, etc. All others require environmental destruction to produce. Algae, does not. It can grow in the desert in tubes.

13. @AndrewDeLong This information comes from the University of Washington science department. A professor there is the brains behind a book recently published about the use of biomass in the production of hydrocarbons. She spoke in one of my courses at length about how algae is the only plant that makes sense when all other plants are considered.

14. @AndrewDeLong The system is completely closed, otherwise my computer would overheat and I’d always be low on water. It’s the same as a car’s cooling system essentially. There are no openings to allow for evaporation, and any leaks endanger the engine. Algae will grow in a closed system with no problem. It does need fuel for growth, but it does not need exposure to open air to grow.

15. @fhumnagads

    Pure Deionized water has no nutrients. But naturally occurring water does have minerals in it. Also, the CO2 as well as the water itself acts as nutrients for the algae.

16. @criticallistenphile

    Actually, the nutrients would come from the chlorine, which when used in city water, isn’t pure, but diluted with other substances, carbon being among them. Also, those clear tubes might be plastic, which is HEAVILY carbon based. Not to mention the way you describe it, you would have to have transferred the water to your system which could allow for any contaminants to enter the system. If algae grew in your coolant system it was definitely not a completely closed system

17. @criticallistenphile water from a air conditioner drain is about 10-30ppm from what I’ve measured here and city water is about 250-300ppm. Im sure that there are nutes enough in the city water to grow a batch of algie. I use the water from my air conditioner to fill the fish tank because if this.

18. cool stuff. Gas is going up to day

19. National Geographic- polar algae forests,sea of antarctica.Carbon dioxide,seemingly there’s alot of that naturally,like dry ice

20. Very cool video….

21. @r8wing no you throw dog food or something in there for protein it eats it

22. Algae are protists, not plants. They feed on carbon which can be found in the air or in water. This is a great concept for bio-fuel as it takes much less real estate, has a significant yield, and has very little turn around. Unfortunately, I don’t suspect we’ll be purchasing algae power of any variety any time soon.

23. @r8wing Although I understand your intentions, you have oversimplified algae’s ability to grow in water and completely underestimated it as a species. I have a water cooled computer. It has clear hoses so I can see the water in the inlet and outlet. I was supposed to use purified water in my system, but got lazy and used clorinated city water. After a while, I began to see stringy green stuff in the lines. It was algae. It grew in a closed loop system with no nutrients.

24. Dude, no organism can live on sunlight alone. Plants extract minerals from soil and use sunlight to convert them into organic matter and energy. Algae are plants, and have to extract their minerals from water.

25. Water doesn’t have nutrients

26. We can maybe get a few hundred million gallons of oil if we could somehow squeeze out all the oil of all the Alge on earth at the moment…but that won’t last even a day
    Again just the US uses 1.2 BILLION Gallons a day,the whole world uses 4.8 BILLION gallons of oil a day…biofuel is not possible without a shitload of hydroponics

27. The U.S. Oil “Haabbit” is 1.2 billion gallons a day

    If you was to strip all the food crop at the moment, all the grass,the trees,the bushes,and other plant life in the united states and convert it into oil we can support the “Habbit” for exactly 1 and 1/2 day

28. @TheRealArchAngel Biofuel is not going to compete with food sources. America has such a large agri industry, it would definitely be able to support both. The real question is practicality. Whether or not the means to attain biofuel is worth its effects on the environment.

29. hell yeah bikes are awesome.

30. @wrdeboise
    i second that.
    when you think about green technology all the companies selling products are using power to create their product. thus you just tripled co2 out put including that POS prius that you drive.

31. He does not know more than the guy talking…he is just parroting some shit that he read on a piece of paper he found on a park bench.

32. future of transport = bicycle, it’s an amazing machine
    biofuel- 1 banana= 3-4miles

33. Id like to know who the guy is starts asking questions about 40:00 into this. He seems to know more then the guy talking.. Ive heard this whole so called theory about ethanol useing 3 time the amount of petrol then what you get out. Thats Bullshit! And I have no idea where the hell it cane from.. Like this guy says, its slietly energy possitive but but still not a great idea.

34. Your name seems to suggest a slight conflict of interest. That aside, there is a silver bullet: watch?v=3JATBObk4p8

35. Because even electric cars have to get their electricity from somewhere. Where are we getting alot of it now, COAL. Then there’s batteries that have to be disposed of, they take alot of resources to create. There’s no silver bullet my friend.

36. stan meyer look into him

37. I want to see a video about the B.S. that is Co^2 as a greenhouse gas.

38. 100 years of reserves is insignificant and thinking only 100 years in the future is very short term thinking given that the waste will cause trouble for thousands of years

39. Question is, was the algae oil extraction method similar to what Valcent is using?

40. It is all about logic and common sense into invention and/or improving a current technology and its system. I barely hear our politicians going for vegetable oil usage or the Sterlin Steam Engine. Search for on youtube: PAINSCourt’s video on “Solar Chicken.”

41. around 44 min this guy completely ruined his credibility by trying to argue that things published in the jounral Science could be used to “back anything” . his 3 gal petro for 1 gal ethanol is wack, its slighly positive (~30% reduction in CO2) according to the jounral Science… which cites a meta-analysis (i.e. like 10 studies) which were complied by the dept. Energy and Agriculture.

42. I did some further research and their was a pilot plant launched in April 07. They had to shut it down because… get this… it was producing too much algae (and the algae extraction equipment was about twice as expensive as they thought it would be). Longer term that seems like a great problem to have, hopefully we’ll see the extraction problem kicked.

43. Valcent is pushing the edge of envelope with algae with their vertical process, which can be used to grow other crops as well. They have GREAT potential. I have heard about a company in CA that is building or built an algae oil refinery capable of processing 5 million gallons per month (don’t quote me). A company in New Zealand has already gone commercial producing algae oil from municiple overflow sewage. Aquagrow or Aquaflow is the name of the company. MIT is tweeking a process as well.

44. Estimates for the cost of a gallon of gas inclusive of the cost to “protect” that oil are $8-$15. The US economy felt the initial shocks of becoming an oil importer in the 70s under
    Jimmy Carter, since then we’ve been living a “borrow and spend” lie.

45. Some waste is (has become) recyclable, newer reactors are high temperature reactors (not generation I and II reactors like 3 mile island or Chernobyl). There is more than 100 years worth of uranium reserves. There are still huge questions about what to do with the waste. There is also potential for fusion (more likely Bussard/Farnsworth Fusor than the tokamak style fusion reactor) and some interesting theory and research on Thorium based reactors (safer, less radioactive, cheaper fuel)

46. Valcent Products (Vertigro) has developed a way to grow more algae in the same square footage of land (and with more automation). As far as I know they don’t have data from a real pilot plant and there are some people that find their production estimates mathematically unlikely. I hope they’re not just blowing marketing smoke, but until I see real results with cost/barrel equivalents I’m going to be skeptical (they’ve announced a running bio reactor but not results).

47. It also works in Greenland (and Iceland) because they have low population to natural energy ratio (geothermal, wind, wave, small scale hydro).

48. Hydogen works great in Greenland because they make electricty using geothermal sources.

49. electric diesel hybrids getting over 100 mpg and take incentives for reroofing your home with solar shingles
    ( oksolar d o t c o m / roof )

50. If I was living back in the states, I’d probably write to a local government about pushing for using algae for biofuel. That way, they can’t make up excuse that they haven’t heard of a much better alternative.