Re: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

['Chris de Morsella' via Everything List]

________________________________
 From: John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com 
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2014 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?
 


On Mon, Jul 14, 2014  'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List 
<everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:



>> So it looks like my estimate that if you want to go with solar then a 
>> factory that covered 6 square miles of the Earth’s surface  would be needed 
>> to keep just one 747 in the air may have been a a bit on the low side.
>>
>> It seems rather more likely that jet fuel will be provided by synthetic 
>> (engineered) algae grown in hot desert areas using brackish -- or sea -- 
>> water
 
The efficiency of photosynthesis at capturing the sun's energy is between 3% 
and 6% depending on the particular plant,  the efficiency of my solar cells was 
15%. So to keep just one 747 in the air you will need either 6 square miles of 
solar cells or about 18 square miles of nasty algae ponds. Do you really thing 
such a monstrosity would be a lesser insult to the land than one LFTR which 
would have a footprint that was smaller by a factor of more than a million?

 John K Clark


Algae biofuels can be produced on land that is currently producing nothing. 
Each square kilometer of barren desert land (+ a source of slat or brackish 
water that cannot be used for growing crops) can yield 4,000+ tons of high 
grade jet fuel per year...  worth at current market prices  around $4 million.
Though algae biofuels are quite ready for prime time yet -- as I mentioned 
there are still problems harvesting the green goo and squeezing the valuable 
oil (and other by-products) out of it... but it surely holds promise as a 
potential source of high quality liquid hydrocarbon. Have you driven through 
the deserts of Arizona or Sonora state in Mexico lately -- empty desert land is 
not exactly in short supply... you know.
Chris
 




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