Mark Goldes sent me the following information which has direct relevance to any scheme to harvest the bounty of Earth's oceans for transportation fuel.
As many of you know, Mark has been involved in advanced alternative energy thinking for many years prior to "Ultraconductors" and MPI. Nearly forty years ago, his Aesop Institute was a sponsor of the wind car mentioned recently. The Institute, founded in 1973, is a non-profit tax exempt organization with the goal of finding alternatives to fossil and uranium fuels. BTW if any vortician out there knows of a good candidate billionaire (i.e. the rare one with a social conscience) - like the inimitable Richard Branson - and which far-sighted-funder now sees the wisdom of investing in advanced alternative energy projects, like the one we are tossing around this week on vortex, please have them contact Mark directly. Anyway, the new twist on the conversion of sargassum into gasoline comes from George Huber of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It is a revolutionary method for making "green gasoline" from cellulose: basically any sort of wood or grass... I see no good reason why the same process would not be ideal for ocean-derived forms of biomass. Results of Huber's research were published in the April 2008 issue of ChemSusChem, a publication devoted to environmentally-sound chemistry. "Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels," http://www.ecs.umass.edu/biofuels/Images/Roadmap2-08.pdf "We've proven this method on a small scale in the lab," says Huber, "but we need to make further improvements and prove it on a large scale before it's going to be economically viable." Huber's method is a one-step conversion method, whereas other processes like fermentation takes several or dozens of steps. The new catalytic technique involves a special reactor, in which the feedstock undergoes "catalytic fast pyrolysis" the rapid heating to 600 degrees centigrade followed by quick cooling. By adding zeolite catalysts to this process, gasoline range hydrocarbons can be directly produced from cellulose "within sixty seconds." With cellulosic ethanol, your residence time is five to ten days, which means you need to have a much larger reactor for the same output and possibly could not do this onboard the harvesting vessel itself. With the one-step process, conversion could probably be accomplished 24/7, and immediately after harvesting and dewatering, and in series so that feedstock is not stored- only finished product (gasoline for instance). As any sailors may appreciate, the available space onboard even a large catamaran is limited due to the narrow hulls. Here is a smaller version of what a ship might look like without the harvesting apparatus between the hulls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_class_research_ship All of this varied information, none of it particularly unique (since even the Huber pyrolysis process has been known in prior art) is starting to come together into a highly "doable" package for one near term solution to a sustainable and carbon-neutral future... Jones
