G8 + G.Bush, Algae Investments, Helms Death + WHO?? Scientific UnderEstimates
Stafford Williamson
July 08, 2008
Clearly the rest of the leaders in that G8 will be eagerly looking forward to their following meeting with Barak Obama, presumptive Democratic Party nominee, and at this point presumptive next president. The good news however, is that the video included in this story from Buffalo, New York is a press conference remark from our president in which he said, we don't just need people who make big promises we need them to write big checks. That was, of course, in reference to monetary and debt reform and efforts to eradicate poverty in parts of the African continent. Despite his lame-duck status it seems fairly likely that our president will have some significant effect on this topic provided he himself is willing to, " write big checks" and speak loudly enough to embarrass the others if they do not.
Despite the Bush administration's supposed efforts at Middle East Peace, or perhaps because of them, President Bush is likely to be willing to push fairly hard on the issue of African debt and poverty relief in order, at this late stage of his presidency to have some positive legacy for historians to look back upon. Ironically President Bush was probably acutely aware that the next incumbent will have a democratic dominated Congress who will find African debt and poverty relief harmonious with their social and economic policies and therefore likely to find favor despite the transition to a new administration.
As you may know, rock group U2 and especially leader, Bono, have been campaigning in support of these policies for many years now. Bono, himself, has been allowed to address the G8 in the past. What you may not know is the strange alliance of Bono and his cause with the recently deceased Senator Jesse Helms. Known as an arch conservative, "Mr. No" (known more for his opposition to legislation including equal rights, equal schools and voting rights for blacks than for anything he favored) falling into step behind Bono for Senator Helms was distinctly out of character. Unlikely though it was Senator Helms support of antipoverty measures, though uncharacteristic, at least seemed to fall in the realm of possibility. But Africans? Black Africans? Surely this is an indication that Bono is among the most persuasive human beings on earth. The other issue on which Helms was particularly known to be opposed was: foreign aid.
While touching on the subject of senators, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was far afield in support of wind power this week. Speaking from the site of 84 wind generators in the hills of Wyoming, Wyoming County in New York, that is, Senator Schumer was pleased to announce that the New York Public Services Commission has dropped its objections to a Spanish Company acquiring Energy East, the parent company of New York State Electric and Gas and other power producing assets in the state. Iberdrola, the Spanish Company, has pledged to invest two billion dollars in wind energy in the state of New York if the public services commission approves its proposed purchase.
I received an email this week from my friends at OriginOil pointing me to an " excellent" article about investing in the bustling field of algae for energy at www.greenchipstocks.com. Not surprisingly the article contained favorable mention of their company. In fact writer, Nick Hodge, made OriginOil one of his two top picks along with Valcent, on the basis of what he called demonstrated accomplishments. Also mentioned were GreenShift Corporation, Nanoforce Inc., Green Star Products Inc., and PetroSun Inc. Valcent, you will recall is developing the Vertigro process. Green Star Products Inc. (GSPI) has also been much in the news. While PetroSun has reportedly begun cultivating 1100 acres of algae in what appeared to be, formerly, mussel beds near Huston. PetroSun have also announced an algae to biodiesel production facility to process the algae they are growing.
I found a blog from 2006 that mentions that a Spanish company had announced at that time they had succeeded in creating fuel from "plankton".
Matt calls his blog, "Being Matt Hallett: this world of mine" and I haven't really investigated it beyond this particular post at http://www.matthallett.com/2006/07/26/biodiesel-from-plankton-announced-by-spanish-company/#comment-1381 although (now that I have looked around a bit), sadly it seems Matt has abandoned this blog back in May of 2007. Too bad. He has a TON of nice pictures from his trip to Asia.
I posted the following comment over there.
Of course Matt's original post is almost 2 years old at this time (July 3, 2008) but a lot has happened in the "algae to oil" field since then. About the same time a New Zealand company Aquaflow Bionomic Company (ABC) announced that they had created biodiesel from common mixed varieties of algae they just "found" in large sewage ponds ("wastewater processing plants"). Algae is used in this way to clean the water of "nutrients" (mainly nitrogen, but others too) so that the water released into the environment doesn't have such undesirable effects. Algae and "plankton" are virtually interchangable terms for microscopic sized plants (although "zooplankton" are slightly different, are considered "animals", and 'eat' other plankton).
Algae is the "next great hope" for bio-based fuels because the boom in "biodiesel" is grinding to a ... well, not quite a halt, but a definite slowdown, as prices for common vegetable oils rise to the point where they are almost as high as the biodiesel being produced. It's hard to make any profit that way.
I regularly discuss biodiesel, and especially biodiesel from algae in my column on the American Chronicle syndicate of (about 20) websites.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewByAuthor.asp?authorID=1059
It is also probably not so surprising that all this interest in biofuels (from me, and the rest of the world)has resulted in our creating a concentrated algae cultivation system. See our press release at http://energy.psykr.us/press/ for more details. Our company's overall goal is to develop sewage into fuels, and we want to accomplish that worldwide. Certainly it would eliminate the wasted energy used to move fuels from distant refineries to the urban markets for those fuels.
Algae is also in the news these days because it is filling the harbor in China (Qingdao) where they plan to hold the Olympic sailing events. While there has been a lot of negative talk about never being able to grow enough "crops" to convert to biofuels, I think when you see the pictures of 10,000 people and too-many-to-count trucks and skiploaders trying to clear this away a reported 100,000 tons of algae from this one harbor, that the "growth potential" for algae is pretty much unlimited.
(Well, that's what I said a few days ago)
I will repeat here what I emailed a colleague this week, that after calculating a modest 20% lipid content for those 100,000 tonnes of algae been cleared away would provide approximately six million gallons of biodiesel. I almost cried to see them being hauled away.
But no soon had I talked about unlimited growth potential than this showed up in my inbox.
6,970,000,000 that's number of gallons of biofuel that some scientists estimate can be produced by cultivating energy crops on degraded or abandoned farm and pastureland. Elliot Campbell, Robert Genova and Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, in partnership with David Lobell of Stanford University, say that by using abandoned crop and pastureland one could expect to produce some 2.1 billion tons of energy crops, amounting to 41 exajoules (one exajoules equals 1,000,000,000 billion joules) (yes, 1,000,000,000 billion joules, which they estimate to approximately equal 170 million barrels of oil), but they claim that this would only amount to about 8% of worldwide energy needs. This assumes the use of 4.7 million square kilometres of land, half the total of all 50 U.S. states. The same scientists estimate that renewable energy sources will NEVER be able to supply more than about 10% of the energy needs in highly industrialized countries like the United States, France, Britain, and Germany. I was going to express incredulity that Carnegie and Stanford are destroying all sense of creativity and imagination as they turn out scientists, but I will be charitable and say that presumably these gentlemen have not seen Qingdao Harbor recently.
There is a gentleman out there, (well several folks really) under the influence of alcohol. This man's name is, Robert Jackman, and while it is true that he is " under the influence" of alcohol, he is not a drunk (at least, not that I know of). It would be fairer to say that he is under the influence of author David Blume. He also seemed to be a subscriber to the theories of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla inasmuch as I have seen Mr. Jackman cite Mr. Khosla's prediction that we may well see a significant drop in the prices of oil and gas before we transition to predominantly biofuels. In any case Robert Jackman is an enthusiastic member of a community known as Alcohol Can Be A Gas, or ACBAG. Robert has left us a rather interesting report on his experiments with a "flex fuel" Subaru. Actually it is an "unmodified" vehicle according to the topic under which he files his story. His basic story is that starting by adding 1 gallon per tank full he has transitioned his Subaru from standard unleaded gas at 87 octane to a mixture which is 60% E-85 and 40% pump gas (PG). Robert claims that the result of this cautious blending is that he and his Subaru can now drive at 40 miles per hour in fifth gear without it pinging as it did on pump gas at the same speed, due, he believes to a net increase in octane. Oh, and in addition to the "green" aspects of using a renewable biofuel, his E-85 costs approximately $1.00 less than the pump gas. So he saves about US$6 per tank full by blending himself at his friendly local Tuscon gas station that also sells him his E-85.
On This Week with George Stephanopolous this morning while discussing Senator Barak Obama's willingness to fine tune his policy implementation of withdrawal from Iraq and more particularly the attack on his remark that was launched by Senator McCain's campaign, George came up with a typically George Stephanopolous epigram. And by the way, in case you didn't know, both of the surrogates for the Obama and McCain campaigns that George was interviewing at the time, acknowledge that George created President Clinton's winning slogan, " It's the economy, stupid." In this case when George pointed out the McCain camp response was a rather paternal, " We're glad to see Senator Obama coming around to the McCain position on Iraq." George distilled this down to a pithy analysis that amounted to, " Why vote for McCain, when McCain says Obama's position on Iraq is the same as his?" Of course Senator Obama was not, in fact, changing his position with respect to speedy withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. He was saying, as he has said all along, that having given the new strategic mission of withdrawal to his generals that he would listen to their counsel with regard to tactics. Senator McCain's campaign, now being run by Steve Schmidt, a veteran of both the George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger reelection campaigns, may have shot themselves in the foot. By trying to blunt Senator Obama's strong opposition to the war and the ongoing occupation of Iraq by saying there is little difference between his position and Senator McCain's it significantly weakens the "Victory and Withdrawal with Honor" as a strong and unique plank in McCain's campaign platform. A stand which, aside from age and experience, is about the only firm plank Senator McCain had to stand on, up until now.
In light of all that, it seems appropriate to talk about a movie we saw this week in its DVD release. Under ordinary circumstances we might well have gone to see this in a movie theater because the stars are some of our favorite actors, indeed some of the world's favorite actors but we did not because from the trailer it appeared that star, Tom Hanks, had transitioned from being supportive of the noble sacrifices of World War II veterans to being an out and out "Hawk" having taken this leading role in what appeared to be a very pro-war story. Indeed through much of the story it appeared that this was the case. It was the foul-mouthed, belligerent, abrasive, and irreverent CIA agent character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and the playfully, rascal-ish manner in which Mr. Hanks portrayed Charlie Wilson in Charlie Wilson's War that kept me from dismissing it as militaristic propaganda. I won't give away the ending, in case you haven't seen it, but I could hardly have been more wrong in my original assessment. If only I had remembered from the credits in the trailer that the movie was directed by Mike Nichols deservedly famous for such masterworks as Catch-22, Silkwood, and Primary Colors where he also was showing his political stripes, as well as such popular blockbusters as Working Girl, The Graduate, and The Birdcage, not to mention that the film was written by my all-time favorite writer, Aaron Sorkin (famed for A Few Good Men, The American President, and my all-time favorite TV seriesThe West Wing. Well, had I remembered all of that, I would not have deprived myself for so long. It was, needless to say, marvelous. Sadly, the usually highly decorative Julia Roberts was less than her stunningly beautiful best as she accurately recreated the stuck-in-the-sixties Texas millioinairess, Joanne Herring. But very charming and enoyable was young (34 year old, she looks younger) Amy Adams who might not have faired so well in my opinion had I know at the time that she was the live-action Snow White-type character in Enchanted (although somehow she got an Academy Award nomination for that, according to her IMDB biography). Hoffman was outstanding, and Hanks as charming as ever.
My 96-year-old mother-in-law has recovered from hospital ministrations by spending two weeks in a skilled nursing care facility and has just returned to her own home this weekend. She is a remarkable woman. Her older sister died last month. Gert would have been 103 years old next week. With genes like that in the family, it seems unlikely that I will outlive my spouse, but I'm going to try. :o)
Love and warm wishes,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://waterislife.psyrk.us/
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