HVO is it available?

[StephenA]

2 minutes ago, IanD said:

Algae being used as a biofuel feedstock is being heavily investigated, especially because it odesn't compete with crops or mean cutting down rainforests.

 

Does need an awful lot of water area and sun though, which kind or rules it out for the UK canals... 😉

 

True - and I suspect that although there must be 100 of tons of duckweed across the canal system each year ( I know my parents garden pond provided a lot of biomass to the compost heap) it doesn't actually add up to much

[Alan de Enfield]

18 minutes ago, StephenA said:

what we need is some way of turning duckweed and all the other things that clog canals into fuel..... At the moment CRT use alien weevils to eat it but......

 

Algae is already producing a direct Diesel replacement, the problem being that the power required to do so exceeds what you 'get out', so until there is an abundance of (say) wind power (and of course the windy-makers are never turned off are they !) it is unlikely to become available as a bulk production fuel

 

Algae fuel - Wikipedia

 

Green diesel[edit]

Main article: Biodiesel production

Algae can be used to produce 'green diesel' (also known as renewable diesel, hydrotreating vegetable oil^[52] or hydrogen-derived renewable diesel)^[53] through a hydrotreating refinery process that breaks molecules down into shorter hydrocarbon chains used in diesel engines.^[52][54] It has the same chemical properties as petroleum-based diesel^[52] meaning that it does not require new engines, pipelines or infrastructure to distribute and use. It has yet to be produced at a cost that is competitive with petroleum.^[53] While hydrotreating is currently the most common pathway to produce fuel-like hydrocarbons via decarboxylation/decarbonylation, there is an alternative process offering a number of important advantages over hydrotreating. In this regard, the work of Crocker et al.^[55] and Lercher et al.^[56] is particularly noteworthy. For oil refining, research is underway for catalytic conversion of renewable fuels by decarboxylation.^[57] As the oxygen is present in crude oil at rather low levels, of the order of 0.5%, deoxygenation in petroleum refining is not of much concern, and no catalysts are specifically formulated for oxygenates hydrotreating. Hence, one of the critical technical challenges to make the hydrodeoxygenation of algae oil process economically feasible is related to the research and development of effective catalysts.^[58][59]

[IanD]

26 minutes ago, peterboat said:

As I pointed out palm trees are useless in comparison to the rainforest so why bother? The end results would be our early demise, the rainforest also help stabilise climate change palm trees do the opposite 

https://www.zsl.org/news-and-events/news/palm-oil-and-climate-change

Are you really so unable to understand how this works? That site that you linked to -- like many others with the same agenda -- looks at the negative side of palm oil (which is bad, don't get me wrong!) but doesn't look at what happens if you *don't* grow it and burn fossil fuels instead.

 

In the palm oil vs. rainforest argument the issue is that the overall net CO2 effect of burning dino-diesel is worse than biofuels, including palm oil, even if rainforest is cut down to grow it. The negative effect of the CO2 emitted by burning diesel instead of the HVO that would be made from the palm oil is worse than the positive CO2 effect of having the rainforest there. None of which is a good reason to cut down rainforests to plant palm oil given the other downsides, but CO2 emission is the biggest probloem faced by mankind... 😞

 

There's no excuse for companies trying to pretend that their biofuel is ecologically wonderful and trying to cover up what the feedstock is -- for example, pretending it's "100% renewable" -- and that's what the site you quoted is rightly complaining about. Many of the claims about the environmental impact of biofuels (including HVO) being "90% lower" are just plain lies, because they're ignoring the downsides of production. But even is the saving is only 50% -- in other words the CO2 burden is 5x higher than they claim -- this is still 2x better than burning fossil fuels.

 

17 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Algae is already producing a direct Diesel replacement, the problem being that the power required to do so exceeds what you 'get out', so until there is an abundance of (say) wind power (and of course the windy-makers are never turned off are they !) it is unlikely to become available as a bulk production fuel

 

Algae fuel - Wikipedia

 

Green diesel[edit]

Main article: Biodiesel production

Algae can be used to produce 'green diesel' (also known as renewable diesel, hydrotreating vegetable oil^[52] or hydrogen-derived renewable diesel)^[53] through a hydrotreating refinery process that breaks molecules down into shorter hydrocarbon chains used in diesel engines.^[52][54] It has the same chemical properties as petroleum-based diesel^[52] meaning that it does not require new engines, pipelines or infrastructure to distribute and use. It has yet to be produced at a cost that is competitive with petroleum.^[53] While hydrotreating is currently the most common pathway to produce fuel-like hydrocarbons via decarboxylation/decarbonylation, there is an alternative process offering a number of important advantages over hydrotreating. In this regard, the work of Crocker et al.^[55] and Lercher et al.^[56] is particularly noteworthy. For oil refining, research is underway for catalytic conversion of renewable fuels by decarboxylation.^[57] As the oxygen is present in crude oil at rather low levels, of the order of 0.5%, deoxygenation in petroleum refining is not of much concern, and no catalysts are specifically formulated for oxygenates hydrotreating. Hence, one of the critical technical challenges to make the hydrodeoxygenation of algae oil process economically feasible is related to the research and development of effective catalysts.^[58][59]

 

The same problem as a lot of other schemes -- they work if you have unlimited renewable energy, but we don't.

 

Comparison purely on cost is another problem, because it's difficult to make any synthetic fuel from any source that's as cheap as digging up dino-juice. If there was a proper CO2 tariff attached to fuels to reflect their environmental cost then this could be very different, but Big Oil (and the politicians it owns) really don't want this to happen for obvious reasons... 😞

Edited May 8, 2023 by IanD

[peterboat]

4 hours ago, IanD said:

Are you really so unable to understand how this works? That site that you linked to -- like many others with the same agenda -- looks at the negative side of palm oil (which is bad, don't get me wrong!) but doesn't look at what happens if you *don't* grow it and burn fossil fuels instead.

 

In the palm oil vs. rainforest argument the issue is that the overall net CO2 effect of burning dino-diesel is worse than biofuels, including palm oil, even if rainforest is cut down to grow it. The negative effect of the CO2 emitted by burning diesel instead of the HVO that would be made from the palm oil is worse than the positive CO2 effect of having the rainforest there. None of which is a good reason to cut down rainforests to plant palm oil given the other downsides, but CO2 emission is the biggest probloem faced by mankind... 😞

 

There's no excuse for companies trying to pretend that their biofuel is ecologically wonderful and trying to cover up what the feedstock is -- for example, pretending it's "100% renewable" -- and that's what the site you quoted is rightly complaining about. Many of the claims about the environmental impact of biofuels (including HVO) being "90% lower" are just plain lies, because they're ignoring the downsides of production. But even is the saving is only 50% -- in other words the CO2 burden is 5x higher than they claim -- this is still 2x better than burning fossil fuels.

 

 

The same problem as a lot of other schemes -- they work if you have unlimited renewable energy, but we don't.

 

Comparison purely on cost is another problem, because it's difficult to make any synthetic fuel from any source that's as cheap as digging up dino-juice. If there was a proper CO2 tariff attached to fuels to reflect their environmental cost then this could be very different, but Big Oil (and the politicians it owns) really don't want this to happen for obvious reasons... 😞

Yet the scientists don't agree with you! The climate change will be disastrous if we cut the rainforest down much stuff on the internet about that. Virtually no positives for palm oil growing so thankfully the president of Brazil agrees with the scientists. 

[TheBiscuits]

6 hours ago, IanD said:

trump facts...

 

I think we call those "alternative truths" now 😁