BioDieselNow - Renewable biodiesel fuel

 Hi there, 

And, does anyone have experience pressing the oil from Algae? 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 Hi,

as I already learned here is, that you have to spend a lot of time in reading, but there are a lot of people with huge knowledge and like to help and distribute their expertise. See also my thread "stepping into algae production" which I posted recently. There you find also some comments how to get further.

The other forum at yahoo could be also interesting for you.

But I also would like to generate two questions from your text:

1.

EoaProd:

fresh water Algae would be much easier and cheaper to grown than Salt Water Algae

...why ?

2.

EoaProd:

and use the mash in my pellet stove

...would it be also possible to use it as animal food, if you feed your algae with normal air ? 

Heinz 

The only reason I stated fresh water is because I know nothing about salt water and how difficult it is to operate.  If salt water is no more complicated that fresh water, or not much more then I would be interested. 

I have read that the left over algae for animal feed but I have a need and use for it as a fuel. 

I will look for your thread,  Thanks.

I agree with Heinz. If you are near a seawater source, using freshwater would ba a waste. If you are lucky, seawater would already bee sufficiently seeded by algae and some nutrients.

Algae as animal food is also a good idea, but I would prefer to run it through with a professional.

Low-tech solutions do have their values.

Sincerely,

Damir

I am not near seawater but I do have an unliimited supply of fresh water.  I am totally not interested in producing feed because of the uses of fuel pellets.  So back to the beggining, any suggestions on the type of algae, presses, etc?

Thanks,

I would suggest that you consult your local water management authority. They should have a prety good idea about alagae naturally growing in your area. Secondly, you should observe these algae and watch for a tell-tales sign: a kind of reinbow style reflection of the light from the surface of water around them. (This indicates higher levels of oils.)

A simple cold press should extract the most of oils. For the rest (+converting shugars into ethanol) I would suggest a simple fermentation and distillation; like when you make brandy. (Maturing in oak barrels not required.) A bit enhanced brendy making equipment should do the trick, but I'm not so sure about smells. Better to do it a bit away of the place you living in.

I hope that this helps.

I wish you all the luck and joy in discovering new ways and recipes for brendy... huh, no... I meant biofuels... But I would not mind a glass of nice brendy right now.

Sincerely,

Damir

Damir:

  A simple cold press should extract the most of oils.  

A wet feedstock will yield less oil in a cold press than a dry feedstock/run.

EoaProd:

I am totally not interested in producing feed because of the uses of fuel pellets. 

Seems I read that some types of algae have a high ash content. It would be something to check into & consider if one want to use the algae mash in a pellet stove.

Martin 

froggy:

Damir:

  A simple cold press should extract the most of oils.  

A well running cold press typically yields ~ 50% of the oil within the dry seed.

A wet feedstock will yield less oil in a cold press than a dry feedstock/run.

This, home biodiesel brewery challenge is quite interesting.

Sincerely,

Damir

I'll have to look into the ash content of burning Algae.  Although with the high oil content it will have I would think it would burn very hot and can't be any higher that hard woods.  But I'll let you know if I find something.  Thanks.

Everyone is pushing salt water Algae.  If i'm not close to the ocean and want to make salt water so a high oil algae will grow, how does one do that cheaply?

 And, if not salt water, give me a name for a good fresh water algae?  Something that I can order.

Its quite easy to replicate sea water just go to an aquarium store or pet shop and purchase "artificial ocean" or any variety of  prepared sea salt formulations, and follow the directions on the box and voila! you have sea water.

 Marc 

Marc,

 Is it cheap enough to make a algae pond?  I'm going to start off small but soon I will want to have several hundred gallons.  Is this doable?

 Kevin

yes its cheap and doable . backyard units can be made from plastic tanks or above ground swimming pools even the inflatable ones from walmart.( kiddie pools. )

marc

EoaProd:

My initial plan was to grow Canola on my property and make BioDiesel but I quickly discovered (as did everyone else) that it would take too much time, money and land to be proficient.  So Algae. 

Well at least what BD out that is commerically made from things like Canola oil. Not a drop has been made from algae that was profitable. If it were possible, someone would already be doing it.

Derek, 

And yet people still try and build a better mouse trap!!!!

My friend, that is what research is all about - finding ways of getting around road blocks. We would still be walking if Orvil had listened to those who "knew" it could not be done.

Keep going EoaProd - there is a solution to every problem. And by the way, a cheaper form of salt can be bought at your local swim pool shop - raw sea salt usually comes in 20kilo bags.

You need to know the best salinity level for your algae species and add enough salt to reach that %. Base level natural sea water is around 3% salt. Into that mix you need to add a soup of chemicals and vitamens - recipes can be found on oilgae.com or google F2 and Johnsons Modified Recipe.

Damir:

A simple cold press should extract the most of oils.

Cold press isn't going to get as much of the oil out as some of the high-tech methods, but it's a very good way to start.

Damir:

 

For the rest (+converting shugars into ethanol) I would suggest a simple fermentation and distillation; like when you make brandy. (Maturing in oak barrels not required.) A bit enhanced brendy making equipment should do the trick, but I'm not so sure about smells. Better to do it a bit away of the place you living in.

I don't know that the taste of algal-Brandy would taste very good. And it's not a very efficient use of the biomass. I'd suggest looking at making a simple Microbial Fuel Cell. This is a device that directly creates electricity instead of going through fermentation and combustion. This is done by tapping into the metabolism of baceteria, and extracting that extra electron that they have to get rid of during reductive oxidation, in or to harness it for your own purposes. a simple, and not terribly efficient, microbial fuel cell is easy to create. More efficient designs require a bit more clever and complex design. But it's nice because you can start off simple and cheap and upgrade and add to your system over time. The outputs of a microbial fuel cell are carbon dioxide and water - precisely the inputs needs for growing more algae! there's plenty of places you can read about these MFCs, and I started a Yahoo group on the topic a few month ago, which has 43 members at this point. It's called MicrobialFuelCells on groups.yahoo.com.

bobk:

I don't know that the taste of algal-Brandy would taste very good. And it's not a very efficient use of the biomass. I'd suggest looking at making a simple Microbial Fuel Cell. This is a device that directly creates electricity instead of going through fermentation and combustion.

I would agree if you have a simple method of converting existing cars to use Microbial Fuel Cells.  I would say that we need something practical as a first step, regardless of inefficient use of biomass. When we have this up and running, we can start thinking about making cars to use Microbial Fuel Cells if somthing else does not pop in meanwhile.

Sincerely,

Damir

 Hi EoaPond,

I am not sure exactly why everyone is pushing salt water algae if you are in an area where you have unlimited freshwater.  It sounds like you may live in a rural area so does that mean you get your water from a well?  Where I am working we have streams set up using multiple types of water.  There are three types of freshwater streams being simulated: 1.well water 2. enriched well water (N and P added) 3. wastewater effluent from about a half mile-mile down the channel from a wastewater treatment plant.  The streams with enriched well water are doing very well as are the wastewater streams.  The straight well water is supporting growth but not as much as the other streams.(expected)

If you are near farms, you could get nutrients easily in bulk form, cant you?

What is the temperature like in the indoor place you are growing the algae?  I have some tanks set up in a greenhouse that gets extremely warm during the day.  My cultures at times have been as high as 40 degrees Celsius which sounds like a very bad thing, but it is actually making one of my species thrive.  In one tank I have both Scenedesmus quadricauda and Neochloris oleoabundans and I have found that the oleoabundans has taken off and outcompeted the Scen. by far.  The Neochloris was isolated from the desert in Saudi Arabia so I think it would make sense that oleoabundans thrives in the hot temperatures.  Although this change has occured in the ratio of species in my tank, the Scenedesmus is still surviving in lower numbers, which could indicate a more stable system.  

I would suggest to look into the use of multiple species at once. That way, if you have fluctuations in temperature depending on season, you can always have something in your tank that can thrive.  Many species do very well in an all-purpose medium such as Bold.  I would consider the simplified way marc from ecogenics feeds his algae.  If you search through old posts(or if he would post it again), he explained a very simple method using soil water for most of the required micro and macro nutrients along with simple fertilizer.

Bacteria and fungus can also pose a slight problem.  There is no doubt going to be bacteria in your cultures so you should think about how that might affect what happens within your tanks.  For me it hasn't been a serious problem since the algae grow in such high numbers and there could even be benefits to bacteria.  Algae thrive in nature with bacteria so I don't see why it should be a major problem in a tank.       

I looked into pressing algae for a long time and searched through a great deal of literature.  I could not find conclusive evidence anywhere that showed someone has successfully pressed oil out of their algae.  Don't be discouraged though, because I also didn't find anyone who actually tried.  There are some people in the other BDnow forums that discuss the use of presses  for their various feedstocks.  I found that some of those people were very willing to test some algae in their presses.  I would recommend trying some different presses before investing in one to figure out what would work the best.  It also looked promising that a press could be modified to use for algae, though it would take permanent changes that wouldn't be guaranteed to work(on expensive machinery).

As far as oil content goes, I have read lipid %'s for my 2 species that claimed lipids as high as 50 or 60%.  After a few small-scale chemical extractions, the percentages I observed were 10.5% for Neochloris and 12.3% for Scenedesmus.  I harvested these straight from my growth tanks without any stresses being applied to increase the oil content.  I am trying that now so I will post when I get some more results.  Considering that the cells I harvested were 1/10 lipid without stress, I am optimistic that the percentage will be at least in the 30-40% range.  You should look into literature that discusses the effect of stressing algae.  I think this is an important step of the process because most algae stores energy as carbohydrate.  You want the type of lipids used in energy storage that are nonpolar, which are produced when the algae is stressed, most often by lack of Nitrogen.  This is how you can get the algae to produce TAGs which is the oil that can be converted into biodiesel.  It might involve having a second tank with just plain water to give the algae one or two days to produce the lipids you want.  

Your idea sounds great to use the pressed mash for fuel.  That is a good way to take advantage of the inefficiency of the cold press that is known to leave behind oils.  I bet those will help your pellets burn nice and hot.

What type of stove to you use to heat your house?  My parents installed a Tulikivi last year in their home and I cannot believe how efficient it is.  They can heat nearly the whole house by only burning 2 hot fires a day because of the heat-retaining and radiating properties of the soapstone.  Is this much different from your pellet-burning heater? 

One last thing: Why is everyone pushing seawater so much? wouldn't that add extra cost and complication to his operation?  I am aware of some benefits with an outdoor system, but does it really make much of a difference if the algae is being grown indoors?

Hi Grtfulbuster (huh, how do you say this ),

Finally somebody down to earth. Thank you.

Grtfulbuster:

One last thing: Why is everyone pushing seawater so much? wouldn't that add extra cost and complication to his operation?  I am aware of some benefits with an outdoor system, but does it really make much of a difference if the algae is being grown indoors?

Sincerely,

Damir