BioDieselNow - Renewable biodiesel fuel

hi everyone, I am quite new to this forum. I really thank everyone who have contributed they

valuable thoughts and ideas. i want share information who r interested to work on this project. it will be funded by kumar biotech.

 

I really want to knew about botryococcus braunii    whether this microalgae is  marine or freashwater algae.

second i am looking for the which micro algae has a high quanties of oil (lipids)

 

 thanking you very much everyone who will be helping me in this regard.

warm regards.

kumar.n.j

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botryococcus_braunii

Optimal Growth Environment

Botryococcus braunii has been shown to grow best at a temperature of 23°C, a light intensity of 60 W/M², with a light period of 12 hours per day, and a salinity of 0.15 Molar NaCl. ^[2]. However, this was the results of testing with one strain, others certainly vary to some degree.

 

does anyone know how salty that is? 

 

hi,

 

you can have more information on this  here.

 

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ychisti/Botryo.pdf

 

 

warm regards,

 

kumar. 

hi mehm,

 

thank you very much for you reply,

 

I am from India,  i have just joined   this site.   www.bluelight.ru       my username is  kumaralgae    

 

waiting for your reply ,

 

warm regards,

 

kumar.n.j

hi everyone.

 

please go through this site .

very valuable information is available.

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ychisti/FileC.html

regards,

kumar.n.j

 

 

ku 

mehm,

From Wikipedia, typical salt concentrations of sea water are 35 g/l.  NaCl has a molecular weight of about 58.44, which means that sea water has about a 0.6M salt concentration if I haven't pooched the numbers or the math.

Therefore you could make 0.15M water with one part seawater to three parts fresh.

 

 

kumar, your link doesn't work...

mehm, I got to both of his links by copying the text and pasting it into my browser's "url" section.  Some interesting (but a lot of esoteric) stuff to be found there.

Kumar, I'd like to offer a couple of suggestions:

 

1. You should never post your actual e-mail adresses the way you did.  Lots of web-bots will grab your email adresses and you will get tons and tons of junk e-mails.  It's a lot better to do something like (the examples aren't your actual addresses):

emal: kumar (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) xxyyzz

Or:

kumar@RemoveThisBeforeSending.yahoo.co.xxyyzz 

(some people use "nospam" instead of "RemoveBeforeSending", but I think many bots have started to recognize  "nospam" and just remove it automatically).

 

2. While it's fine to ask for offline help, the real purpose of these lists is to share information, so that whatever info people give you is available to everyone else too.  You will find that this is usually a good thing; people who don't have anything to say about your original question are likely to have something to contribute later on to the discussion. 

3. Thanks for the URL's - I found a VERY interesting article in there:

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ychisti/CeronG.pdf

Which would seem to indicate that Glycerine could be a very good energy source for multitrophic algae growth of at least some species.  This could potentially be a huge boost, since glycerine is a high-volume "waste" product of the biodiesel process!!!!! 

Good luck in your venture! 

 

They can be found in both estuarine (brackish) and freshwater ecosystems and are widely distributed around the whole world. This does not mean that these places have the best (optimal) salinity, but could give you some hints about solutions to try and grow these alga species in. I know that I have come across "Bots" in phyc nets when sampling in lake michigan. They seem to be very oligotrophic, because they only have high % community abundance in open water away from land, where its very cold and low in nutrients. This means that if you put them in a pond with a bunch of unkowns, your odds for sucess are pretty low, because they will get out-competeted for light/nutrients in the epilimnion. (not that they don't like warmer water and more nutrients, it's just not where they are dominant) When they start flushing out oil they are pretty cool, but they are sticky like snot rockets and get really viscous, and don't seem like they do well against rotifer grazers. I wouldn't recommend them for a bioreactor system b/c they are very gregarious and clump together  easily. They also have a really tough sheath that I found hard to break open with a seed press, I heard it's the old cell wall from previous generations.

btw, Kumaralgae, you can Private Message me on bluelight.ru if you want to.

JordanGVSU:

They can be found in both estuarine (brackish) and freshwater ecosystems and are widely distributed around the whole world. This does not mean that these places have the best (optimal) salinity, but could give you some hints about solutions to try and grow these alga species in. I know that I have come across "Bots" in phyc nets when sampling in lake michigan. They seem to be very oligotrophic, because they only have high % community abundance in open water away from land, where its very cold and low in nutrients.

Excuse my ignorance, as I am not a phycologist, but when you say they do well in open water where it's cold, you mean cold in relation to what? If they dwell in the epilimnion (surface layer), isn't that supposed to be the warmest layer of the lake (as opposed to the metalimnion and hyplimnion)?

JordanGVSU:

This means that if you put them in a pond with a bunch of unkowns, your odds for sucess are pretty low, because they will get out-competeted for light/nutrients in the epilimnion. (not that they don't like warmer water and more nutrients, it's just not where they are dominant) When they start flushing out oil they are pretty cool, but they are sticky like snot rockets and get really viscous, and don't seem like they do well against rotifer grazers.

I had this wild guess that their "snot rockets" were partly a defensive mechanism, but from what you're saying, it's not a very effective one. 

JordanGVSU:

I wouldn't recommend them for a bioreactor system b/c they are very gregarious and clump together  easily. They also have a really tough sheath that I found hard to break open with a seed press, I heard it's the old cell wall from previous generations.

well, that's not exactly the news I wanted to hear ;). But let me stay in denial by spouting out a few things: First, if they can survive in low-nutrient conditions better than other species, one could use that to advantage. I read somewhere that, above the minimal amount of phosphorus, additional phosphorus doesn't help Bb. So keeping Phosphorus lower than other species need would be helpful. Also, due to their "snot" flotation device, they can stay at the very top of the epilimnion, above the competition. If the water were quite murky, this could starve the competition of light.

 As far as a PBR, all of that snot and clumpiness says to me nothing more than needing more pressure to move them through PBR tubes. Also, I have no intention of breaking their sheath, as it is the "snot" that seems to be the best thing to harvest, by dissolving it. It is my understanding that this "snot" is what makes up the majority of the interesting Bb hydrocarbons.
 

kumar, I'm sure the people here can discuss all of your questions better than I (alone) can.  If it's ok with you, I'll repost what you wrote on bluelight.

kumaralgae:

I am from India,  i have just joined   this site.   www.bluelight.ru       my username is  kumaralgae    

kumar.n.j

 Kumar, what has this site got to do with algae???

bob, from what I can remember when we analyzed samples of these last summer, they are pelagic and mostly float on the surface of the water, not in the water column, so this colder water is in relation to nearshore temperatures. Upon looking at my feild notes, the B.B. bloom we found was 8-10 miles offshore of Muskegon MI on 8/13/06, during a sampling research trip for a summer stratification . The water temp was 17.1 degrees C, and the other populations included scenedesmus spp. and various planktoic diatoms. This water was much cooler than the nearshore temperatures at the time 23 -24 degrees C. this colder water, even though it was in the epilimnion, was due to an upwelling event during a strong NE wind the day before.

We never had a conclusive explanation for why the B.B. bloomed here, but It was a huge bloom, (estimated at 5 sq. miles) and the only time we experienced this species in such high concentrations. At the time we were looking at rotifer and copepod abundance, not phytoplankton dynamics so we didn't have the equipment to study chlA, dissloved phosphorous, nitrate, or d.o. conc. & %. in our samples, it didn't look like the zooplankton grazing was inhibited by the B.B. My guess is that they produce oil as a flocculation mechanism to increase surface area so that they may float better in colder water, because most coldwater pelagic diatoms clump together like this (like meridion, pinnularia, stauroneis) these aggregate clumps are like happy meals for hungry zooplankton and increase grazing rates. I am guessing that oil production/clumping is good to a certain point, (to get them closer to the surface) but then this gets to be too much and makes them more susceptable to herbivorous grazing by being such a big target, therefore I am skeptical of this being a defense mechanism.

when your talkng about their competitive advantage over others species, you guess might be as good as mine, but I would venture to say that a more opportunistic cyanobacteria like anabaena or oscillatoria could outgrow b.b. without starving it for light, by using up c02, nutrients and producing cytotoxins. If your running a bioreactor system to prevent this contamination, you should make sure the inside has no rough edges, and that the separating filter has spaces of at least 30 micrometers (these clumps were about 1 mm across) You also might be interested that there was a correlation/regression between how well the algae floated on the surface, and how much aggregation occured, which seemed to be related to oil production.(more floatation= larger clumps= more oil production)

 

oking at this phenomenon as an ecologist and not a biotechnologist.

That's pretty salty, you wouldn't want to taste soup with that concentration of salt.  I know Bb grows better with less NaCl on the medium.  It best grows at 51 mM according to a study called "Effect of salinity on growth of green alga Botryococcus braunii and its constituents."

 Kumar,

From what I have seen in other posts, BB is primarily a freshwater species.  But there are many strains, so you may be able to match your situation.

The important thing is not the lipid percentage, but the lipid growth rate.  Rumor has it that BB grows slowly.

CCMP647 grows well and has a fairly high percentage of oil.  It is marine.  It is a strain of Pleurochrysis carterae.

http://ccmp.bigelow.org/SD/display.php?strain=CCMP647&genus=Pleurochrysis&Species=carterae&Class=Prymnesiophyceae 

Liberty1,

 

The lipid/protein/carbohydrate percentage is a VERY important consideration. If the algae cells produce a lot of proteins, then you will need to supply them with a lot of nitrogen. Artificial nitrogen fixation is a very inefficient process, and it may be what eventually sends this whole endeavor down the shitter as it did with the corn/ethanol project. The goal is to reduce the protein percentage of biomass to minimize the amount of fertilizer that you will need to supply. This is the reason that Bb, with its high oil output, is so popular among the biofuel community. 

 

Best,

T 

Princeton U.  

 Trevor,

The determining consideration is going to be amount of oil produced per dollar of total costs.  You are right to be concerned about N.  I am hoping we will be able to feed our algae with animal wastes, so that may minimize the cost. 

I can't recall if I picked it up on another thread here or another site, but I was interested to read that feeding Bb glycerin from further down the biodiesel stream has had interesting growth results.

I'll leave the science behind this alone, but by creating a loop in the biodiesel production cycle, avenues for development have opened up.

 Maelinar,

BB is not part of the biodiesel process.  It can not be transesterfied.  It must be cracked.  Good news - one guy claims it produces gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel. 

I don't know about the glycerin.