Random Thoughts of Chris Tilley

In searching for Pumpkin Patterns I came across ExtremePumpkin.com. First they have pictures of some of the coolest pumpkins I have ever seen. They have instruction on the use of power tools in pumpkin carving. The coolest stuff in my opinion is the pyrotechnics. The use of road flares to light the pumpkins isn't the coolest but probably the least dangerous although still a real hazard.

The second cool site is Captain Dan. Pirate hip hop music. Definitely different. Very appropriate for Halloween.

GreenFuel has finished testing an Engineering Scale Unit at the 1,060-megawatt Arizona Public Service Redhawk facility. This was the first time that smokestack gases were used to grow algae for conversion into biofuels (Ethanol and BioDiesel).

Check out the pictures of the installation and the Performance Summary Report.

In the summary they state that they exceeded the productivity targets. They where aiming for 80 g/m2/d and they got and average of 98 g/m2/d. That is 98 grams of biomass (Dry Weight, Ash Free) per square meter of the footprint of the Algae Matrix per day. This will help with the land costs of such an operation. The 98 grams may not sound like a lot but if you look at in compared to corn. The algae yields .098KG x 365 days = 35.77 kg/m2/year. The corn yields 25.4KG per bushel (from wikipedia) and the 332.7733 bushels per acre (Winner NCGA Yield contest). So 25.4 KG/Bushel * 332.7733 Bushels/Acre = 8452.44182 KG/Acre Convert Acre to m2 and that equals 2.1 kg/m2/year. Plus I would much rather eat the corn. Overall a definite successful large scale test.

They are in discussion to build a commercial scale operation. They still have some questions to be answered but I don't think it will be long before we see a full scale commercial operation.