Strain Selection for Green Algae Production

At this stage of the game, it is time far better spent to choose a technology that you, your environment and your climate are comfortable with than spend endless hours identifying and selecting some better strain of algae.

They are just now starting up the Moores Curve of Genetic Engineering of algae strains. The algae available in a year will be much better than anything found in the industry today. The year after that, they will make more strain improvements, leaving the previous year strains obsolete.

We will see the engineering of algae strains not only to excel in a specific growing environment, but also specifically designed for a given processing technology and to better produce the products desired.

This continual strain improvement for every likely growing environment on earth, every important processing technology and the specific products desired will continue for a very long time, generations in fact. Your grandchildren will work with algae strains you can not even dream of today.

The day will come, in a few years, that each algae grower will set their own parameters for a perfect algae strain. They will be able to tell the GM labs exactly what products they are producing, what technologies they are working with, what their environment is and on and on.

The labs will combine algae and other genes specifically for you and the parameters you set, and do so quickly and cheaply. Your strain will be a one of a kind strain, unlike any other strain on earth.

We are starting to do this with corn. Corn grown for an ethanol distillery is not the same corn you would plant for human food or animal feed, and of course it is not sweet corn nor pop corn.

The GM industry is not yet to the point of engineering corn seed for a specific farmers field, but they are getting closer. It will happen first with algae because of the short generational span of algae, days or even hours versus months and years for corn.

It is the same with all important plants on earth, rice, wheat, roses and jojoba. The impact of GM on plant life; food supply, energy crops and the beauty of flowers is in its infancy and we will be riding the Moores Curve of strain development forever.

Corn and food, and some other corn issues.

 

Corn is a multi use grain, a feedstock we should not underutilize. To label it as if it were only used for food is dishonest.

Back fifty years ago, we used to throw whole corn ears over the fence to our hogs. I did so. With our modern technologies that we now use to derive thousands of products from corn, it is really becoming unethical and immoral to not process corn for best uses. This means processing it for all of the foods, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals. vitamins, nutriceuticals, cosmetics, home chemicals, industrial chemicals, plastics, and a dozen kinds of fuels that corn has inside that kernel.

All of these products come from each kernel of corn. It is not a simple question of either fuel or food, we produce both. One hundred percent of our corn should be processed for best uses.

If we actually do have a disastrous American corn shortage some year, it hasnt happened yet but theoretically it is possible; much better to be producing enough corn for all corn markets. Then in an emergency it would be simple to switch to more food and less of the thousands of less critical non food products in corn like cosmetics or plastics.

If we were only growing enough corn for food, and we had a crop shortage, we would not have that safety net supply of corn grown for other uses that could be re-directed to food. Having thousands of uses for corn actually increases our food supply stability, not decreasing it as some like to proclaim.

Concerning land use. In the United States, We currently pay famers billions of dollars to not grow crops on 30 million acres of farm land. This was 40 million acres, until the Age of BioTechnology came along and we developed more markets for our crops.

The reason for this subsidy to not grow more crops is that if we grow too much of a crop like corn and world markets collapse, to prices below the cost of growing it, we will bankrupt millions of farmers world wide.

This happened in Mexico, and we were not even selling corn below the American cost of production. When NAFTA opened up the Mexican corn market for American corn. We flooded the Mexican market with corn that was below the Mexican farmers cost of production; the Mexican farmers could not compete on price, and thousands went broke.

This actually led to riots over a lack of taco shells. We had disrupted a hundred years of local Mexican farm to market corn marketing, and many small taco factories could not buy corn in the quantities they needed. They could buy a whole truck load of American corn cheap, but a just few bushels that they needed to buy locally from local farmers, not available.

As we continue to develop world corn bio product markets, more land will be returned to productive use. the US federal subsidy to not grow crops will continue to decrease.

Of course, the anthropogenic climate change theory is a hoax. We have always had climate change and always will. This is the way of the the universe. Nothing we can do to stop it, nor should we try. 

The Anthropogenic climate change hoax is being pushed because a lot of people are getting rich from it. Others, like politicians, are finding it to be a path to power.

The risk is that they might actually figure out how to effect manmade climate change. This is probably the greatest risk to life on earth today; not nuclear war, not world hunger, but pseudo scientists playing games with our climate.

Raising algae in large tubes.

I see a company in India is using very long plastic tubes to grow algae. These are outside, laying on sand, perhaps 12 inches in diameter. For some reason they felt they needed to create waves in the tubes, so the engineered a pretty complicated electric motor and plunger system to do so.
I have long propounded a system of using silage bags to grow algae in. Perhaps you have seen them around farms; long white tubes. In America these have replaced the concrete and blue steel silos sitting mostly empty around farms.
My proposal is to use clear plastic tubes similar to the silage tubes. Lay them out on a flat surface, turn up both ends, and pump water into them to a depth of several inches or maybe a foot. Let the tubes spread out as wide as they want to.
Seed them with green algae, pump CO2 or sewage/manure water thru them slowly to feed the algae.
I would also suggest trying our local wild algae found here in SE Iowa, this is a filamentous algae that grows in masses, rather like wet wool. It is very easy to harvest, as it clings tightly together. The shallow ponds around here fill up with it in the summer. It does not like deep water or too much disturbance.
To harvest I would suggest rolling the tubes up. Letting the water slowly flow out.If you are using filamentous algae, it should remain behind, fixed to the tube.
The algae filled ponds are very easy to spot with Google Earth. Just look for bright green ponds in this SE Iowa area.
This growing technique is my own idea, but it is available to anyone wanting to use it. I have published it several times before.

Why is the bio industry developing slower than many expected?

An interesting situation has come about in the bio technology industry. Many folks are disappointed at the pace of growth of the industry and a big reason for that is that the technology is growing too rapidly.

Lots of companies would like to build that production plant, however, there is a huge risk with the technology expanding so rapidly. If you break ground today on a 200 million dollar plant that will take two years to build, that plant has a high probability of being outdated by industry technological breakthrus long before it is ready to start production.

Now there is something that will give your banker heart burn; so the strategy is often to procrastinate. Let someone else take the early bullets.

Of course, often much of the supporting infrastructure of any bio processing facility is reusable; tanks and scales, conveyors and shipping docks.

And some companies are finding bankrupt plants to buy, for the supporting infrastructure, and then tearing the hardly used production portions out and replacing them with up to date processes.

If you have deep enough pockets to build the supporting infrastructure first, and if you keep a large stash of cash for those major expected last minute changes in technology; you could do a last minute technology update on the building plans. Much cheaper than tearing out nearly brand new production infrastructure.

This will also keep your bankers awake at night, yet it might be the best strategy under the circumstances.

Trying to come up with projections when all the numbers will change by intention will be a hard sell in the bankers board rooms. Of course, many of those financial projections we draw up should be given literary awards for best fiction anyway, and the bankers know that too.

So, the solution may well be to present your building plans to the bankers as a two step plan. Build the supporting infrastructure and buildings first. Then when they are completed, do your process plan using what ever technologies are available at that point in the future and plug it in.

Perhaps by then, there will be more process modules available that you literally can offload from the truck and plug in. As we climb the Moores Curve of bio technology development, plug ands play production modules could become the future of bio technology processing and updating.

Still garbage being posted about sugar cane

Folks, they are doing it again. We are seeing lots of so called news stories about how awful and dirty sugar cane is as a fuel feedstock.

In fact, they are posting about the old, outdated burn before harvesting method. Of course that old method is both dirty and outdated.

It is much more efficient and productive to machine harvest the entire cane plant, leaves and all, right down to the ground.

This not only avoids the blackened skies from burning the leaves off, but it also produces more sugar and fuel than you get if you waste the leaves.

The implications for food supply in the Age of BioTechnology

Folks, there is concern that we might be entering an age of decreased world food supplies, as the new Age of BioTechnology ramps up.
This is not so, and here is why:
The future of corn production is to fill all markets. We now do fill all world corn based food, feed, pharmaceuticals, nutriceuticals, vitamins, cosmetics, home chemicals, industrial chemicals, plastics, ethanol, bio diesel, bio crude oil, bio gasoline, bio kerosene and bio jet fuel markets out there. We can sell much more as soon as we can ramp up production, and in the case of motor fuels, build more distribution and the point of sale station pumps.
We still have 30 million acres of set aside land that the federal government pays farmers not to farm. We had 40 million acres under no farm subsidy, but with increased corn markets, that has come down a bit, to 30 million acres. The purpose of the farm subsidy its to limit over production, which would crash the grain markets and bankrupt farmers around the world. This 30 million acres can be returned to production, saving billions in subsidy costs. We have the markets. We need the processing plants, and in some cases like fuel, the transportation and selling infrastructure, and we are developing and building them now.
Industry experts tell me we will be capable of doubling our corn production in the next few years. The bottleneck right now is corn processing and bulk product transportation infrastructure, and we are working on that.
As we process corn for best uses, we produce many food and animal feed products. These are all finding markets, with a small surplus of unsold corn left over each year as carryover to new harvest.
The other factor is green algae. This is not just a source of ethanol. Algae is as complex as corn and is beginning to yield many new products. New product development R and D is going on at breakneck speed around the world, as companies and nations rush to dominate this huge new indsutry.
Green algae has been used as human food and animal feed for thousands of years. The big food opportunity today is with the green algae flour left after removing the oil and water. This is high protein and will be bleached white and it will be cheap and abundant by the car load and ship load.
It will be used in breads and cakes and thousands of processed foods. In fact, it will compete directly with corn, wheat, rice and soybeans.
This high protein algae additive will soon feed billions of starving people around the world.

This is a link to a British Petroleum advertisement.

I post it because it is revealing of the state of the art of sugar cane harvesting in Brazil. Not all harvesting is burn and hand harvest.

http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9030046&contentId=7055176

I am not receiving any compensation for posting this ad.