Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

The_Shadow_Of_Yor t1_ivaly3a wrote

Calling it now, we’ll never hear about this ever again

70

Tokenserious23 t1_ivat31l wrote

The rights have probably already been bought and burned to the ground. The oil industry is hell-bent on world domination.

16

scillaren t1_ivb0r5u wrote

Lol, big oil doesn’t give a shit about this. The whole world together makes about 10-12 million tons of whole coffee a year. The US burns 3 million tons of petroleum a day. The potential scale of this is irrelevant to big oil.

20

thunderingparcel t1_ivbd8c8 wrote

It’s not a 1:1 ratio of coffee input to diesel output. I agree, though, that this is probably not scalable to that extent.

4

scillaren t1_ivbfnyb wrote

You’re right, it’ll be way less than 1:1. And Chlorella production is really hard to scale. All of the Chlorella produced in the world wouldn’t be enough to feed even a tiny 10kbd refinery.

4

slide2k t1_ivbd8pt wrote

This! They might buy it just to show they are going “green”. Most of them are working on their PR with green stuff.

1

dkran t1_ivb3ugl wrote

When I grew phytoplankton, I was honestly shocked at the possibility of using the grow farm for numerous applications as an amateur. I’d imagine professional biologists can work these things to wonders.

6

brett_riverboat t1_ivg6pi0 wrote

Algae always seems to be a dead end.

1

scillaren t1_ivgc41q wrote

Algae are very good at doing certain things and very bad at others. For biofuels, the issue has largely been that people extrapolating from the lab don’t account for the vulnerability of these organisms in the wild (single cell non-extremophile algae don’t form natural monocultures period), and way way way underestimating the entropic costs of dewatering a single celled bug that behaves as a colloid.

But when algae do what they’re good at it works great. No baby formula DHA without (heterotrophic) algae.

1