Slacking: Successful

Okay, so I still haven’t renewed my ffxi account, but that hasn’t slowed me down on the slackitude front. I spent today getting snippets of reading in on biodiesel between updating livejournal, checking my email, and getting my ass handed to me in caylus.

I finally had a break through in Caylus, I came in second, instead of “half the score of the next to last guy”. I think it was 88-90-110 or something like that. My “strategy” was to save up building materials, and then blitz the castle construction. I did it wrong for the dungeon phase. I turned a cloth in for a favor, when if I’d used that placed token to acquire a food, I could have built twice, getting the favor for building that round, and getting the favor for having built two units in the dungeon. Instead, the guy who built after me got both of those favors. I think he ended up coming in last anyway. Ah well.

Now to impress upon myself the value of gold in the end game.

Leaving that aside, I’ve learned some valuable and interesting info on biodiesel feedstocks.

First, on the agricultural end. Some mustards and rapeseeds are not edible, but they aren’t edible to bugs either. They’d make great biodiesel and save on pesticides. Yay. We haven’t grown them as much, but it shouldn’t be a big deal to kick that one in to gear.

Secondly, the algae plan that MIT is looking into for smokestack cleaning is essentially the same plan the DoE investigated for 20 years and found unprofitable as a biodiesel cultivation method. It would probably work just fine to capture many of the toxic emissions from coal plants, and yield some biodiesel as a pleasant side effect.

However, this presents an interesting point. If you burn the biodiesel, then you’re no longer sequestering the smokestack carbon. If you don’t, then you really can’t count the biodiesel as a useful side benefit. Sure, sure, some of the carbon would go into other structural elements of the algae. And you could feed it to animals, turn it into ethanol, whatever. But all of those are going to release that carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide sooner or later. And since it came from under the ground, not from the atmosphere, that technically makes it an efficiency-increasing technique, not a renewable technology. Of course, if it was wood, or some other biomass (like the leftover lignin from cellulosic ethanol) you were burning instead of coal, it would be renewable. Any questions? (Heh).

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has a new unicorn they’re chasing: High fat saprophytes, chubby molds and fungi. The main things this takes out of the original plan is the need for photosynthesis. These guys can do their business on wood, lawn clippings, whatever, in a nice dark tank. There’s no need for acres and acres of special algae ponds, because these little guys don’t take the sun’s energy directly, they get it second hand (like vegans). There’s no worries about your engineered oil-makers having to deal with natural competitors, because you control the tank. There’s alot of appeal to this plan, but this one doesn’t have the refinements or results of 20 years of research to back it up. We’ll see how that one goes. But it sounds cool to me.