Chelsea Jobe
Sept. 13th, 2009 1 day late
3:45pm
Technology will has changed and will keep chaining out future. If we find a new source of fuel that will change how transporation and globalization works. So, when I started to read this article about how oil companies were investing in tweaking the metabolic pathways in algae to increase the amount of oil they produce it really showed me a new door of possibility. There is no guarantee of sucess and it's not going to be easy, but it's a start. Exxon mobile invested up to $600 million dollars towards finding a future where algae will help produce oil, or something around that area. Producing algae fuel has not been looked at very well up until recently. Since 2006 every year the amount of people interested in this version of fuel has doubled. Agae can produce much more fuel per acre than palm, sugar cane, or corn. Other companies such as Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell are also starting to invest in algae oil. Algae fuel has been tested and has helped power planes, cvars and other vehicles. So the airline industry is also interested in algae oil. There are a lot of ideas on how to grow th algae and companies like Google (which now practically owns 95% of the world) and NASA.
The point here is that we are finally on our way to finding another resource for oil other than digging into the ground, in which it will eventually be depleted. So I think it's great that all these big companies are realizing how important it is to research and discover new ways of energy. I'm not sure how this one is going to work out when it comes to helong the algae grow and I hope we don't just go from one problem to another, but you never know until we test and try it. Technological advances are really helping shape the world we live in today, who knows where we could be tomorrow.
3 comments:
Wow. Algae! Very interesting. The question is how many more alternative sources will they come up with before they actually switch over from oil! When its no longer the most profitable? Or maybe when the earth is sucked completely dry.
Algae? Wonder if i got enough in my fish tank to make some money lol.
I think its great that people are trying to solve the worlds oil problems. but he is right... when will people actually switch to all alternative fuels?
Its great that companies are starting to realize that we need to start finding other ways of getting resources, and using other resources that we have like the whole algae thing to make the are resources even better!
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