But what if the technology becomes as simply mainstream as keeping a pond in your backyard that you skim every day? What about all of the money invested already in the land and machinery?
Okay I'm going to let you pick my brain. This is a project I've been working on for the past 8 years. It's a tough sell, but personally I think it's an awesome recycling program. I will tell you the players, just because I doubt any of you would compete with my company.
a 1 acre raceway (think of it like a shrimp farm race way that is 3 feet deep) of Blue Algae in normal conditions can produce more protein in a 6 month cycle then 1,000 acres of corn. The footprint is quite small. This program would be set within a pig farm community.
We have a methane reactor system in Iowia, using 1 pig finishing facility (2,000 pigs per building X 4 buildings = 8,000 pigs). Those pigs generate 1.7 gallons of manure per day through a normal turn (finishing stages 60 lbs - 200 lbs or 45 days). There are 2.5 turns per year. That generates roughly 900,000 gallons of pig shit. The anaerobic digester will produce about 1 gigawatt of electricity everyday for 300 days of the year. The problem with pig manure is its unstability. The manure can't be bottled because it expands so farmers must pay to get this manure out of their farm. Most pig farmers have huge amounts of corn farms; because they can plow in the pig manure in the fall. But because of the salt index getting too high; they must lower their manure injection about 15% per year. The rest must be paid to be disposed of.
Then the byproduct of the digested pig shit is put into a aerobic settling pond and treated by our products to form liquid stabilized organic fertilizer. There is a huge amount of CO2 that is produced through this process. We have this settling pond isolated indoors; so we can trap the CO2 and inject it into an outdoor Blue Algae pond; which will increase the production 10 fold. You must extract the Algae everyday, because at night the algae dies from lack of oxygen.
A daily skimmer automatically skims the algae; which is passed through a filter. The left over water from the filtration is recycled to the aerobic processed manure; so we won't need more water to add powdered ingredients to the process. The amount of Algae created would create more ethanol than 10,000 acres of corn; while producing well over 1 gigawatt of electricity to the surrounding farm community. The community co-ops electrical farm equipment and donates the excess manure to the cause. Basically farmers lower their costs, produces electricity; which generates more income; has viable fertilizer to sale out of the community; and can ship out the algae to refining companies to produce ethanol.
So for this farming community, they have 5 revenue streams.
1.) Selling the electricity back to the grid
2.) Selling the pigs for food
3.) Selling the corn grown from the pig shit
4.) Selling the stabilize liquid pig shit as fertilizer
5.) Selling the Blue Algae to the oil refinement companies to process alternative fuel.
TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION:
Now if the oil companies were smart; they would pay a premium for this algae and "co-op" other farms like tyson does with their chickens. Basically the model is: We supply the protocol, the seeds or program and every month, we pick up your algae for "x" price per ton. So even the ma and pa farms can still sell their algae and make a decent profit too.
