Sunday, June 5, 2011

Solar Slime


A company called Solazyme (Solar Slime in the Green Machine’s vocabulary) had an IPO this week and has the thermodynamic neophytes on Wall Street in rapture. The company is in the business of making biodiesel from algae. This is not your average pond scum company. The average pond scum company claims the use of sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to yield lipids from algae. Solar Slime has a different angle on being gangrene. They will use sugar instead of carbon dioxide and sunlight as the carbon and energy sources for their wonder algae to perform the “miracle” conversion of sugar to oil.

Yeah Solar Slime is another company taking a food crop and intending to propel the billion vehicles on planet earth. In previous blogs I have given my readers some data on the land and water intensity of growing crops to yield table sugar. Just like the great lovers at Amyris, Solar Slime needs sugar to yield a vehicle fuel. Why not simply grow soy beans and yield a crop that can feed people, and then have the people ride electric bicycles, take the bus, or walk and save the world from the sugar to diesel nonsense where there is no value add and only the government and dumb investors support the conversion of furniture to wood.

Just today Nissan announced they have cut their forecast of Leaf sales in the USA in half to a paltry 10,000 units for the full year of 2011. Nissan is still getting over a billion dollars of Federal grants and loans to equip their plant in Tennessee to build hundreds of thousands of Leafs a year starting in 2013. The Mamas and The Papas gave us California Dreaming about escaping brown leaves, the Nissan crowd will give us a new song called Tennessee Dreaming where we all believe that the Nissan Green Leaf will sell a million units. Of course the dreaming will take place when we are all drunk on Jack Daniels.

The boys at Kleiner Perkins continue their green fake out with additional funding for Fisker who claims they will sell their first plug in hybrid $100,000 car in July. Fisker has Coda beat by a whisker in launching their car first as Coda has now delayed their launch till late this year. Fisker is supported by Al Gore while Coda is the brain child of Hank the Tank Paulson. The Green Machine is fair and balanced and suggests that both Al and Hank should just fade away after both of them had a hand at messing up the country while pretending to be public servants in Washington. If I remember correctly old Al Gore did not carry his home state of Tennessee in the 2000 presidential elections. Perhaps the people in Tennessee are smarter than the folks in Delaware where old Biding His Time managed to hoodwink the Feds to equip that Fisker assembly plant. News is that Fisker is now saying they only need one third of the floor space of the former General Motors plant. I guess kids in the second grade can learn fractions by reading the news from Renault, and Fisker.

The laws of thermodynamics are not fractional and the second law will always hold long after

the leaves are brown,

the sky is grey,

and

all our pretend praying did not make fossil fuels go away

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