I’ve always been interested in biofuels. Cooking gas, cooking oil, diesel fuel made entirely from your own land. Sounds pretty cool.

There are lots of DIY biogas projects on the net. I’m curious to try this after we move onto the land, particularly if we ever get larger animals like goats.

I’ve also done some reading into palm oil. Apparently, palm oil has been challenged as having quite a few negative aspects from an “eco friendly” standpoint. Some of these reasons include reduced food supply because food farms convert to energy production, burning of forests to make way for palm oil plantation land, and the energy used to transport palm oil for processing and to get to the consumer. But none of these issues would relate to me if I were to decide to plant 3 oil palm trees on my land and make oil from them.

I’ve read that oil palm trees can yield up to 6000 liters of palm oil per hectare, and that you can plant 143 trees per hectare. Thats about 42 liters of oil per tree per year! These numbers suggest that just 3 trees can produce an average of 2.4 liters of oil per week. I don’t know much about how spread out this yield will be over the year (3 trees producing enough fruit for 10 liters of oil once a month is more useful than producing no fruit for 11 months and then fruit for 125 liters of oil in one month), but these numbers sound at least worth exploring more. In addition to burning palm oil for cooking, it is also supposed to be a pretty healthy oil for eating. And you can also make soap from it. And, of course, there is biodiesel. Hopefully I’ll get around to planting a few of these in the upcoming year. If I can find saplings or seeds.

But even the amazing numbers associated with oil palm yields pale in comparison to algal oil (oil from algae). You can see numbers of up to 90,000 liters of oil per hectare per year and harvest periods of only a few days. Based on this number, I would be able to get my 125 liters of oil per year from only 14 square meters of land and harvest as often as I could possibly need. This is compared to 210 square meters for the 3 oil palm trees.

Well…

I’ve got rain water filling up my pond, and I noticed algae growing in it:

So just for fun, we collected some of this algae floating on the top and tried drying it out. Here is how it came out:

(It looks a bit like a bag of marijuana, don’t you think?)

It smelled delicious. I’m not sure if it is actually edible or not, but it sure smelled yummy. Like fried seaweed snacks.

Anyway, it didn’t easily burn, so I suspect the oil content is quite low. I’ve read that algae produces greater oil content in more nutrient scarce environments, and this environment is probably quite nutrient plentiful. And who knows which species of algae this is.

So maybe it is time to look into building my own algal bioreactor and do a more controlled experiment?