Heat and pressure makes oil in minutes
At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy, engineers have been able to turn freshly harvested algae into useful crude oil in minutes. All they needed was high temperatures and pressures: 350ºC (662ºF) and 21,000 kPa (3,000 psi).
Research team leader Douglas Elliott was quoted as saying: “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.”
Processes in the earth can naturally reach very high temperatures and pressures, so the irony is obvious; the very result Elliott is reporting is evidence that no millions of years were needed to form oil geologically, but that weeks or months at most would have easily sufficed.
- Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab, gizmag.com, 24 December 2013.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.