Globalvert
The Problem.
30 years of research, hundreds of companies, universities and research institutes, thousands of researchers, and no solution. Why?
The Money Cycle
Money is the shaker of everything.
If we want to use algae based biofuel – it has to be economically viable. It can’t be more expensive than fossil fuel.
To get to viable biofuel- we need research.
Research costs money. And a lot of it.
How are we going to make enough money to support all the needed research?
By using all those algae we already have to produce other more profitable products: from food supplements to cosmetics.
Many algae research companies do it and gradually migrate their focus onto the source of income they have only developed to sustain the expensive biofuel research.
#1
Money generated on those production lines eventually finances mainly those products, with very little left for the biofuel research department.
We still do not know how to use a single production line to produce algae biofuel AND other algae based products. So companies often leav their algae biofuel research behind in order to make money and survive.
The Language Barrier
We can overcome regional language barriers using the English language. But to overcome different research languages, styles and methods we still need a lot of work.
Researchers need to speak the same scientific language if they want to work together in the field of algae biofuel.
The first researchers to investigate this field were obviously biology researchers. They focused on the biological production circles, the algae growth under different conditions, the different types of algae and how they work.
#2
In order for them to really manufacture anything, they have to use machines- machines to grow the algae in the right conditions, to monitor the growth, to extract the fuel from the algae and more- and this is the field of the engineers, chemists, and physicists. And they speak different languages, using different words to describe similar things, putting different emphasizes on different subjects, leading them to a totally different understanding and ending up with a hard time communicating.
But that’s not all: in order for the whole thing to succeed, it has to make money. It has to be economically viable. And all the biologists, chemists, engineers and physicists now must also communicate with the economists, to make sure the whole thing has not only the scientific and mechanical but also the economical basis to work. And the economists too have their own angle to look at things, and talk about them differently.
A real Tower of Babel.
If so many people are in this quest to develop algae biofuel for so long and they are still not there – they must be missing something. Had anyone known what everyone is missing, this research would have been at another phase by now.
But no one knows what is the missing piece, and given the current state of information sharing- or non-sharing, it's no wonder.
Only little information is shared, and even the information that is shared is hard to find and is not organized. Bits and pieces of information are scattered all over the net, libraries – public and private. No central search exists, nor indexing of any sort to facilitate search and usage of any such knowledge.
The Missing Piece
#3
More importantly, the current state of disorganized information, cannot allow for the mapping of knowledge. Without that, we can't put all the pieces to a single picture, and spot the missing pieces in it- the missing pieces in algae biofuel research.
After spending so much money in research, companies who are vested into Algae Based Biofuel are reluctant to share any research results. It’s a race to find the new world’s oil well. No one wants to help their competitors.
For the decades this research field exists no real advancement towards any economically viable algae based biofuel has been reached. No single company or institution is capable of executing all the necessary research to get there really. But sharing of private research is somehow inconceivable.
-Or is it?
Hidden Information
#4
Sharing privately reached information and research might indeed help your competitors advance in this race, but perhaps it is worth it if it means that we will all get somewhere eventually. Better get in a race to a certain goal with competitors then remain in a race with no competitors to nowhere at all.