Biofuel jobs in New Mexico

[dogman]

Sapphire is hiring for their Columbus NM biofuel facility. It's the algea thing. http://search4.smartsearchonline.com/sa ... search.asp

Likely you'd live in Deming, about 40 miles away. Columbus is too small to find a rental.

[spinningmagnets]

This may end up being expensive per gallon, but it does work in the lab. I believe the US military has committed to purchase a minimum volume of product to ensure adequate data is collected to see what the actual costs and results would be if plants like this were scaled up. A few years back, the US military issued a spec so the major oil companies would be on the same page to supply them with a 50% bio-fuel mix.

Small ships now use jet engines (a turboshaft like a helicopter, that drives a propellor), fighter jets, cargo jets, the turbine-engined M1 tank, and the wide array of diesel-piston vehicles (6X6 trucks, Hummvees) can all run on JP-5, which is slightly thinner than diesel fuel (similar to kerosene). I believe this project will be well-funded for at least the next couple years.

There is no single silver bullet to solve future fuel issues, but I am a fan of bio-diesel. The majority of bio-diesel made currently comes from soybean oil (simply because its convenient at current volumes), but the latest crop to show the promise of being much better is Camelina seed oil.

Rather than displacing existing food crops (corn, soybean, etc) camelina can be grown in fairly marginal soil with very little water. Modern non-flying big-breasted chickens are descended from the scrawny Guinea fowl, and the same type of genetic engineering is being tweaked on Camelina. The US has plenty of unused land, the main issue is dwindling water supplies.

[dogman]

The desert sw is the hotspot for the algea biofuel route. Cheap land, the process can be done with bad water, tons of sunlight. No way it will ever be cheap as regular oil, but pretty cool that it doesn't take food out of any mouth like the corn ethanol does.

Deming is not that great a place to live, It's just small, so no nightlife. Great 4x4 roads right there. Land and a mobile home is cheap there. Too bad the big facility didn't get located a bit closer to Las Cruces. Some of the jobs are in the R&D lab in Las Cruces though.

[Whiplash]

Haha! I drove through Demming on my way to and from Houston when I went to machining school! Kind of creepy at night with their dimly lit red sign I saw! Middle of nowhere for sure!

[Jay64]

I agree that solutions like this won't have as much capacity as regular oil production, but I think if it is built into a multi-purpose system it would be more worth while. I would think that after they extract the lipids out of the algae there would still be a decent amount of bio-mass left over. That could be used for soil amendments. The desert could definitely use bio-mass soil amendments. But just growing algae for bio-mass isn't a very productive endevour, but as a byproduct, it could be really useful.

[dogman]

Likely they can feed large quantities of biomass to dairy cows. Got tons of dairys here. Or plow it into the chile field.

100% of New Mexico is the middle of nowhere. We actually like it that way. 4x4 and dirtbike heaven.