The oil tree there is an American chemist who won the Nobel Prize. His name is Kadawin. He inferred from the fact that combustible vegetable oils such as peanut oil, rapeseed oil and soybean oil all grow from the ground that oil should also be planted. So, starting from 1978, he decided to plant oil to verify his prediction. Later, Kadawin searched everywhere for plants that might produce oil and began planting experiments. One day, Kadawin found a small bush. After he cut the bark with a knife, a rubbery white milk flowed out. Then, he tested the milk and found that its composition was very similar to that of oil, so he called this small shrub "oil tree".
Then, Kadawin began to get busy, not only selecting seeds, but also breeding. He also tried to plant an "oil tree" of about 6 acres in California. As a result, 50 tons of oil were harvested a year, which aroused people's interest in "planting oil".
Since then, the Institute of Petroleum Plants has been established in the United States, specializing in the research and experiment of "planting oil". Researchers at this institute found that there is a kind of squirrel grass in California that contains oil. They extracted about one ton of oil from one hectare of this wild weed. Later, the researchers artificially cultivated and hybridized the grass, which increased the oil content in the grass and extracted 6 tons of oil per hectare. In Brazil, there is a tree more than 30 meters high and about one meter in diameter. As long as a hole is opened in this tree, 7 kilograms of oil can flow out in an hour.
There is an oil-producing walnut in Philippines, which can be harvested twice a year. There is an expert in planting oil trees. He planted six such walnut trees and harvested 300 liters of oil every year.
People not only "grow" oil on land, but also "grow" oil in the sea, because the harvest is greater in the sea.
The US Department of Energy and the Solar Energy Research Institute have successfully extracted high-quality "diesel" from the giant algae growing on the west coast of the United States. According to statistics, 50 grams of seaweed can be harvested per square meter of sea surface every day on average, and the lipid content in seaweed reaches 6%, and fuel oil 150 liter can be extracted every year.
Canadian scientists at seaweed power station also became interested in "planting" oil at sea and conducted successful experiments. They put special bacteria on some fast-growing algae, and after chemical treatment, they grew "oil". This is basically similar to the process of bacteria decomposing organic matter in organisms to form oil in the long years. But it took scientists only a few weeks to replace millions of years.
British scientists are unique. Instead of planting algae to extract oil, they use algae to generate electricity directly, and have developed a set of algae power generation system with a power of 25 kW. Scientists who study seaweed power generation grind dried seaweed into fine particles with a diameter of about 50 microns, then pressurize the small particles to 300 kPa, making them into a mist similar to ordinary fuel, and finally send them to a special generator set for power generation.
At present, scientists in some countries are building a new energy base of "seaweed garden" on the ocean, using bioengineering technology for artificial breeding to form a large area of seaweed culture to meet the demand of seaweed power generation.
Using algae instead of oil to generate electricity has two advantages: 1. Carbon dioxide produced by algae during combustion can be recovered through photosynthesis for algae growth, so it will not release greenhouse gases into the air, which is beneficial to environmental protection. 2. The cost of seaweed power generation is much cheaper than that of nuclear power generation, and it is basically the same as that of coal and oil power generation. According to calculation, if a 56-square-kilometer "seaweed garden" is used to grow seaweed, the electricity generated by it can meet the power supply demand of Britain. This is because the organic matter stored in seaweed is about 4-5 times that in land plants. It can be seen that using algae to generate electricity is promising and has attractive development prospects.
At present, scientists all over the world are actively cultivating algae and refining algae into liquid fuels such as gasoline and diesel for power generation, thus opening up a new way to obtain energy from plants.