I was looking into bioplastics earlier today to try to track down patents. But honestly I couldn't really get into it; polyethylene is quite cheap and the economic value that would be generated by open sourcing this seems small. Of course it and other plastics are something that need to be developed sooner or later. But at the same time, it seems like in order to propel OSE and FeF with maximum speed the juicy stuff that gives a return on investment seems like the first thing to start with yeah? Then the profit produced feeds back into the system speeding it up, and reducing the chance funding runs out too.

And this applies to other commodity stuff to sometimes I think; scrap steel is 60 cents a kilogram. That sounds awfully hard to beat. Making useful objects from said steel might make more sense, amiright?

But Aluminum from clay is currently a stated priority for OSE,(which I previously agreed with, but I change my mind now):

Let's look at aluminum: aluminum is $2.7 per kg as a commodity [http://metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/al/al.asp]. at 6.2 kWH per pound to produce (13.65 kWh a kg) that equates to 0.19 cents per kWh electric input[http://www.rocksandminerals.com/aluminum/process.htm].

Biomass is at least $100 per ton, 17 mj per kg for biomass, convert it at 22% to electricity and so you get 1.038 kWh per 10 cents. You net 9 cents per Kg pf biomass burned. And biomass can be worth more than using it to produce aluminum - some people are selling biomass pellets at $400 a ton!

Pure sun at $800 kilowatt peak productivity and no maintenance and if it is efficient at low light levels you get 4.73 kWh per day in columbia missouri out of your $800 system that's 89 cents a day.. hey actually that's not so bad is it. Return on investment in a couple years, the (obvious problem being that you are mining your own clay though there is a lot to go around this is neither a long term plan or a get rich quick scheme). In many cases it may be better to sell the electricity back to the grid. Plus that ignores the rest of the production process. (the obvious question here is how do they manage to make aluminum that cheaply; they put the plants right near a hydroelectric dam)

But it's not anywhere near making CEB presses at a profit of $2000 each in 10 hours of work. Or hydraulic pistons at a profit of $250 each. It seems like this is likely to apply to other commodities too - although I know an organic chemist who comments on the extreme cheapness of producing a lot of chemicals and the exorbitant profits of companies like dow so I would certainly not rule out the production of all commodities. But pure aluminum and polyethylene seem like very low profit margin products in this context ( $1.7 per kg http://www.icis.com/V2/chemicals/9076151/polyethylene-high-density/pricing.html).

At the same time something just occurred to me: I guess this is what farms do, sell what are really quite cheap commodities (sugar is $0.5 per kg!), but still... essentially this would be the farm that grew polyethylene. An admittedly interesting notion to empower farmers, but not game changing?

What's your take on this?