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Biology Could Be Used To Turn Sugar Into Diesel
ABCTech has an interesting article about an Emeryville-based tech startup, Amyris Biotechnologies, that is planning to use microbes to turn sugar into diesel. Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline. The company was initially given a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attempt to research the applications of Synthetic Biology for making a cost-effective malaria drug. Jack Newman, the Vice-President of Amyris said, "Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel? We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel. And if you wanted to design, you name it, a jet fuel? We can make that too."
I'm sure this will be on the market just in time for me to fill up my flying car.
Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline.
They should add suger to beans. They're great for making gas.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
No, really, they'll use snakes to make oil. Get it? Got it? Good.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Can Biology really do that?
Wow!
Tell me what else this "Science" can do.
By the time this is a viable way to get your gasoline, I'd really hope we'd be onto higher technologies then this. You know, like that Eleck Trick stuff, Or that Hydro Jen whatchamacallits.
-E
Biology can turn sugar into diesel? Next they'll be telling us that physics can turn heat into electricity!
Create more diesel? Not exactly an environment saver, this idea.
FTFA: "We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel" ... And this helps our Global Warming problem how?
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
We're still dying from Malaria, but thanks for the cheap fuel.
If you're making it from sugar, it's going to suck from an energy-balance point of view no matter what. The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
Biology already have the means to make long chain parafins in the form of triglyerides.
Gasoline will be a bit harder as you don't want long chain parafins, you want branch chained C7 / C8s (seven and eight carbon hydrocarbons) as a straight chain C8 hase an octane number of zero (by definition) while the fully branched C7 has an octance number of 100 (again by definition). Getting octane numbers >90 is difficult without using aromatic compounds (benzene & toluene which have octane numbers in the 120 to 150s).
The original source for the octane 100 reference was from the cones of a particular pine tree.
So in theory there is a biological precendence but it could take 10 years to get there, once we do then the scale up will be very quick.
ZombieEngineer
People don't like to talk about peak oil as something that could really rock the way we live, but it's got that potential. Modern economies are based on growth, which means that more and more energy must be consumed. Eventually, however, we're going to have to figure out a new way to satisfy that growing demand, because oil isn't going to cut it.
Most alternatives require drastic infrastructure changes—converting hundreds of millions of cars to hydrogen or batteries isn't going to be easy or cheap. Adding ethanol to the mix could help, but the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) isn't all that great, and it will force food prices up as well. This company seems to have something rather novel up its sleeve—it'll be interesting to see how effecient their process is. If it's good, it'll be much more than a $10 billion company before too long.
Umm diesel is really similar to kerosene used in jet engines.
Well, most sugars have enough basic ingrediants to make octane, I suppose.
Perhaps it will be even more popular than soylent diesel?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Innovative bio-fuels like will not really help mitigate the global warming crisis (http://www.climatecrisis.net/). If anything, they'll help promote a false sense of security--"we are driving bio-fuel-powered vehicles, so we are doing our part to help prevent global warming." When we burn bio-fuel, we still release the greenhouse gases responsible for causing climate change.
Instead, research should be targeted at fuel efficiency and conservation. While biofuel may be important for fighting foreign oil dependency and may be better than oil-derived fuels in terms of climate change, it is still no great leap forward.
Also, is it ethical for Amyris to take money for researching a more affordable anti-malaria drug for poorer countries and then use that money to develop a profitable fuel for use in the United States? Likely not.
Because the energy and CO2 released by the manufactured gasoline were originally captured from the sun and the atmosphere respectively by plants. Thus the net effect over a very short cycle is zero.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
most of these petroleum hydrocarbons are extremely powerful solvents.
so unless they are making methane, which lots of bacteria already do then im not quite sure what this is about.
Am I mistaken, or did this company start with a $43 million gimme with the explicit goal of saving people from malaria?
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
This will not work. Sure, you can make almost anything but as anyone who's worked with bioreactors or bacterial colonies will know they do not scale well. Also comparared to good-old sythetic chemistry, bio-processes are inherently inefficient energywise. If you want to take energy from the sun don't mess around with stupid stuff like this. Instead improve upon the COTS solutions available and help them grow in scale for mass-market. Most energy production should be local and thermal (solar-thermal, geo-thermal etc.) with the main net running on nuclear power. Vehicles should be plug-in EV. The reason for this is that we're gonna need our ever diminishing arable land for food production to feed the almost 10 billion people we'll soon have here...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I'm going to go pour sugar into my gas tank! Wait here!
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Seriously. I mean, it's nice and all to know a really, really inefficient and underproducing way to produce gasoline, but malaria's really not related to that, is it?
That's like if my boss hired me to write a web service for internet transactions, and I show him after 4 months that I wrote a VR simulation with a floating head that spouted out daily horoscopes. I'm sure there's a market for it, but I'm certain my boss would be pretty confused.
The trees. Man, the trees hate us too.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Judge: So even though you admit to pouring sugar in your ex's gas tank you are claiming to be innocent of damaging her car?
Defendant: Yes your Honor. I mistook it for a diesel.
Judge: A Diesel? What does that have to do with anything?
Defendant: I was just trying to use Biology to fill her tank.
Judge: Of course. Bailiff! Take him away. fsckn slashdotters...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The problem is taking carbon based oil out of the ground and then putting it in the air. Instead, with this approach, the CO2 is taken out of the air to form carbohydrates and/or deasil fuel. This is burned, but the CO2 simply recycles back. IOW, this is more of a close loop system. It will be environmental friendly. In fact, it is more likely, that they will use algae and have that clean up waste water. Make more sense than doing corn, switch grass, or stalks => ethanol.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While not specifically named in the article, this seems a lot like butanol, a four-carbon alcohol. Its energy density is very close to gasoline, and far better than two-carbon ethanol. We can even use it to fuel modern gasoline engines without modification (the site I referenced ran several thousand miles in a 1992 Buick). BP and DuPont are co-operating on a project to bring butanol into the alternative fuels market.
And it's carbon neutral.
I think this would suffer from the same problem other biodiesel projects suffer from, which is that they require such vast amounts of land to produce, that the entire process becomes inefficient, expensive and not that environmentally friendly anymore.
/.. I hope it is still intelligible.)
(That has to be the longest sentence I've written on
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Devastating argument!
I surrender.
Gov. is good. Loving government loves me.
Republicrats are good people.
The bad guys are going to get you.. no W and DHS and the patriot act will protect you.
They found WMDs, HR 6166 didn't pass, DU is good for you.
Steel buildings just melt and collapse due to fire.
There is no more oil!
We need to kill ourselves to save the planet..
Bahh, Bahhh, Bahhh...
-1 Troll
+2 Concept for next Mel Gibson Movie
--
+1 Net points
Please mod accordingly.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Not to be completely off-topic: diesel from sugar? Good for them!
... can you please soften a bit this jarring, eye-popping yellow you use for the "opinion center". Yea, we get it: they pay you a lot to have it there, blazingly obvious and right on top of everything, but it's totally out of place and distracting when I want to read something.
And now
"making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day." Thats too funny let em die they got no money lets make gas go figure funded by Bill Gates ... Life Curing Drugs For africans or promote lazy fat ass Americans like Comparing a PC for Every Kid to potential $$ made with Windows Vista
Wish I could mod you up. I remember reading a story in Wired(?) about a world renowned scientist that stated oil was being created by microbes continuously. Of course this revelation ruined his credibility, guess we all just need to drink the Koolade.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Yep, men of ambition and men of reason seldom undersand each other.
WTF are they thinking??? "Woohoo, we blew our whole $43m on the WRONG PRODUCT and made a WHOLE $20m from it!!! Oh, yeah, actually it's just a PMITA loan of sorts, but one day this might make us RICH!!!!111eleventy-one11! Oh, what, dying kids? ORLY?? Yeah, whatever."
I'm speechless.
The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.
That's easy: Add xylene. (Either in a batch, or by incubating it with the sort of bacteria that hang out in the guts of termites.)
This cracks the cellulose back into starch.
Cracking starch to sugar is similarly trival. (Either add acid or feed it to certain microbes.)
Once you've got sugar, getting to ethanol is a previously-solved problem (as is getting it to "something more like gasoline or diesel fuel" if the other bioprocesses work out on an industrial scale.)
Of course if you are willing to go with METHanol, just heat the cellulose, in a centuries-old industrial process. (That's why they call it "wood alcohol", after all.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ah, the sweet smell of diesel!
Obviously whoever came up with this scheme has no understanding of either biology or chemistry.
Hey! wouldn't it be great if we could make bacteria ferment diesel! Yeah man! Cool!
I like alternative energy schemes, but I just get the "ain't gonna work" feeling from this one. For one thing the products would have to be water soluble to be fermentation products, so you're looking at some kind of carboxylic acid or long chain alcohol probably. These would then have to be dehydrated in an industrial process by boiling them in acid. The net result is you'd be better off just processing the sugar (or actually just raw plant material) to begin with rather than fooling around fermenting it into something else, because in each step you lose carbon.
Clickety Click
If they can really synthesise jet fuel they'll make a bucket load of money. Pure biodiesel is too viscous to be used at high altitude, ethanol's energy density is too low, liquid hydrogen's volume too great. There really just aren't many alternatives to good old kerosene.
The US DoD recently had a successful trial of synfuel on a B52 but it was synthesised from natural gas, which is also finite. Successful production of kerosene from sugar would be a great achievement.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Why is the western world so utterly addicted to the internal combustion engine? It might be an easy way to get around, but we generate a lot of harmful waste gasses that way. By finding alternative ways to produce diesel and gasoline, we're not addressing the fact that internal combustion is just an outdated technology which we keep clinging on to.
Research should focus on an efficient way to turn energy from a portable source into movement, and an efficient and clean way to produce portable energy sources. We will still be needing huge quantaties of hydrocarbons (read: crude oil, not refined into diesel or anything) for the production of plastics and other artificial materials.
(1) Yeah, yeah, flame away with your pro/contra global warming theories whatever you like. Fact of the matter is: Internal Combustion engines are not an efficient way to extract energy from an energy source. A lot of energy is transferred into heat, which is dissipated. I don't want to go into the global warming issue here, with a dominantly american crowd, but the carbon oxide emissions are a fact, and they're not benificial to the environment in any case.
I know everyone is drawn to filling the shortfall caused by dwindling petroleum supplies is causing something of a gold rush in ethanol and bio-diesel, but why go through the effort to convert it at all?
Sugar is fuel. In fact, any food with any number of calories is fuel. If it's so cheap and easy to make large volumes of sugar to convert to other fuels, and run vehicles on, then it would be easier, more efficient, and more profitable to just start designing cars/engines that run on pure sugar, instead of gas/diesel to begin with.
Perhaps we need to switch back to boilers, so that our cars can run on anything flamable that we can shovel into the hopper. We'd have some real competition, and I bet straight (dried) cellulose (and things like home tree trimmings) would win out.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Or is that now on the back burner?
Jack Newman, PhD, Amyris Biotechnologies VP: "This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."
So they decided to aim for a more lucrative market as well -- bio-fuels -- a clean alternative to petroleum products.
Within months they had $20 million dollars in venture capital funding and a new CEO.
Well, well, well, isn't that nice...
So, whadup with that malaria thing?
Man...Damn chumps make less than a dollar a DAY! How we gonna make a livin' on that?
Oh yeah, right.
An now we need to clear cut a billion acres for our sugar plantation. Gonna get us some giant ants to run the place.
Cowabunga.
What?
Will this make our cars diabetic, too, like the ever-increasing percentage of Americans who drive them?
Isn't that a song from Aerosmith?
As other /.ers hve pointed, this *will* be an environment saver, because it is *renewable* energy. (But there's a *BUT...*)
Any renewable energy, by being *renewable* must therefore be part of a cycle.
Not a resource that just must be mined for (like coal. There is a net positive release of CO2 and other pollution into the atmosphere), but a resource that is progressively rebuilt as part of the cycle :
Where at one end of the cycle, people are burning bio-diesel into CO2, at the other end, algae/corn/other plants are converting CO2 and light back into sugar which will be fed back to the diesel-producing bacteria (basically : they produce fat*).
Same with wood : if your burning down great tropical forest there's a net negtive bilan. But if you use wood from specially grown tree for that purpose, the net bilan is neutral : you destroy as much as you grow new tree whitch will fix back that CO2. (And therefore, heating with wood pellets happen to be more ecological)
In fact, if some scientist discovered a way to produce renewable gasoline (I mean, a faster way than the natural "just stand around a few million years and all that coal will finaly turn into oil"), it will be much more environment friendly because at one end of the process you'll be fixing back most of the pollution that was released on the other end.
BUT...
Although the problem of CO2 is corrected with renewable energy sources, there's still other pollution that is produced by burning diesel, whose problem isn't it's increase, but it's mere presence.
Namely : the finer particles that are emitted by burning diesel. All this micro-dust, at the moment of release, is bad for your health (even if in the long term, it's going to be degraded and then assimiled back into the diesel).
But that is a separate problem that is currently already being tackled in current diesel/bio-diesel engines.
------
* : Given the fact that bio-diesel is just refined fat, another solution beside the bio-diesel producing bacterias, would be adding bio-diesel facilities next to liposuction clinics. It is renewable (CO2 fixed back into fat through the food chain). Given the fact that the societies burning the most gaz are also the fattest (due to the lack of exercising related to the car usage), this could (...almost...) makes sense.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Physists report the ability to turn lead into gold.
Economists point out that the electric bill for said process would pay for 10 times as much gold as the process creates....
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women...
Malthusians have been wrong for several hundred years now on the relationship between arable land, population, and well-fed people. The key conceit is that food production is directly proportional to arable land and that arable land increases linearly while population increases geometrically. There are a couple of problems here, and the most salient one is that food production also increases with technological and social progress.
Our food production on a *per acre* basis beats the hell out of any reasonable expectation of human population growth. Human population going to be 100 billion by 2100? Thats a big *yawn* from the perspective of our untapped agricultural capacity -- yields per acre in the US from 1900 to 2000 increased by over a factor of about 6 to 8 (depends on crop), due to improved agricultural practices, improved agricultural business models (sorry, family farm, agribusiness grinds you into dust on the efficiency scale), the Green revolution, etc etc. The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt. Take modern technology plus modern societal organization, mix in some cruddy desert land that had been impoverished for millenia, and you get Israel (which is an agricultural powerhouse, especially compared to anybody in the neighborhood).
Over the same 1900 to 2000 time period, Japan had an even better relative increase in productivity, mostly because (like much of present-day Africa) they were starting from pretty darn close to the bottom of the curve.
Even assuming that technological progress in agriculture stops today (unlikely -- we're just getting the party started when it comes to GMO crops, and "640k should be enough for everybody"-type "All progress has already been accomplished" thinking is always a loser), all we'd have to do to feed 10, 15, 20 billion people is take the technological and organizational know-how of the leading edge of First World farmers and get that know-how to land which is already used for agricultural purposes. Sure, we could claim extra land too, but its hardly necessary.
So why, with this abundance of technology, do people still starve? Bad government, in every single case in the modern world. Governments practically evolved to combat famine and some countries in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands) haven't seen a non-war one in a couple hundred years. Many nations in Africa, North Korea, the Ukraine under the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have a government which either uses famine as a weapon to commit democide against their opponents (Sudan), or is just maliciously incompetent (North Korea, "Hey I've got an idea lets take all the land from the white farmers and give it to our black powerbase who have no experience managing farms, no possible downside there" in Africa).
Give your stock poor African nation 20 years of stable economic growth (i.e. capitalism and democracy, pretty much) and I'll guarantee you their main food-related health problem will be obesity, like it is for "poor" people in the United States. (Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)
Now, as it regards bio-anything for a power source, I'm skeptical that we can increase agricultural efficiency faster than our energy needs, so I agree with you. Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes. (Solar, geothermal, and hydropower are all heavily dependent on you living somewhere they actually work, but you can split the atom pretty much anywhere.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I've been turning carbohydrates into methane for years.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Bastard
That's what I was thinking too. Even if they don't give a fuck about solving malaria, I'd expect then they'd give the money back, since it was for a specific purpose.
Now I realize that a donation isn't always a "you have to deliver X in Y days for Z million dollars" contract, but at the very least certain promises have been made. It's basically like saying "donate some money to help the latest tsunami/tornado/whatever victims" and then going "wtf, now I'm supposed to just give them that money? That's a stupid business model. I'll just go build a supermarket with that money instead. Now that's a good business model." It's pretty much just fraud.
And yes, some things aren't great business models, but that's the whole idea behind charity and donations. People give to charities _because_ we know they're going to use the money for a good and ultimately unprofitable cause. For a cause which wouldn't get done otherwise, precisely because it's not profitable. We don't go donate to an already profitable corporation in a profitable market. Ever considered sending a donation to IBM or Microsoft? Thought so.
The whole idea is to make a difference, to help something get done that wouldn't get done otherwise. If it were profitable, it would already get done anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Biodiesel derived from grown plants would produce no net carbon. Plants take in CO2 make oxygen store energy as starches. We take their starches make biodiesel. We release some CO2 plant makes oxygen.....and so on. The net is zero. Biodiesel isn't like we take fossil fuels and burn them. Fossil fuels are from carbon deposits built up and stored in the earth for millions of years and we are burning through what has been built up for millions of years in a couple hundred. Isn't that the problem. Biodiesel with better and better fuel economy seems like a real solution to me. Unlike the idiotic disaster that would be unleashed from the greatly increased polution derived from the current inefficient manufacture and distribution of hydrogen that everyone wants. Hydrogen from water has always been 10 years away. Just like we are promised we will have a handle on Iraq in 6 months. Put that together with a efficient plug in car hybrid and there go many pollution problems. Newer Coal burning power plants with the latest pollution reduction equipment are a lot less polluting than your current run of the mill gas car. Biodiesel from plants is currently more expensive than gas but economies of scale and all. Granted all that extra farmland might pose more ecological problems but it is a start. Please explain to me if am wrong I have always wondered why no one likes biodiesel?
Find a way to turn easily turn FAT into sugar. So that fat Americans can fuel their own cars.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
If it really was so easy to make sugar from cellulose we wouldn't use sugarcane and other plants to get the sugar and go the big cellulose producers - like trees - instead.
Nikola Tesla thought that it was possible to make the hole earth into a giant dynamo and make energy free for everyone. The earth is spinning so the idea makes sense. Why not do a little more resarch on this? Oh yeah, thats right.. No bank will lend money into this. No revenue in free energy.
"Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices
because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of
potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can
but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner
this market once again."
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
Strategy Session
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
Creating fuel from renewable organic materials allways bares the same problem, regardless which plants you use and at which fueltype you arrive: The amount of agricultural landmass you need to only power a fraction of our fuel powered traffic is extreme.
The avarage Person (in europe and us) consumes like 30kg of sugar each year. Let's speculate you get 1litre of fuel out of 1kg sugar. That would be an additional 2000kg (per person) sugar for a car that makes 20'000km/year at 10l/100km. I don't even want to think about the fuel demands of airplanes, cargoships, generators and centralheatings in buildings for now. So if the existing landmass for sugarproduction just meets our actual 30kg demand (and even at that size allready is the main industry of many southamerican countries), then productive landmass would have to grow (at least) by factor 70, to produce a usefull amount of fuel for the world.
I'm just saying: in about 40 years we're gonna be finished eating up the fossil remains of 3billion years of plantlife. Imagine how many sugarplantations you need to sustain that throughput. What probably will happen is the same to every organic fuel we've heard of so far: At some special Gasstations you will be able to purchase a overpriced "special blend" whichs adds 3% or 5% organic fuel to normal fuel. Whopie. I totaly feel like destroing earth less now.
The trees. Man, the trees hate us too.
Yeah, did ya ever look at a tree man? There's some spooky shit goin' on there.
And they are green too!!
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
1) ???? 2) Biology 3) Profi
-1 not first post
``Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel?''
Ethanol is actually an excellent fuel. I'd say it's actually _better_ than gasoline. While the mileage you get from either is about the same (provided you tune the engine for the fuel), ethanol burns cleaner, which is better for the environment and for the engine.
So, as far as I am concerned, the question is why we are _not_ making ethanol. And I think the answer to that is that some powerful entities don't want us to. For example, governments don't want you to produce ethanol - which is, after all, alcohol, and bad for your health, etc. Besides, many governments get a cut from all alcohol sales. And of gasoline sales, too. Which are also the lifeline of the powerful oil industry. I am not saying there is a conspiracy here, but it's undeniable that there are powerful parties who have much to lose from cars switching to gasoline for fuel.
By the way, all the above applies to gasoline engines. Diesel engines are a different story. They don't run on gasoline, and they don't run on ethanol (or at least, not well). However, they do run on biodiesel, and even straight vegetable oil (will need pre-heating in cold weather, though). Vegetable oil is much less problematic, and, if I ever get a car, I will make sure it's a diesel, fit it with the necessary fuel heating system, and run it on sunflower oil (or whatever vegetable oil is cheapest).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel?
My car runs with ethanol (it runs with gasoline too). Isn't it a fuel? (According to the dictionary, yes, it is.) More than that, my car does 11.8 kilometers per liter (27.75 miles per gallon for americans, 8.478 liters per 100 km for europeans) with ethanol and it costs only 65% of the price of gasoline.
It would have to run 18.15 km per liter with gasoline (42.69 mpg, 5.51 l/100km) to have the same cost per kilometer, but it doesn't go further than 15 km/l.
Gasoline? Not for me, thanks!
So say we all
read about it here
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
combining that with this
Jack Newman, PhD, Amyris Biotechnologies VP: "This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."So they decided to aim for a more lucrative market as well -- bio-fuels -- a clean alternative to petroleum products.
And it sounds like they decided to abandon the malaria reasearch and pursue more profitable reasearch.
Looking at thier website though, it seems the malaria research had a roughly four year lifespan anyway, so it's possible that they are just running both processes simultanauosly.
Although, being a company, it actually is much more likely that they will focus more on the profit angle. All we can do is hope it doesn't squash the anti malaria research (grants usually have cluases in them to prevent such misappropriation of funds).
P.s.
It is much more efficient to stop malaria by quickly curing infected patients (which will break the infection cycle of the plasmodium) rather than attempting to totally wipe out a whole species of insect (which still plays an important part in tropical ecosystems)
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
It doesn't really matter all that much what the end product is... ethanol is perfectly fine. The point is one ton of dry woody biomass is about the same as 2 barrels of oil and this if you can convert for free.
Starches are fine to start with, but only a small amount of the plant ends up as starch. An even smaller amount ends up as oils. Celulose, pentosans and lignins compose the majority of plant tissues. There are many fungi which digest these and some can be harnessed to produce alcohols. The issue is we are still stuck with one ton of dry plant matter equals about 2 barrels of oil.
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. From a plant source this is 40 million tonnes per day.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. Note that Alberta Tar Sands operations are essentually bitumin->liquids. Bitumin is a little closer chemically to what we need than coal is... IE both are hydrogen poor in that liquid fuels in the Alkane series (most of what we use) have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon.
Coal depending on the type is about 0.6:1 and bitumin is closer to 1:1.
Methane is 4:1. This means that methane is a good chemical feedstock from which to obtain the hydrogen needed.
This also means it is stupid to be burning methane... it is far more valuable as a chemical feedstock than a fuel.
Plant matter does fit into the equation, it is not as hydrogen poor. Plant matter is basically (CH2O)n and from this we can see that it is a partially oxidized hydrocarbon. This means that plant matter is hydrogen poor unless we can break the H2O bonds and this is the same problem we face with coal and bitumin. Ie... in the case of coal and bitumin, we can break H2O bonds in river water or lake water or ocean water to obtain our hydrogen.
Note that alcohols are also partially oxidized hydrocarbons. Ethanol for instance is C2H5OH. This means it is easier to obtain ethanol from sugar because both the sugar and the ethanol contains Oxygen. The flip side of this is that since the molecule is already partially oxidized, it doesn't contain as much energy as an un-oxydized Alkane such as the ethane (C2H6) parent molecule. Also note that ethane for instance has an atomic weight of 30 while ethanol has an atomic weight of 46. So you have less energy with about 1.5 times the weight.
(BTW - this is the short of why the oil industry is building LNG tankers. Methanol (CH3OH) is safer and easier to transport than CH4 (liquid), but 1/2 the weight of methanol is oxygen).
All this means is there isn't a free lunch. Production of any fuel from a sugar polymer source (dry plant matter) is going to require energy and the only biological source of this energy comes from oxidizing carbon to obtain the energy required to salvage the hydrogen. This results in massive releases of CO2 (of course - its the raw material plants use to create dry matter - hense it is not polution and is in fact fertilizer). Next you lose a significant amount of the total mass of the dry matter we start with. We eventually are left with one ton of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil - if we can convert it for free.
We are back to needing 40 tonnes of dry plant matter per day and massive factories which don't exist.
A few items back engineer-poet posted this link: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/solix_and_ color.html which
claims to get to jet fuel-like stuff:s -selling-solar.html
"The algae oil can also be refined into other liquid fuels, including ethanol and jet fuel."
In this case they can leave out the intermediate step of making sugar and take advantage of the higher photosynthetic productivity of algae over rooted plants. I wonder if the two groups should get together to try to further process the algae biologically to get increased yields?
---
Candy is dandy but SOLAR is quicka in 40 US states but not Costa Rica: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
but your own: http://www.powur.com/mdsolar
--
An after thought.
Oh... I should add. The issue of producing ethanol from starch is the same as making beer. Note that beer is typically 5% ethanol. Thus 20 gallons of beer contain about 1 gallon of ethanol.
If ethanol is going to compete on price with gasoline then we're going to need to be able to make it at under $2.50 per gallon. The process to produce ethanol from starch includes converting the starches into sugars (mashing) and then converting the sugars into ethanol (fermentation). This means beer is an intermediate step.
The short of this is that if we can produce ethanol cost effectively as an energy source compared with say gasoline, then we should be able to make beer for less than $2.50 per keg ( A keg of beer is about 58.6 liters = 15.5 US gallons = 12.5 imp gallons )
Note there is a lot of CO2 released in this conversion. Some of it can be used to make the beer fizzy.
I think this gives new meaning to the phrase "Don't drink and drive" and perhaps it needs to become "Drink and don't drive" or "Drive and don't drink" as the later phrases more clearly convey the alternatives. In any event in the new world order with ethanol available as a fuel competatively priced with gasoline I can see little reason to justify beer prices much above $2.50 per keg.
Horray for a brave new world. Technology advances clearly can and should drive costs down.
So plants fix CO2 for a living and therefore once you use sugar from plants the CO2 pollution is O?
Well that's not really true. First, plants do breathe also, which means they also produce CO2. They fix more CO2 than the produce, but it is not like they do this without any CO2 production. So than the carbon is stored in sugar which is a carbonhydrat, C6 H12 O6 is for example such a sugar.
To derive to diesel you have to reduce the sugar (get rid of the oxygen) to have something like CnH2n (roughly), which is a process for which the plant or the yeast needs energy. Lets asume they genetically modify the yeast such that they produce diesel rather than ethanol (CH3-CH2OH). You can genetically modify them until they are green glowing fast shiny spinning spaceships, that doesn't change the fact that you need at least two glucose molecule to make one CnH2n with n>6. And this doesn't tell you anything about the energy the yeast needs itself for a living, which it does.
So you invest into fertilizers, harvesting machinery, storage, and transportation, which is all energy dependent, to produce sugar, which then is transformed into diesel by yeast, which put out some oxidation endproduct like CO2 ( before ethanol, but can't 'cause know they produce diesel). And that is going to solve our energy and climate problems, which are based on the oxidation of fossil fuel?
Build nuclear power plants and when does this ITER starts, dammit!
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
Fuel? Hell man, I hear they got a car that runs on water.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
This all sounds well and good, but, as other slashdotters have noted, there is not a whole lot of incentive from the market to go to alternative fuels. One sees the occasional "green" advertisement but these ads are really only paying lip service to alternative fuels. The only way to break the power that oil holds over the energy industry is to eliminate demand for oil and increase demand for alternative fuels. This change happens at a grass roots level (no pun intended.) Once the oil industry begins to loose money on its chief product due to rising supplies from decreased demands, then the industry will be forced to seek other profit modalities. That said, Americans must eschew their gas guzzling SUVs in favor of smaller, more efficient vehicles. While this is already slowly beginning to happen, there has not been enough change to have an effect on the market. Additionally, there needs to be easy, prolific access to alternative fuels and that has just not happened yet either (or at least in the Philadelphia, PA area.) Finally, while I hate politics, we should keep an ear on the current environmental lobby. I hope that this time, it will be more than lip service. Just my .02.
- I don't think it is going to be even remotely feasible to replace all our current fuel comsumption with biodiesel or similar. To quote Monbiot: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30/another -species-of-denial/#more-1038:
What we need is to think of some radically new solutions. And it isn't even difficult either - we already know the technology: wind-, wave-, tidal-, solar power, just to mention a few. All that is needed is the political will to pursue this course. What would it take, technologically, to replace all the existing fossil and nuclear powerplants with eg. solar power? A lot, certainly, but far less than what most people imagine; it is certainly within our reach already now. But of course, there are businesses with far too much political power, who would lose out on doing this, so the US will certainly not be leading the world that way; not unless you guys give your political system a very major overhaul.
Hmm, something happened to the formatting there - it should have been:
r -species-of-denial/#more-1038:
- I don't think it is going to be even remotely feasible to replace all our current fuel comsumption with biodiesel or similar. To quote Monbiot: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30/anothe
What we need is to think of some radically new solutions. And it isn't even difficult either - we already know the technology: wind-, wave-, tidal-, solar power, just to mention a few. All that is needed is the political will to pursue this course. What would it take, technologically, to replace all the existing fossil and nuclear powerplants with eg. solar power? A lot, certainly, but far less than what most people imagine; it is certainly within our reach already now. But of course, there are businesses with far too much political power, who would lose out on doing this, so the US will certainly not be leading the world that way; not unless you guys give your political system a very major overhaul.
But we can also make some plastics from soy right now. I don't know how many kinds or whether this is currently feasible on a large scale. Nor am I suggesting it would summarily replace all petroleum-based plastics. Anyone know more about soy plastics?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Why should we make something that looks a lot like diesel when we can make ethanol? Ethanol is close to the energy content of gasoline. It burns much more cleanly in fuelcells than does gasoline. Diesel doesn't burn in fuelcells - it needs more complex, pressurized, much less efficient mechanical parts. Ethanol is much less toxic and more easily handled than gasoline or diesel.
Sure, gasoline goes right into existing cars. But so does high-concentration ethanol/gasoline mixtures. By the time gasoline is too scarce to add, even if in a decade or two, we can have upgraded engines to fuelcells to use ethanol. And the greenhouse gas pollution we'll pump into the atmosphere will be much less: solving our two biggest "carbon economy" problems at once, instead of perpetuating one while taking pressure off by solving the other.
If anything, we should be looking at lower-energy/impact production techniques for methanol, which has 1/2 the carbon of every ethanol molecule to pump into the atmosphere as pollution.
--
make install -not war
The gray-haired boys and girls of science are at it again, talking up the good, not presenting the bad or anything that opposes the science. So, two obvious points:
1. It is immoral to produce fuel from food. And the more fuel-from-food you call for, the more immoral you are, whether you are a President, or a country. We will NOT be able to produce both food and fuel no matter how hard they try to tell us we can. Linear projections of food output ignore the limitation of fixed water resources. Read "When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century," by Fred Pearce. The USA is exporting vast amounts of its ancient water resources already in the form of "virtual water" grain exports. The water tables in the West are alarmingly low in places. But that is also a problem worldwide. And this source of irrigation water does not replenish itself for thousands of years. In India, the cheap Japanese pumps that hit the market in the 70s allowed farmers to irrigate to the point that they are poisoning large areas of arable land with salt, taking that land out of food production. Like the buried hydrocarbon resources of the Earth, once ancient water is pumped up and used, it is gone. And there is also the problem of disappearing rivers, rivers who's water is being almost completely used right now for irrigation. There is no more water in these rivers to "fuel" increased production of food. The Russians have almost completely destroyed the Aral Sea since the 1960s, using its feeding rivers' water to irrigate crops. Food prices and fuel prices must not be placed in competition with each other for their common natural resource.
2. Who wants gasoline-tasting bread? It sounds funny, but it isn't. Yeast is ubiquitous. Unless they create this food-sourced, genetically-altered- yeast-produced "gasoline" in biosafety level 4 factories, these little buggers are going to get out into the environment and we can look forward to smelling the stink of gasoline in food and water. We'll long for the day when we "only" had gasoline from oil. Oh, I know, they'll say they can make it 100% safe.
E Proelio Veritas.
I really hate to tell you, but I liked the first version more, it was also easier to read
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
is like complaining about death. yes, it's awful and tragic, but it's also completely unavoidable
really, it's completely unavoidable. it's part of human nature. intrinsic to it. no, really
go ahead and dream your utopian fantasies where everything works wonderfully... just as soon as human beings start behaving as they never have behaved... in every culture that ever existed
i'm going to dream up a world where no one dies. and then use that dream as my emotional starting point for delivering withering comments about this paltry reality we find ourselves in where people fall over and croak
i'm real helpful aren't i?
i think it is superior to judge people and reality against my impossible standards, rather than simply accept that which will never change about human nature, and proceed from there to make this world a better place
pffft
you need to work within the limitations of human nature if you actually wish to improve this world
standing in denial of human nature and delivering acid comments about it is not actually working to improve this world, it's working to salve your bruised idealism
in which case, improving this world doesn't seem to be your goal anymore
in which case, you seem to have lost touch with your human conscience. which seems to be your goal at face value, but upon deeper inspection, actually isn't
you're out of touch
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The chemistry is fairly well understood. Doing it at industrial scales in an energy efficient manner isn't so much.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I don't understand why there is not a greater push to Biodiesel made from used cooking oil. you know, the kind from your favorite fast food restaurant. I'm currently making small batches (40 gallons) at home for around $0.85 per gallon. the engine runs better on it, produces less emissions (as measured at my local tail pipe sniffer shop). Hell, the only drawback is the smell (smells like french fries!). I get the oil for free as the places normally PAY to have the oil disposed of. Just think of the farmers that would go back in business from the increased "oil" consumption. Landfills would be less filled...everyone benefits, IMHO.
You are correct in your assement. Liquid fuels are alkanes which are CnH(2n+2) which you simplified to CnH2n which is ok... I said 2:1 hydrogen to carbon. We are both saying the same thing.
Now this issue is where a biological system obtains its energy inputs. You mentioned ITER. I would not count on it. However we do have technology on the shelf in the form of the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) which was developed by Argonne Labs by 1994 under the guidance of Dr. Charles Till. This machine will burn all the actinides which means it is both safe to use and instead of producing wastes it burns the wastes. It can be used to burn existing nuclear wastes (all of them), and in so doing there is about a 60,000 year supply of uranium and other actinides on hand already mined and ready to burn. This can power a fleet of about 100 reactors in the gigawatt range. To produce 100% of our power we need about 1200 reactors of this size which means our fuel supply is only about 5,000 years... but I didn't add in new mining and I didn't add in thorium. I did add in all the "depleated" uranium which is BTW still about 80% as radioactive as natural uranium and in fact is still about 80% as radioactive as the enriched uranium fuel stuffed into the light water pressurized reactors in common use in the USA. ALL of the spent fuel can also be put into an IFR system.
So why don't we build them? Well - go ask Bill Clinton. His administration shut the program down in 1994.
Back to the plants.
Biological sources can capture radiation to produce biofuels, but not on the fermentation side. The technology is clearly well developed in the plant kingdom mind you.... but not in the fungal kingdom. Yeast is a fungus. So is Trichoderma reesei which is being looked at for cellulose->ethanol production.
So we are still left with where the fungus obtains its energy during fermentation and this is by oxidizing carbon and releasing CO2. What this means is that a sizable percentage of the biomass we start with is lost to CO2. We are still left with the issue of obtaining hydrogen or at a bare minimum conserving it.
A pure chemical process such as Fischer Tropsche might be just as efficient and easier to operate. Nuclear can be used to create a supply of hydrogen using say steam electrolysis.
I think it is very important to note that using a plant source is going to likely be considerably more expensive than other sources of energy... This is easy to see since the plant source contains about 50% of its mass in the form of oxygen. Note: (CH2O)n. With n=6 we have simple sugars.
But costs aside.
If we cart off the dead plant material to a fuel factory then we can clearly convert it to liquid fuels of which one choice (a good one) is ethanol. Note: Methanol (CH3OH) is NOT a good choice.
If we do not cart off the dead plant matter then it will still be oxidized to CO2. The fungus in the environment will do this. So we will neither increase or decrease the amount of CO2 in this part of the planetary carbon cycle by converting to liquid motor fuels and burning them. About all will will do is take some of the food the fungi consume and let our cars consume it instead. I frankly don't think the fungi will care all that much.
But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
Note that the C
I thought so too.
So I checked on thier website and it says biofuels is just one of the areas they are working on.
Thier original estimate for cheaper malaria drugs was roughly four years. TFA does say they are working on biofuels as well.
As long as this new research doesn't significantly increase that there should be nothing stopping them from branching into other fields.
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
What, you mean like a boat?
Redundancy is good And also good.
+5 Insightful? You sound just like I did... when I was in college and Libertarian with the big L.
Exponential curves can run for a while, but often they hit limits. Some temporary, some not. Take mass air transport, for one. Cruising speed has been the same order of magnitude for approximately 60 years now (DC-3 cruising speed 180mph versus 777 of 560mph). Look at Moore's Law. I wonder if Kurzweil is going to stop using that as "proof" sometime soon now. Or as they say in mutual funds (very quickly) "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
You cite Israel as an example of an "agricultural powerhouse". Are you serious? As the biggest recipient of aid from a superpower (and for a while now, a monopower) for 30 years, you'd think they'd have grown a carrot or two by now.
And Africa's economic woes are caused by... bad government? Specifically, lack of democracy and lack of capitalism???
Democracy, how will that stop anyone starving? And do they even care? Democracy is the whole idea behind Blacks taking the land from the White farmers. You have something I want, I outnumber you, I take it. Democracy in action!
And capitalism is not some form of magic pixie dust. It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans. And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help?
But I'm with you on nukes. Specifically, fast breeder reactors and the ITER. And I don't think we are going to run out of food just yet.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Someone should create a microbe that turns any living creature to diesel fuel. Imagine the increase in productivity when you load the microbe in a gun and shoot that blubbering idiot in the office. It boosts morale, increases fuel reserve, and decreases competing consumer by one. Or you drive down the street and your tank is low. You wave a bum over. Voila! You find fuel for your car.
Just another modest proposal.
DrFalkyn said:
>I don't see any reason why all those coke bottles can't just be sterlized and used again with new labels.
Remember the old horror stories of people finding a mouse skeleton in a bottle?
Usually it was a shrew, which got into the bottle when it was discarded along a roadside, then made it into the food chain when the bottle was picked up by someone, run through the recycling chain (essentially just washed and sterilized --- done while the bottle is upside down, most skeletal bits would drop out, but every so often one would ball up so that it would get stuck) and used to bottle soda again.
Recycling is a good idea, but limits imposed on re-usage to preclude such are a necessity.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
In other Bay Area biofuels news, Berkeley (along with U of I) just got a $500 million grant to set up a major center for biofuels and clean-energy research. So I suspect there will be a lot more startups and collaborative realtionships in this space very soon....
Um, no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
The AMD strategy to increase the price of corn by burning in automobiles has worked. That's nice for them but not for people who can't afford to eat anymore. I'd rather directly subsidize farmers and send the result to people who are hungry.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Want your great-great grandchildren to be incredibly rich? Start buying landfills.
Well...maybe not, but I thought it might make a decent premise for a science fiction story...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Is a microbe that can turn the diesel from the sugar into beer.... oh wait...
we were taking rich women's fat asses and selling them right back to them. it was glorious.
Think of all the other stuff you can find there. Metals like copper and such ... the older the garbage dump, the better.
I personally believe that it will be a folly to use food as a fuel device. There have been numerous studies done that show it isnt feasible in lattitudes beyond those that are tropical areas. In addition, this will only result in further pressure in food costs for humans. It is better, imo that we use energy sources that cannot double as food production.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/facts%20about%20israel/e conomy/focus%20on%20israel-%20israel-s%20agricultu re%20in%20the%2021st
For being in the middle of a freaking desert, Israel doesn't do too bad for itself -- 70% of the way to self sufficiency on food, with the remainder being a mix of luxury (coffee, spices), fish (hard to plant the suckers), and bulk grains that its cheaper to just buy from the US than to use valuable growing space on. It would be higher if it weren't for the nigh-constant state of armed conflict they find themselves in. If we could bring Africa up to the Israeli standard, we'd be pretty much done on the whole hunger problem in a stroke.
>>
It will not confer the basic, amply demonstrated civilizational competencies of East Asians or Caucasians onto Black Africans.
>>
When Lincoln was fighting a war to free the slaves Japan was a medieval country populated by what were essentially fractious tribes under the sporadic and largely ineffectual rule of a central monarch. Visiting Europeans described them as shiftless and absolutely incapable of basic civilizational norms such as punctuality. I wonder what those visiting Europeans would say if you said "By the way, you won't live to see it, but your great-great-grandkids will get all many of their toys from Japan, their economy will be bigger than any European country's, and they'll be widely considered to be fanatical workaholic clones." I wonder what our great-great-grandkids will get from Africa.
>>
And what exactly do you mean by capitalism? Rule of law? Property rights? Trading of goods? How is any of that going to help?
>>
All of the above and then some. Having property rights encourages you to invest in your farm, because you know that if you're good at it it will make you money some day... and NOT get taken by the guy who happens to have more guns than you at the moment. Rule of law means that you can plant crops today and have a reasonable expectation of living long enough to see the harvest, too.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It depends on where you are. Supposedly the theory has popularity in former Soviet states according to this nice Wikipedia article on the subject.
I think it's probably just so much bunk, but that's a product of my education under the conventional theory. It may also be wishful thinking that has kept me from ever forming an interest into looking into the theory. I can think of few ideas more horrific for the future survival of humanity than that it may continue to be cheap to burn off hydrocarbons for centuries to come.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There are organic methods to combat erosion, but you can bet that a company like Monsanto isn't going to employ them on their 10,000,000 acre corn-for-diesel fields.
I think you're confusing your evil agricultural giants. You're thinking of Archer Daniels Midland. Monsanto is the company that makes the seeds that can't be replanted and the crops that can withstand having gobs and gobs of pesticide dumped on them.
ADM is the company that owns the soul of the Midwest.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"(Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)" As an aside poor people in America suffer from far more health problems than those in similar social deliniations in other countries. Its not known exactly why but scientists have the hypothesis that simply the stress of being poor amid such decadent wealth incurs a heavy toll for their well-being, unlike other countries where the wealth difference isn't so starkly evident.
prepare the survey weasels.
Great, lets cut down some more rain forest, enslave some plantation workers, and get our 'cane on.
FTA: Jack Newman, PhD, Amyris Biotechnologies VP: "This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."
Wow, that just sounds bad. Why would you get a 43 million dollar grant to create a COST EFFECTIVE solution to malaria if you didn't already realize that malaria striken areas need a COST EFFECTIVE solution. I feel really bad for all the people with malaria who are going to die because we wanted cheaper gas.
Why grow plants that produce sugar, then convert it to something like oil, then convert this it to fuel. Talk about doing things the hard way!
Wouldn't it be simpler for farmers to grow a crop, such as sunflowers or rape, which produce oil that you can mix straight into your fuel tank?
Using vegetable oil as a diesel fuel
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Well, I suppose if Miller and Budweiser can do it, why can't they?
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
[...] But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
Well, I do disagree that CO2 is fine in general and I do disagree that our rate of adding CO2 to the system is fine as well. I don't care so much about what has been here 500 million years ago, as that is very difficult to compare, what was the average CO2 production, what was the ratio of sea to continent, and in particular how was the weather, volcano activity, etc.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
The earth might cope with it, but can the humans and can our economy? I doubt that. Lets look at the C4-plants and CAM-plants, which use an intermediate to store CO2, which than is finally fixed in the night (as far as I remember) into glucose (or some other sugars, ribose, etc. lets spare the details). Now there is a little problem with these guys, as you state, this is a quite recent invention from evolution ( or god, but than our timescale doesn't work) and it is unlikely that all this CO2 get fixed by C4 or CAM plants. As far as I know they close their stomata (the openings in the leave) at a certain CO2 level, as they do breathe as well and that wouldn't be possible at a certain CO2 level. While they operate better for now, this may not be the case when we reach the 1000 ppm CO2.
Note that the C4 metabolic pathway didn't exist back in the Ordovician! Neither did the angeosperms of course. Ordovician is about 470 million years ago and angeosperms showed up maybe 100 million years ago. The C4 metabolic pathway is much more recent.
One argument is that the clearly far less efficient photosynthesis available 500 million years ago was able to cope with CO2 levels over 10x higher than today so its pretty clear that the plant life on the planet can cope with the negligible amount of CO2 we are adding.
It wasn't that much less efficient, but obviously possible in this atmosphere, as you said there were mainly gymnosperms. But it is very difficult to argue that there everything was alright, why should we worry. First, I don't know the state of the oceans in this time, did they start storing CO2 or were they giving of CO2, second, what was the state of the atmosphere, was it as clean (in terms of sunlight transmission) as today or better or worse? Again, what about volcano activity, which is low today, very, very low.
Oh... a question to be answered? Did the high levels of CO2 back in the Ordovician cause global warming? The answer is that during the Ordovician the earth plummeted into an ice age dispite the high CO2 levels.
So, the short of it is that CO2 is not a problem. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is actually good because it stimulates plant growth, increases food production, and makes plants more tolerant of arid conditions.
I really disagree with this point. There hasn't be a point in time were we had this extreme change in CO2 concentration in such a short time. I guess if you look back at earth history, we can't even measure such a short temporal window like last 100 years or last 30 years. And this change is what is causing the problem. And it is not good, if it is true that C4 and CAM plants just shut off at a certain CO2 level.
We have habitated this planet for a long while, but our civilisation has flourished in the last 5 millenia, wit
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
Also, mod up the guy above the parent too. He got it first, but this guy was a little more informative.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I love Big Brother!!!@!!~!@#!1`211
The highest gasoline prices in the USA are in Hawaii because it imports 100%. Hawaii is the best location in the US to grow sugar cane because of its year round tropical climate. Currently sugar cane is the most efficent biofuel source- not corn, wood chips, palm oil, etc.- until these "magic microbes" come into production.
Best current estimates are we'll reach peak population in 2050, at well below 10 billion people. Until something very fundamental changes, we'll NEVER reach 10 billion people.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Much of this technology for productivity increases is not sustainable. For many reasons; salinity build-up from over irrigation, declining fresh water supplies, reliance on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers (which requires petroleum to synthesize), desertification, etc.
There's ample reason to worry that food productivity per acre could level off or even decline in the next century.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Corn Lobby
In other words, the problem with using cellulose (or anything other than corn, for that matter) to produce ethanol in the United States, is political, not technological.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No need for research, this already exists. I'm sure some of my early home berr brewing experiments were partly diesel, judging from the taste...
Brazil is already off of foreign oil as of 09/2006. They convert sugar cane to biodiesel. Why waste your time converting sugar when you can take the raw sugar cane and use it.
I'm going to head off the environmentalists (the dirt people) with this post.
"Great, now we'll have to bulldoze all the rain forests so that we can plant sugar cane in order to drive our Hummers!"
Just like the idiots said about Corn, and anything else that someone might come up with that doesn't fit their "Return to Amish style living" ideas.
This is what I find hard to reconcile.
People seem to think that by using bio-fuels they will help to cut emissions of CO2 and hence reduce global warming. but they seem to forget, they are still BURNING THE FUCKING STUFF ! Burning == heat
Anything that produces heat, that is to say, anything that is not 100% eficient at its task, contributes to global warming. Oh no, you say, it will be better than it is now with all that smog and CO2 produced from fossil fuels. Well actually, it isn't better. It's the same.
The major cause of global warming is population. Where as 100 years ago we had a relatively small number of people owning cars, houses, electric gadgets, and producing heat from everything they did, now it's starting to hurt. Until we stop using machines, global warming is inevitable. (or invent a 100% efficient machine - unlikely). Cities store heat, the roads store heat, we generate heat on purpose, we generate more heat trying to cool other places down coz they're too hot.
I don't think CO2 is the problem, our incessant production of heat is the problem, and no-one wants to do without that. After all, fire was the beginning of our civilisation.
Well, if it would be closer to diesel than ethanol, then it would also be more poluting than ethanol.. And that's not what we want, we want cleaner cars... (And no not those damn little cars, I want my gasslurping Jeep cherokee to be much cleaner)..
There are several separate projects at Amyris Biotechnologies, with completely separate funding. The fact that this was not made clear in the article, is fault of the new report, not the company.
Just go to their website if you don't believe me.
What makes a tree a "big cellulose producer"?
Sure, trees are big, but that doesn't necessarily make them big producers. They take a very long time to grow and need a large amount of land for each indivdual plant. A comparative measure of cellulose productivity would be to see how much each can produce from a given amount of land in a period of time. I've no idea how trees would compare to conventional crops, but I certainly wouldn't assume them to be ahead.
If it really was so easy to make sugar from cellulose we wouldn't use sugarcane and other plants to get the sugar and go the big cellulose producers - like trees - instead.
There are lots of molecules besides sucrose in the class "sugar". Industrial-grade cracked cellulose suitable for feeding microbes may be a far cry from the composition and purity requirements to sell it for human consumption.
Not to mention that you don't get to call it "sugar" unless it came from a cane or a beet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Algal biodiesel! This can be done with non-arable land using non-potable (even brackish) water with sewage as a feedstock. The article makes a compelling argument that the US could satisfy all of its vehicular needs domestically, provided we all switched to diesel.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
First of all, ethanol is NOT a better fuel than gasoline or a biofuel that more closely resembles gasoline. The reasons why this is is true are too many and too complicated to list here. Do some research and educate yourself.
For anyone that thinks burning biofuel will increase the planet's concentration of global warming gasses, here is a little lesson about a scientific principal called "mass ballance". Atmospheric CO2 goes to plants goes to sugar goes to yeast goes to biofuels goes to your car goes to CO2, resulting in NO net increase of CO2. In fact, the overall CO2 levels are decreased since some of the carbon remains earth-bound in the form of biomass. Congratulations you just passed your first lesson of "I'm not a complete moron when it comes to science 101"
Lastly, for those that think Amyris is taking unfair advantage of Bill Gate's money, you people are ignorant sheep and have no idea what you're talking about. If you actually did any sort of research on the company, you'd know that all the money Amyris spends on biofuels was given by biofuel venture capitalists, not by Bill Gates. You'd also know that all money given by the Gates grant is being appropriated to the malaria project, which is still where the large majority of all Amyris resources go. Finally, you'd also know that the Malaria project is a short term project, and once Amyris has developed the technology, it will be transferred to a contract manufacturer and Amyris will be done with it. If you weren't stupid and had any knowledge above the 1st grade level about "business", you'd know that if Amyris wanted to actually survive as a company instead of going out of business once the malaria project was done, they probably would need to have some sort of pipeline of products that may some day be profitable, don't you think? And of all products that a biotech company could have in their pipeline, is a potential petroleum alternative such a bad thing?
Do your homework before posting idiot comments.
this company is still working on the malaria problem (with apparent success) and has expanded to bring in a new people with the funding they got to work on biofuel. any company that is not a non-profit has to find a way to make profit to help them do humanitarian, no-profit work. there is no free lunch.
If you know anything about the Gates foundation, you can bet that grant recipients have to jump through hurdles for every $1 in funding and that there is a panel of world experts evaluating every step of the research. Gates is pretty savvy about getting "value" for their grants.
To make diesel out of sugar, I just have to pour it in the company coffee. Problem solved (well, I still have to drink it).
Australia's grain yield (one of the biggest exporters in the world) has been declining for 20 years now. Most of the improvements in crop yield have been by inventing better ways to convert cheap oil into food. If oil is running out (which seems to be the motivator for this approach) then I expect there will be an order of magnitude decrease in yield. Why?
* fertilizer derived from oil
* herbicide derived from oil
* insecticide derived from oil
* energy intensive tilling/harvesting practices, derived from oil
* bulk shipping, powered by oil
then we have the down-sides of modern agriculture:
* dry-land salinity
* water rights
* habitat destruction
* erosion (kansas has lost 3m of topsoil in the last 50 years)
* escalating pests, including endless foreign invaders
* foreign ownership of farms leading to inefficient management
I wish I could believe what you do, but having just spent 3 months looking at the situation in the WA wheat belt, I am very pessimistic of the short term future. Farms are currently converting all profits to chemical support and are still losing money every year.
Add to this the probable reduction in rainfall in our largest grain growing areas (former soviet union, south africa, WA wheatbelt and canadian plains) due to changes in the atmosphere and the situation is rather grim.
Last time I noticed, the world trade price for raw sugar was about US$250/tonne (European and USA prices tend to be much higher with protection against excessive importing of cheaper sugar from tropical countries). I can't find what the conversion efficiency to gasoline will be like, but I'd suggest on a mass balance that more than 4 barrels a tonne would be challenging. So how will this be a cheap fuel? Sugar cane has a better yield to sugar beet, not surprising since it is grown in tropical/sub-tropical areas and the plants grow several metres tall compared to a bulbous root under the ground. It also has the advantage of having a byproduct (bagasse) that can be used as a fuel to run the sugar mill. Beet factories require fuel from other sources, which increases the processing cost.
In Mexico they are protesting the rise in prices of tortilla due to using ethanol http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/26115.html
If we use sugar Rosie O'donnell and the 30% pleasently plump Americans will protest the rise in cake, candy and ice cream.
There is no solution!
The factor the increase the risk are cigarette smoke and smaller size of particles. Unlike cancer, for chronical disease the risk of smoking is deterministic and not stochastic (once you cross a certain amount of cigarettes, you're almost sure to have chronic disease).
Plus, some other oxide gaz that are emitted by diesel happen to be irritating and increase risk of asthma crisis (in asthmatic people) and other disease.
That's why we see more and more filters installed on diesel engine exhaust, each generation better as the previous one. Currently Bio-diesel is produced in several countries (and home-made in several farms) by processing vegetal oil. The goal of the research mentioned in TFA is not inventing a new unheard-of method of producing diesel, it's just about transferring the method from plant to bacteria, because they'll be able to make it faster and easier.
You just have to find a good way to genetically program them into producing and secreting the correct type of fat (triglycerids) in good enough amounts. First, as other pointed out : a bacteria isn't an animal, it's not even an eukaryote.
Then, even from some point of view : there's no killing of bacteria involved or even bad "treatment". In fct, in this kind of production, you pay attention to provide the best environment for bacteria (which basically just means providing the correct temperature, pH and Food quantity. A bacteria doesn't need anything else to be happy) so they can multiply quickly, and just pump the produced fat that is secreted by bactria (which also happen to naturally separate from water so it's even simplier than cultures producing soluble substances).
Last, the crazy fundamentalist usually kills way much more bacteria b his own immune system (to protect from infectious disease) than are killed during this kind of cultures (basically : no bacteria need to be killed).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
More than you ever wanted to know? That article contains the least amount anyone needs to know to participate in an informed discussion about future fuel cycles. Far too many people think they are clever enough to discuss fuel sources and carbon cycles because they have figured out how to pump their own gas at the filling station. We're not even at the level here of an intelligent dicussion about a bike shed.
It wasn't long ago I was reading a slashdot thread with a lot of negative posts about the general quality of Wikipedia. I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that improving one sentence in Wikipedia is a better use of my time than any three +5 informative paragraphs here.
It's a huge problem with the hydrocarbon reform movement that the minimum intelligent radius is so much larger than most people are willing to wrap their mental arms around, whereas many other complex subjects at least permit sub-topics to be split off without degenerating into outright pointlessness. This isn't one of those subjects.
Throughout history we have moved to older and older stores of energy.
We burnt wood until we started running out of forests. It doesn't take long to turn solar radiation into a tree, but we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt peat until we started running out of swamps. It takes a long while to turn solar radiation into plants and then to peat, and we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt coal, oil and gas until they started to run dry. Fossil fuels are stored solar radiation from millions of years ago, and we don't have millions of years available to renew them.
Now we're moving on high-energy isotopes that were most likely created at the dawn of time.
Regardless of how much we think there is, and putting aside the issue of waste disposal, nukular power relies on a non-renewable resource, and we'll sure as heck invent new an imaginative ways to use it all up if we put our minds to it.
Energy that has been stored since the dawn of time is about as old as it gets. There's no "next oldest" to move to.
Amyris is a company built by hippies for hippies (literally, the Amyris founders are a group of hippies from Berkeley, the hippie capital of the world). They're trying to come up with an environmentally friendly replacement for gasoline. They're trying to help the world by curing malaria. Yet you hippies complain. You always complain. "waaaaa the farmland hurts our ecosystem," "waaaaaaaaa using sugar for fuel is wrong," "waaaaaaa waaaaaaa waaaaaa coprorations waaaa waaaaaa i love trees"
What would it take to make you hippies happy?
I realized just now why the bio-diesel type concoctions bothered me. In 500 years people will laugh at us for trying to turn cheap and worthless chemicals into valuable ones.
1. Sugar cane is grown bountifully in the tropics.
It may very well be that rainforests are the only worthwhile places to have forests as carbon sinks.
More sugar grown in the tropics, more rainforest gets cut down.
Even if it's only planted *near* to the rainforests, since it forces other food crops out into the jungle areas.
2. Synthetic fertilizers contain Nitrous Oxide, aka Laughing Gas (aka N2O)
Agriculture accounts for most of it. (Especially when you include making plants to feed to animals)
Nitrous Oxide is 310x worse for global warming than carbon dioxide, and lasts for twice as long, 120 years.
Using a bunch of fertilizer to grow Sugar crops is stupid.
Whats the better solution?
Algae BioDiesel.
Not only does it not need nitrogen fertilizer, you can actually use power plant emmisions to feed it. Which dramatically reduces Nitrogen and Carbon emmisions.
BioDiesel is better than Ethanol.
BioDiesel and Ethanol take roughly the same ammount of energy inputs.
However, BioDiesel has 55% more energy per gallon than ethanol.
E85 cars get 20-30% worse mileage than gasoline cars.
Diesel cars get 20%-40% better mileage than gasoline cars.
Do the math.
If you compare the best Switch Grass, and use it's theoretical yeild if cellulosic ethanol were possible.
And then divide it by that difference in energy content. You get:
500gallons/acre/year / 1.55x = 323gal/acre/year BioDiesel feedstock equivalent.
A relatively poor BioDiesel feedstock: 282 gal/acre/year : Avocados
A relatively good BioDiesel feedstock: 700 gal/acre/year : Chinese Tallow Tree
A relatively uber BioDiesel feedstock: 5,000-20,000 gal/acre/year : Algae
Cellulosic Ethanol is a joke.
About the only downsides to BioDiesel is:
1. It burns hotter, so it produces slightly more NOx, that forms Ozone and Smog
However a new federal study finds 20% BioDiesel does not increase NOx levels.
Right now, European Car manufacturers have a low tech NOx cleaner that reduces NOx by 90%. Legal in 45 US states.
And in early 2008 they will market their high tech NOx filter, which also reduces NOx by 90%. Legal in 50 US states.
As long as all NEW Diesels require the NOX filter, that flimsy 10-8% increase in NOx from Diesel in older vehicles would be fine.
[Note: This isn't an issue with BioDiesel 20%]
2. It cleans the engine, and is far superior at maintaining the fuel injectors.
This is a "problem" since it tends to clean out any gunk accumulated in an old dirty engine.
Meaning you might need to clean out your fuel filter. (Or replace it, if it's a cheap low-tech one)
If you don't clean your fuel filter, in a catastrophic case, it could send the gunk into the fuel injectors.
Or cause fuel to burst all over the hot engine. Causing expensive damages.
On the flip side, if you do clean out the fuel filter, you stand to save a hell of a lot more money on maintenence.
Which is a huge plus side when you got a very expensive big rig truck, or a boiler which takes years for a company to pay off.
[Note: This isn't an issue with BioDiesel 20%]
3. Like normal Diesel, it tends to gum up in sub freezing weather. (6 below freezing Untreated when it's 100% pure)
This is usually mitigated by treating it with kerosene, (Gets it down to about 64 below freezing)
or storing tanks underground. (Where it's relatively toasty at 18 above freezing year round.)
[Note: This isn't an issue with BioDiesel 20%]
BioDiesel 20% could just be dropped in virtually any diesel engine,
And not only give superior performance, and have far less wear and tear on the engine.
But practically all Diesel air pollutants would be equal or far less than before.
Including the virtual elimination of Sulfur.
(A currently expensive process for PetroDiesel due to new federal Ultra Low Sulfur standards that went into effect October 2006)
_
I really don't think Sugar based fuels are the way to go.
Algae Vegetable Oil fuel is c
"Beginning June 1, 2005 all U.S. Navy and Marine non-tactical diesel vehicles will be required to operate on a B20 (20 percent) biodiesel blend" http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/stor y?id=24024
Also, in a reversal of a 2002 USDA study
National Renewable Energy Labs finds B20 BioDiesel does NOT increase NOx (Smog) emmisions.
http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/npbf/news.htm l
B20 BioDiesel can be used in any Diesel vehicle, with no modification.
With equal or greater performance.
And much less air pollution.
For the same energy input as Ethanol, BioDiesel produces 55% more energy.
BioDiesel gives you far better Mileage than Gasoline, increase of 20-40%
Ethanol gives you far worse Mileage than Gasoline, decrease of 20-30%
Protecting America from disaster
Protecting the World from disaster
BioDiesel
Starting in 2008_ news/article_1906.shtml
p ress_releases_details_d1.php?id=268
3 major car manufacturers will release BlueTec (type 2)
It's a close loop regenerating filter technology that reduces Smog emmisions by 90%
http://www.vwvortex.com/artman/publish/volkswagen
There's already a similar tech for filtering out Smoke and Dust thats been around for years.
Which cuts that by 90%
Featured on everyone elses favorite dancing car, the Citroen C4
http://www.psa-peugeot-citroen.com/en/psa_espace/
And starting last October, 80% of all US Diesel will be sold as "Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel"
Containing 97% less acid rain forming sulfur.
Not to mention, Diesel cars get 20% to 40% better mileage than gasoline.
And about 20% less Global warming emmisions.
And thats just talking about products coming from Petroluem Oil
Combine the those three technologies, and Petro-Diesel is Cleaner than Gasoline.
And things only get cleaner and greener when you start looking at "BioDiesel"
... is there when producing crops (like sugar cane, rapeseed, maize) for fuel gives a farmer more money than growing these crops for food.
Mind you: this point has already been reached.
It's stupid if you plan to stop global warming. According to a new study by the Federal Berkley Livermore Labs, RainForests, and Trees at lower latitudes are the only trees worth planting. http://www.llnl.gov/pao/news/news_releases/2006/NR -06-12-02p.html
Planting SugarCane in the Tropics,
Either you force the cutting down of rainforests.
Or eat up all the farmland not in the rainforests,
Which then forces the local food crops out.
Who are then,
forced to cut down rainforests.
Thats just pulling us out of the frying pan,
And driving us into the fire.
So the situation is not that different from the US.
Subsidies have been cut by 36%, but they are still there.
Ethanol from Corn or sugar beets doesn't make sense for the US or Europe. This may be different for e.g. Brazil. Diesel from rape or soybeans makes much more sense (or even algae in the long run).
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
...a few interesting differences
Most of the Japanese population has always needed to live along the coastlines as most of the inland prefectures are mostly hills and mountains unsuitable for settlement.
Also, the Japanese never had a lot of natural resources or native technology (by comparison of course).
Yet, the Japanese were colonizing other countries in 1900 while Africa was being colonized.
Self-imposed isolation and homogeneity apparently have their upsides. They invaded China, Korea, et al. About 50 years later, they out-sourced millions of Japanese jobs to the same places.
Maybe avarice has downsides.
Trees are big cellulose producers if you select the right tree. The paper industry usually grows eucalyptus for this purpose. Some countries (hello Netherlands!) do grow some minor amounts of hemp in crop rotation, but they are less productive than an eucalyptus monoculture.
declining fresh water supplies
Water can be desalinated using reverse osmosis or other methods. Nothing that cannot be powered by a nuclear or some other thermal plant (solar, coal, etc).
reliance on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers (which requires petroleum to synthesize),
Not quite. Nitrogen fertilizers require hydrogen to synthesize via the Haber-Bosch process. Most of this hydrogen is now produced from natural gas for economic reasons, but it can be produced by other means as well.
desertification, etc.
We can grow food with no soil at all if it comes to that.
There's no "next oldest" to move to.
That we know of. What if someone managed to exploit zero point energy? Or something more exotic we cannot even imagine now? Who would have said a thousand years ago that we would manage to get power from uranium? It was used for little more than colouring glass.
Anyway, this is all besides the point. The Sun has plenty of power for our purposes. Just capturing a fraction of the amount that reaches our planet surface, even after it has been filtrated by the atmosphere, would be enough. If we need more we can capture it in space and beam it towards Earth. AFAIK the Sun will last for some billion years more. That would be a pretty permanent solution IMO.