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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."
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
In my country in Europe we make sugar out of beets and we even export it and make money off of it. If a 3rd world country like mine can do it, U.S. sure can, so why is it fixated on sugar cane when beets are easy to grow?
d ings/Sugarbeets.htm
I think they produce a beet or two here in the US:
"U.S. farmers produced 33 million tons of sugar beets on 1.6 million acres in 2000, versus 28 million tons of sugar beets on 1.4 million acres in 1990"
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February05/Fin