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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."
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.
But then there are all those older cars and trucks that run on gas or diesel. You cant force everyone to switch to electric, hydrogen or any other fancy new energy storage method. We have proven gas and diesel engines in our vehicles today. We need to keep supporting them until it no longer becomes necessary.
I hope this isn't snake oil, we need an alternative to oil as it wont last forever. If you look at the current crop of alternative energy offerings, none of them offer the same energy density or ease of transport and storage the current fuels give us. Ethanol is a very poor fuel in terms of energy density. Hydrogen is a pain to store and transfer. Small electric cars cant get more than 100 or 200 miles on a single charge and it takes hours to charge up. What about trucks, planes, ships and rail vehicles that need hundreds or thousands of gallons of fuel just to make one trip? Maybe rails can be retrofitted with a large network of transmission lines to keep the power to the rails, but who is going to pay for it? Ships could go nuclear but then there is that whole nuclear security thing.
Oh and wasn't there an article a while back that said they could do the same with sewage?
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.
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.
Biodiesel will not add CO2 in the atmosphere because the process of making sugar involces photosynthesis in plants i.e converting C02 and H2O into carbohyderate. Plants do not convert 100% of Co2 into sugar, there are other carbohyderates. Hence total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will decrease if sugar is used to produce the biodiesel.
I am not counting if the land would have been used for planting some other kind of plants, that absorbe more CO2 than the plants that produce sugar.
Burning fossil fuel adds the pollution because it converts the trapped carbohyderate into CO2 into atmosphere, bio diesel process will first absorbe the CO2 from atmosphere. So no global warming.
Until someone produces an economical biofuel grown in salt water in the desert, biofuel production is about the worst thing we could do to our environment.
You talk about harming the environment on one hand, and then talk about covering a desert with plants and salt water as if it is a good and harmless thing? Deserts are a part of the environment too, and are a lot more delicately balanced than prairie grasslands or deciduous forests. Leave the salt water in the oceans where it belongs.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
``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
A lot of the farmland in America didn't used to be farmland. It used to be forests and wetlands, VERY crucial ecosystems. Don't be fooled, just because it is farmland and run by farmers (and most of it owned by huge ag corporations) doesn't mean it is being taken care of, and not harming the rest of the ecosystem. Just because you are replacing plants with plants doesn't mean that is best for the surrounding areas, or the climate.
last I heard we don't have a water shortage here on earth.
Actually there IS a huge water shortage in many parts of America, especially in midwest farm areas. Where do they get their water? They divert it from rivers and streams, and in the process affect habitats and ecosystems over a HUGE area downriver.
Unless you are making those fertilizers from biopetro...
Or unless those chemical fertilizers are destroying the soil, increasing erosion. Erosion is another huge problem. 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.
Until someone produces an economical biofuel grown in salt water in the desert, biofuel production is about the worst thing we could do to our environment.
I'm not green or crunchy or a tree-hugger or anything, but I agree with the grandparent. This would be HORRIBLE, not because biodiesel is particularly horrible in itself (despite its particulate emissions), but because the people who would be operating the agriculture side of it are HORRIBLE corporations.
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.
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make install -not war
GP is right. This doesn't save the environment. It merely maintains it. Which is to say, while if the US switches completely over to ethanol or other biofuels (and there's as much a chance of this really happening as there is of the US switching over to metric completely as it is already), all it will do is slow down the increase in carbon gasses--significantly, mind you, but there's still an increase coming from other countries like *ahem* China *ahem*.
A negative return would be needed to actually save the our ecology from eventual collapse. And that means that alternative fuels should be either an intermediate solution--some kind of stepping stone, or it should be skipped over completely as we move to clean forms of energy production. While I think alternative fuels is good if we could use it to produce the devices for clean energy production (those solar panels require power to make, and it would be much more environmentally friendly if it were made with ethanol than petrol), I also think it's dangerous if we paused there, as people will stop seeing the massive environmental changes and think everything's ok again (and consequently forget about the second step of moving to clean energy sources) when in fact we've only slowed the acceleration.
On the other hand, shooting straight for 99% clean energy production would eliminate this possibility, even if in the short run, things won't seem to be getting any better and will actually get worse. That's the route that I'd prefer, as it seems like there's a huge ethanol backing in DC, largely because we grow so much corn a part of it has to be destroyed anyway or the already-low prices would plummet. Which means we'll almost definitely be stuck at that waypoint. Which also means we'd be prolonging (but lessening) our suffering towards eventual demise instead of outright healing the cause of our ailment.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."