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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.
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.
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