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Scientists Attempt to Replace Crude Oil With Sugars
amigoro writes with a link to the Press Esc blog, discussing a possible replacement for crude oil in plastics, fuels, and other industrial uses. The post outlines findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Science. Essentially, researchers at the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis are attempting to process the sugars in plant matter into an oil-like compound, a daunting challenge. "Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature's most abundant sugar. 'But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,' Zhang said. 'In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,' including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals. Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose while leaving only traces of acid impurities."
What about the guys who wanted to convert dead people to fuel?
This guy's the limit!
Does that much crude go into plastics? I figured that the majority of oil was going to fuels. Would it be better for these guys to work with the current projects that are turning sugars into fuel rather than plastics?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
NatureWorks have been producing plastics from corn for quite a few years now.
Their food containers look just like traditional ones and i've got a few pairs of Teko Ingeo socks that are really comfortable.
It's certainly an interesting field
...as inputs for ALL our industries!
If we could wrap our heads around the idea of conservation, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Unfortunately, since we've defined consumption as economic success, preaching conservation ends up sounding like austerity.
hemp.
what were we talking about again?
NatureWorks - sorry i had html off
Plants that grow plastic... http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/459126.stm
Stop burning Stuff!
/Rant over
How do they not get this yet, you burn stuff you produce CO2. I don't care what you burn, CO2 is given off. Practically every country exept for America accepts global warming as a problem, CO2 emissions will not get better when you keep burning stuff for energy, How are these people not getting this! For god's sake, these are scientists, they've seen the evidence and know that CO2 is a problem so stop trying to find new inventive ways to produce it.
Personally, the main thing that pissed me off, was when America started burning crops (biofeul i think), the same crops that would feed mexicans, and as a result the price of the main food source there rose to huge amounts, now people starve, america wants to keep burning stuff instead of using hydro-electric, wave power, or tidal- all of which are viable. That is WRONG!
The splenda response:
HMF - It tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar!
(I say this about alcohol (ethyl and methyl), formaldehyde and ethelene-diol)
And the fatalistic response:
Great this is just what we need, now we are gonna have rednecks getting stuck in the woods on their campin' and huntin' trips, when their cars break down, they'll run out of food and think they can drink the gas because it's made of sugar, and die... Actually, I think I like this new fuel for the darwin awards, err, our cars!
Interfacial Catalysis? Sounds injurious.
He used something like this as a premise for the movie ``Sabrina'' with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. At first I thought I was just going to have to suspend my disbelief because plastic from sugar seemed stupid. Now the only problem I had with the movie has been erased. The part where a gorgeous young woman goes for a dumpy looking nerdy old guy---now that I can buy.
1. 2 H2 + O2
2. ???
3. Profi- err... CO2!
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
If we could wrap our heads around the idea of conservation, I think we'd be a lot better off.
Conservation is good, but doesn't solve the problem. If 4/5th of the world weren't needing to be brought up to our standards, and the population was static or decreasing, and oil wasn't going to run out, and our oil purchases weren't funding the guys who kill our troops, and we didn't have greenhouse effects to worry about, conservation would be all we need.
Conservation makes all those problems a little bit better. But we need to solve them completely. And until we can get them solved we should absolutely conserve as much as we can to decrease the time until implementation of a real solution.
Actually, I think the best plan is to save oil for very remote vehicle operation and plastics, such that we can cut our production down to the point where domestic sources are more than enough, so using sugar for plastics is probably the last thing that needs addressing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Umm... Correct me please...
:)
Suger based polymers... This is a statement that I've been told is in the screws and plates used to hold my son's head together. (He had a major surgery and my daughter just had the same this past wednesday.) Anyways, when I hear "Suger based polymers", I assumed pastic from sugar. Isn't "polymer" a fancy way of saying plastic? The side benifit for my children are that the screws/plates are then reabsorbed by the skull as it grows/heals.
So this Sugar/Plastic would A) reserve fuels and B) biodegrade better?
Dibs on a name, I call it Slastar or Slastic... (c) 2007, me.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I remember an experiment in a kiddo science project book that involved adding vinegar to milk and producing a hydrocarbon-chain resin (plastic) ....so we just take milk and add some vinegar...or better yet let's genetically modify cows so their stomachs produce acetic acid (vinegar) instead of whatever acid they normally have....that whay when you go squeezing the udders you make straws of plastic. Brilliant. I've solved the petroscience problem of plastics from sugar! The grass eat cow, carbon in grass (glucose) + vinegar producing stomach = plastic!
Ooh better yet, how about grass that eats cows and produces plastic!
want us to toil in their underground sugar caves....
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Not good. Imagine our vehicles consuming all of these autotrophs that are getting photons from sunlight and that we harvest like crazy (think the Matrix). The population would quickly fall as we exponentially increase the number of glucose engines.
On the other hand. Maybe it's not too bad, if it worked like that we would have incentive to expand the biosphere perhaps off of the planet (think hydroponics).
instead of using hydro-electric, wave power, or tidal- all of which are viable.
They're all viable, but together they can't produce enough to supplant fossil fuels, solar, and nuclear energy. If I had my notebook with me I could give you a good number, but, roughly, the technologies you mention can create up to 10% of the power we need.
While many countries (e.g. China, India) may agree that CO2 is a bad thing for us to produce in massive quantities, they're also not interested in stopping, because they don't have a better alternative (they don't view the agrarian society as acceptable).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
if they succeed this will be a tremendous source of energy, just look at how much energy the typical grade school kid has when on a sugar rush...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Burning something that was grown to be burned is the very essence of "carbon-neutral", not the credit-buying al gore approach.
The plant takes in CO2 when it grows and gives it out when it's burned.
Better to use rock oil or vegetable oil, as is already done. We need other sources of energy, such as solar power satellites and thorium breeder reactors, and hopefully, Bussard's Deuterium-Boron fusion reactor, then store the energy as hydrogen, ethanol or electricity in fuel cells or zinc-air batteries in the case of mobile applications.
Competitive or not, when fossil fuels are diminished, there will be no competition. So, any extra option would be helpful.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
have four years left!!!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
oops, that is SUGAR, not sugER.. Sorry...
BUT.. Google give me this:
Wiki on Polymer:
"Well known examples of polymers include plastics and DNA."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer
And, SUGAR based polymers patented: United States Patent 5270421
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5270421.html
So, I would say... news?
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I can understand making plastic from sugar based polymers, because it may yield some new and interesting properties, as well as be able to break down over time. Imagine if all the plastic in landfills was able to breakdown in 20 years. That seems like a good thing.
Using sugars to make fuel, however, just seems like perpetuating an already out of control problem. Internal combustion is a very inefficient way to convert matter into energy. And like previous posters stated, it still creates CO2. I am pretty sure sugar based fuel will never be a big thing, as corn oil based biodiesel is already here. As far as alternative fuels go, this is not exactly what I'm hoping to see the future bring.
Trust me, I once put sugar in a guy's engine and it totally messed it up.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
First sentence makes mention of using hemp plastics derived from the oil within the seeds. Hemp seems like a heartier plant than corn...it is a weed. If I recall correctly Henry Fords model T had a dashboard constructed using hemp plastics, but the Model T wikipedia entry makes no mention of it. Also hemp would reduce the demand on lumber for paper and can even be pressed into beams that do not rot as easily as traditional lumber.
But I think we all know this will not happen...as hemp is too easily produced and would therefore destroy the industrial community.
Live cells make organic matter ("food") into polypeptides. Those fibers have many of the same properties as plastics, and many more sophisticated properties. Including many essential to life.
Why stop at plastics from sugars? We could use genetics to convert biomass into polypeptides to improve our energy (and chemical) efficiency, independence in superior materials. And since organisms make polypeptides from sunlight, water and CO2, switching from oil plastic to photosynthetic polypeptides could solve most of our oil problems at once.
--
make install -not war
Here's what wiki says on the matter:
"The process to create Ingeo makes use of the carbon naturally stored in plants by photosynthesis. Plant starches are broken down into sugars. The carbon and other elements in these natural sugars are then used to make a biopolymer through a process of simple fermentation and separation. The resulting resin, called NatureWorks(TM) PLA, can then be spun or extruded into Ingeo for use in textiles."
...I'm going to try it out by putting some sugar in my gas tank. If it works well I'll increase the amount. With a little luck I'll be able to save lots of money on gas. :-)
the energy involved in converting dead people into fossil fuel likely outweighs the energy you'd get out of it.
Maybe the energy wouldn't be worth it, but there is lots of glycerol in people which is an expensive ingredient because products containing real glycerol are hard to find. There is considerable market demand for it, and its shoddy alternatives have developed a very bad reputation. Stuff usually has propylene glycol instead which is cheaper but doesn't taste as good, or ethylene glycol which is cheaper still but causes kidney failure so they might as well put "glycerine" on the label and take your money while you're still alive. If you have a large supply of human beings dying with statistical regularity, you can saponify their bodies in sodium hydroxide over heat and become a major producer of cheap glycerol which can be used for stuff like glue, shampoo, lotions, shaving cream, soap, mouthwashes, toothpaste, cough syrups, and food products. Alternatively you can make it from biodiesel.
The result will, of course, be the sweet crude oil.
Thank you, thank you... Don't forget to tip the waiters...
We all know that any and all technologies that can be used to reduce our consumption of oil eventually vanishes, or the people sell out to big oil. This will be no different.
Fidel Castro has a big problem with biofuels. Not to long ago he estimated that 3 Billion people would die as a result of using corn and other food-stuffs for fuel. I wonder, with the development of sugar-based fuels if he will change his tune. After all, Cuba can grow sugar.
Just because I have people skills doesn't mean I'm a people person.
Sweet Dude!
crap.
If they want a plant-based plastic, why don't they just bring back celluloid? It's a proven technology.
Why is that a problem? We've been using variants of soybean and canola for industrial purposes for pretty much as long as they've been grown in North America. In South America, there is already a sustainable fuel industry around the sugar cane (and no, it is NOT true that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from plants than you can get out of the ethanol, if it is done right).
The thing about "food stocks" is that when we need more we can just grow more. Conservation is a great idea (and absolutely essential for sustainable management of our environment) but when it comes to non-renewable resources like crude oil it doesn't matter HOW much you try to conserve, you'll eventually reach a point where it's gone and you can't get any more. Ultimately, the only sustainable consumption of a non-renewable resource is ZERO consumption.
Yes, preaching conservation CAN sound like "austerity" but it can also be called "efficiency" which is always a good thing. If we do nothing to explore new technologies to harness renewable energy sources and rely on conservation as our long-term method to sustain our environment then, quite literally and without exaggeration, we would have to live even more austere lives than the Amish--that is, completely stop using non-renewable energy and therefore stop using electricity, heat our homes with woodstoves, stop driving (or even taking the bus). That is not progress by anyone's definition.
Whatta surprising turn of events!
Whoda thunkit that the US might invade Cuba for their energy!
It seemed to work for the Druuge in Star Control, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druuge
This should have been in reply to an earlier thread higher up. Sorry.
this sounds like such a utopian idea until you consider that the glucose and fructose will most likely come from corn.
corn that we subsidize specifically to promote overproduction for the large agribusinesses in this country (e.g., adm, cargill, etc.). corn that, because it's overproduced, the usda will promote (using tax dollars) research in novel ways to use the corn (using tax dollars). corn that creates an environmentally-destructive monoculture across iowa, threatening not only the corn itself but other plants and animals and even the farmers themselves (not to mention the pesticide runoff into the gulf of mexico that creates a dead zone). corn that fills the feeding troughs for beef cows that weren't meant to be eating corn and as a result getting sick.
for more detail, read the omnivore's dilemma by michael pollan.
Reminds me of a car prank I heard from Car Talk on NPR. If you want to easily ruin someone's day, yet do no real harm, get a bag of sugar half-full, sprinkle some on the ground beside their car's gas tank, leave the bag sitting in plain view on the ground beside it. BUT -- don't put any sugar in the tank! That'd be property damage.
:)
Instead, just let them worry about it, get it checked out at the local garage (paying for an inspection), all to find there's no damage whatsoever.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Maybe you haven't worked with celluloid or Bakelite before?
It works as a plastic, but it's very brittle and no where near as strong as most commercial plastics derived from hydrocarbons.
You're certainly not going to get ABS to PEG from sugars right now (but maybe PEG, commonly found in water bottles is a good candidate to start with)
First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Making plasting from suger would give yet another reason for toddlers to stick their toys in their mouths, causing a rise in infant deaths!
Somebody think of the children!!!
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This subject was brought up on the radio, and the concern was about using food sources, they explained in the short run they would use the actual grain, but would then start using the byproducts like the stalks
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Actually, it might definitely be news, of the "better mousetrap" variety. The patent you've linked describes a low-temperature (45 C), enzymatic process with a third chemical (trifluoroethylbutyrate, in this case), to (effectively) curdle sucrose; the article describes mixing using salt, water, and heat to curdle glucose. The lack of added chemicals in the article's process means less byproduct afterward; I suppose the ionic nature of the dissolved salt makes for higher yields.
And for this particular salt, the process works at 100 C, which shouldn't even boil the (solute-laden) water. I think the only question is the usefulness of the resulting compound.
Plants suck (unbelieveably badly) at efficiency themselves. The best plants use about 2% of solar power. Of that power, only 15-20% is used for actual sugar construction (transport, water, active transport in roots being the main things).
... say 20% efficiency ? I would be extremely surprised if they got it this high ...
Then our harvesting processes are not exactly hallmarks of efficiency themselves. But let's say we actually get 70% of the biomatter into the factory.
Then the factory processes it at about
So using plants gives us about 2%*20%*70%*20% = 1/1785 th of the sunlight hitting the plants.
Even the cheapest solar panels get about 10% efficiency. Therefore wouldn't it make more sense to try to find a process that can create sugars (and/or plastic/oil/...) from athmospheric co2, or from ground-based compounds. If we can only make the process 1% efficient we'd still easily be two hundred times more efficient than plants.
Whoops! They aren't using water, they're using another solvent of some kind. My mistake.
Our foodstocks are polysorbate 60 and Yellow Dye No. 5. Who cares about corn? Nobody really eats corn anymore. Might's well use that weed for something! /sarcasm
Using dead people for oil production would just drive up the price of Soylent Green.
We've secretly replaced Bob's Crude Oil with new Folgers Crystals(TM). Will he know the difference?
*car explodes*
Given that most of us have gotton pretty fat due to the productivity of our petroleum intensive agriculture, with its attendant pollution and noxious politics, it wouldn't hurt our reincarnation chances if we offset one final bit of oil consumption.
The idea sort of reminds me of the Tibetan practice of sky burial.
Sky burial works like this. When it's time to hop on the old wheel of transmigration, you have your mortal remains dropped off outside a certain village, along with a small fee (modest by American mortuary standards). These villages are inhabited by a special caste of people whose job it is to cut up corpses and feed them to birds. Any bits that are left over are ground up and baked into a special bread, which is also fed to the birds.
By generously feeding the birds, you goose up the old karma just when it comes in handy. Since you are supporting the meritorious work of the people who handle this job, you probably even get a bit from that too. Given that you don't really have any use for the old carcass anymore, it's the closest thing there is, karmicly speaking, to a free lunch. Maybe it would make the differnce between coming back as a worm or as a bird (assuming karma is not a zero sum game).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
GREAT comment. Soylent Green economics is interesting. This is probably Dr Death aka Dr. Jack Kevorkian's next death trick.
Back to the glucose oil energy topic. I suspect oil from glucose might be the dawn of a very bright new age. Grow your own road trip.
A breakthrough like this is in the offing. We have had too many tiny incremental steps with energy.
Thanks,
Jim
Come on, everybody knows that the Doozers from Fraggle Rock did this first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraggle_Rock#Doozers.
Perhaps there's a bad side to this: imagine getting so upset that you eat your phone... and how would Kia owners be able to wash their cars? Scary story ;)
Trust me, I once put sugar in a guy's engine and it totally messed it up.
Yes. That was my first thought when I read the headline. Especially the word "Attempt". It was like some wiseacre went in to a room full of scientists and said "Hey, Poindexter! Try this!"My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
oh man, I can't wait for the issue of national geographic that shows EPA workers cleaning off gooey syrup from totally spazzed out diabetic seagulls.
ôó
Where has this writer been? Under a rock? Before plastic was ever made from oil, it was made from plants. The original plastic wrap was cellophane, made from Cellulose. Hemp was an ideal plant for cellulose. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, making hemp illegal, ended the use of hemp for plastics. And about the same tyme Du Pont received a patent of making plastic from petroleum. Here's a webpage on an Eastman Kodak, yes the camera company, process: The Process of Making Trees into Plastic dated 13 May 2001.
FalconShould there be a Law?
NatureWorks have been producing plastics from corn for quite a few years now.
Plastic was made from plants before it was ever made from petroleum oil.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And alas, it's not true that we can just grow more food stocks when we need more. Sure, to some degree we can increase it -- but there is a limit to the available arable land, a limit to growing seasons, etc. And to grow more food despite those constraints requires more energy, so you reach a point of diminishing returns quickly in growing food for energy.
The best crop, or one of the best, for biofuels, ethanol, is switchgrass, which is not a food crop. And what do you think will happen when all the petroleum is gone? There goes a lot of food as well. Besides the petro needed to fuel the farm equipment the chemical inputs for farms, pesticides and herbicides, are petro based as well. So when the last drop of petro goes there goes western "conventional" farming as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I think that vaginas should fuel our cars. Think of all the energy in a pussy fart!
Some businesses and people do but most don't.
Though, if supply and demand are the only factors, then the small percentage of americans now farming may very well be priced out of the farming market and may enter other fields.
How so? If, as it has been opined by many replying to this article say, there's competition between crops for food or fuel prices will go up. This means more people will want to take advantage of the increase in price by becoming farmers. As it is now, people are being drivien off farms in the US, especially smaller farmers and their children, because they can make more money elsewhere. But if prices go up they will have a reason to stay on the farms. If the price of farm produce goes up so does the income farms generate.
As long as all other countries in the world can meet our food and energy needs, that's not a problem.. we get cheaper food/energy, our farmers presumably go into other fields (um, no pun intended) and make more money than farmers do.
But what happens if someone decides to cut us off? If we don't have active farms, that could be quite some time before we have our own agriculture ramped back up to feed ourselves.
I seriously doubt this will ever happen unless climate change deprives farms of water. As it is the US exports a lot of food. And agribusinesses get government subsidies doing it. If crops were suddenly grown for fuel then those exports will be cut so the US will still be able to produce enough food. However because of cuts in exports third world farmers will be able to stay on farms and earn a living.
So some of the regulations may be there simply to make sure we STILL HAVE FARMERS.
Why would the US not have farmers unless they aren't being paid enough the stay and work on farms? Growing crops for fuel will mean food crops will raise in price thus increasing the pay on farms.
Where in a free market, we very well might not have farmers, if our people decide not to work for the wages that other people in other countries are willing to work for.
Either farms can pay what the going rate is or they can try to pay less. If they pay less than people are willing to work for the farms will not have workers and without them the farms have nothing to sale. However some yuppies are giving up city life to start organic farms now. One of the fastest grocery store chains is Whole Foods Market, which sales organic food.
But FOOD and ENERGY are pretty important things.. maybe, just maybe, we want to make sure that the market doesn't leave us exposed to that kind of a risk!
If crops are grown for fuel, the price of food will rise, and thus it will become economically feasible to farm. I therefore see no problem of a conflict between food and fuel.
Even.. shudder.. some subsidies. Maybe not as many as we have now... but some? Maybe?
Maybe, if they were applied to sustainably farming I might agree with subsidizing them. However I ask why subsidize them at all. Where does the money come from? Taxpayers, that's where. Subsidies steal from some to give to others. I have no problem buying from and paying a local farmer, I am a member of two coops that support local farmers, thus helping him or her earn a living but I don't support government giving Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill billions. As the CATO Institute said, "'ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period.'" This from one of those Libertarian, freemmarket, groups it seems you don't like.
I am saying that we should be thinking more about how to create fair
Should there be a Law?