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Synthetic Biology For Natural Fuel
CoolBeans writes "Making ethanol is easy. Making enough ethanol to fill every gas tank in a developed country is tricky. The Department of Energy has promised $125 million to the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a team of six national labs and universities that will be run like a startup company. They intend to create new life forms that are optimized for alcohol production. The genes of crops that produce large amounts of cellulose will be tweaked to improve the yield per acre and to increase drought and pest resistance. Microbes that produce sugar from cellulose and ethanol from sugar will be built for speed and efficiency." The article mentions as an aside that earlier this year, "the energy giant BP gave $500 million to Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for similar alternative energy research. That gift will fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, which will operate separately from the JBEI." So UC Berkeley and LBL are both participating in two separate energy-biotech research programs.
Seriously, why? Why bother with all this expensive "synthetic biology" or (worse) growing and using perfectly good corn to make something that's less effective than gasoline when you can just grow an imperial fuckton of algae, render them down for biofuel, and use that? Carbon neutral, and you get something more akin to good ol' diesel fuel than ethanol.
Plus there's some incentive to clean up eutrophicated bodies of water this way because, hey, that's profit floating on the top!
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
ii i hope zey make them acid re.. resistant *burp*
There's a company in Ottawa that's working on cellulose ethanol as well. The company is Iogen Corporation. They have information on the process too. I first heard about them when I was at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas event, and there was a guest speaker from Iogen who talked about the similarities between ethanol production and brewing (i.e. some of the industry knowledge is transferrable).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
As much as I'm supportive of any program that might, conceivably, provide a partial alternative to our petroleum addiction, I have seen several pieces lately about ethanol vs. biodiesel, which seem to indicate that biodiesel is a much more realistic alternative to gasoline than ethanol is, but that its major shortcoming is that it doesn't reward corn production.
While I don't have the background to really comment or hold an opinion one way or another, I just think it's a mistake to look too hard for "one solution" that we need to put all our money and hopes in. We need to be looking all over the place, and we need to realize that the final solution might not involve all the cars in the country running on the same fuel. There might be certain fuels that are preferable in certain regions or for certain types of vehicles, and although it might fundamentally alter the transportation network and your ability to drive one vehicle anywhere, that might not be a terrible outcome.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With Ethonal BP can make money with its current infrastructure, keep positive press about their company, and develop alternatives that will never truly be able to replace fossil fuels.
-Todd
Put down the sig, and step away from the computer.
They also have a patent on an organism that makes ethanol and acetic acid from watergas [CO,H2 and CO2] which can more easily be synthesized without using plants to make the biomass required for normal ethanol production. ethanol is normally biosynthesized by converting glucose=>pyruvate=>ethanol which allows for making 2 ethanol molecules for every glucose used. the glucose is the big problem with ethanol production from biomass. plants are efficient at converting light energy into an immediate source of energy but not too good at storing energy in the form of glucose or other organic compounds, they spend most of their energy just trying to keep alive and functioning. because of this, it isn't as efficient to ferment plant biomass into ethanol than it is to synthesize water gas [using energy derived from solar power/nuclear etc.] then "fermenting" that to ethanol.
Ok, assuming the federal should be funding this sort of research*, why pay out grants? We should take advantage of the natural benefits of competition; pay $X to the organization that reaches a specific milestone.
*I don't see why it should be. The energy market is so large, there seems like more than enough incentive for innovation.
(seriously - I love the idea, but you and I both know it's gonna happen...)
As a (partial) tangent, what safety measures are they looking to put in place to prevent some sort of biological 'oopsie' that may have unintended (read: "Bad") consequences?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I guess what is freaking me out on this (probably too much science fiction) is the whole "creating new life" thing. I don't consider myself a deeply religious guy, so it isn't that. It is more along the lines of the fact that we can barely understand what is going on with the life that CURRENTLY exists. That, and and the potential for this new type of life to make it into the ecosystem with unknown ramifications. Kind of like when a species from another continent hitches a ride on a cargo ship or something and decimates the native species. I realize that there is nothing we can do to stop the wheels of progress, I just wish there were a common code of ethics that was enforceable but not constraining to research and development. What a conundrum!
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
More ethanol can be obtained from it than from corn and it is also a weed, so it can grow ANYWHERE. It produced 5-10x as much pulp as regular trees do so the paper industry could profit from them, and hemp ropes are what make the shipping industry possible, or atleast did back years ago.
Making ethanol is easy. Making enough ethanol to fill every gas tank in a developed country is tricky.
So...Brazil isn't a developed country? 40% of the gas used by *cars* comes from Ethanol (they actually import oil because of diesel and petrochemical needs.) They do it with cane sugar.
The reason we don't have cheap ethanol, and why corn prices are skyrocketing, is because corn is almost *the* worst way to make ethanol. Corn, however, is what the midwest does, and only what the midwest does. The earliest primaries are in...guess where...the midwest (well, not so much any more, thank god.) The government forks over billions to farmers and farm corporations because it buys votes. Corn is what livestock are fed, not grass. High fructose corn syrup, which is quite bad for you (compared to regular sugar) is in damn near everything because it's cheaper than sugar (which, incidentally, is price fixed. Sugar is *dirt* cheap on the world market, but to protect a fairly small contingent of sugar farmers in the US, the feds price-control it.)
By the way, Bush's favorite line is "reducing our foreign dependency on oil." Guess what? We already get our oil from a rather diverse group, and half of our oil comes from domestic sources.
Last fun fact. Think your Prius is helping with that pesky foreign oil "problem", or (laughs) that you're "fighting terrorism"? Think again. Transportation only accounts for less than one percent of US oil consumption.
Please help metamoderate.
One of the problems with generating ethanol from biomasses is that most yeasts don't convert xylose and/or aribinose very well, if at all. And they make up, up to 30% of the fermentable sugar (depending on the plant).
It's only in the last 5~10 years that any serious research was done towards creating bacteria that is useful/economical on an industrial scale. I think there is one or two companies that have viable commercial products already on the market.
I imagine the future of those lines of research will depend on what makes more money:
1) converting all the sugars into ethanol
2) selling the leftovers of cellulose based ethanol to farmers for animal feed
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Could it be that maybe there are plants already here that can do what we want them to? I seem to recall certain algae strains being fifty percent plant oil by volume, with other strains producing comparable amounts of cellulose. Why go to the trouble of engineering synthetic life forms (which could pose a tremendous environmental risk) when we could just try to find ways to grow enough algae to generate large quantities of fuel instead? The last I heard, certain strains of algae could realistically yield up to 5,000 gallons per acre. That's not bad, and as far as I know, no genetic engineering or life synthesis was required.
Why Ethanol? Simple
1) we have the infrastructure to use it immediately.
2) It's not corrosive or particularly toxic.
3) unlike algae it's grown by agricultiure so Archer Daniels Midland can get their cut of the pie.
the latter is probably the most defining reason.
But I think ethanol may be the wrong ticket. Obviously corn ethanol is a bad idea. But even cellulosic ethanol may be a bad idea.
two reasons:
1) Now matter how you produce it, evenif a miracle in effciency happened, at the end of the process any ethanol produced is going to be dissolved in water. Drying it out is going to eat the efficiency.
2) Cellulose and Ligno-cellulose is desinged by trees to be indigestible and energetically inaccessible. If it were easy to digest the bacteria and termites would have eaten the whole forest a long time ago. Trees would not be huge cellulose containers. That should be a clue.
Now it is true that man made enzymes can in some instances beat natural ones by an order of magnitude of more. But this is one place where nature has had a lot of different creatures all working on the same problem independently for quite some time.
One the other hand it's almost commerically viable now. So we only need maybe a factor of ten improvement to open up wide spread production. However then other scaling issues will raise their heads. Farmland will be used. in many case it will be existing farm waste, but in others, say poplar trees, it will be for non-edible products. And if we try to open up new farmlands to compensate then were back to having a water budget problem.
Algae making diesel would seem to bypass a lot of these problem. It can be grown off croplands, in many cases using sea water or brackish water. And it's easy to separate the oils from the water. the product has a higher energy value than Ethanol per volume and per weight. And it does not produce as much toxic waste in the production process (ethanol uses acid treatment and produces loads of crap to dispose of).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
>> life forms that are optimized for alcohol production
My brother in law is optimized for alcohol consumption. Perhaps they could just reverse his genetic code.
I was amazed recently by a sight off of Interstate 70 in Frederick, Maryland. BP Solar has built a huge cell fabrication plant. It is covered in solar panels. It is supposed to be one of the largest solar cell factories in North America.
It is amazing that they located in Maryland. And it is more amazing that it isn't just some photo-op PR "factory" so typical of most oil companies. It's the real deal. Good for BP!.
FYI, a sign outside said "now hiring" . . .
That link that you gave is not for oil, but rather natural gas.
While it is true that many people do not realize that transportation is only one part of the pie with gas consumption, it is far more than 1%. According to this link, in 1998 it was 24%. While it is true that items such as power generation use more oil than transportation, a Prius or two still does help.
I thought the whole point of environmentally friendly fuel was to reduce carbon emissions. Ok so ethanol burns cleaner its still carbon based. Correct me if i'm wrong here. Why aren't we trying to invest in feasabel ways to produce hydrogen or some other truly clean burning fuel ?
Fermentation, then distillation takes a lot of time and energy to make alcohol type fuel that does not have as much energy per gallon as gasoline.
We are much better off following through with the research to convert fructose to 2,5 Dimethylfuran which is a totally chemical process which can be run as a production without waiting for microbes to ferment something to 5% concentration, then distilling to 90%, then using some other drying process to get to 99%
DMF also has more energy per gallon than ethanol
http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/7204
>They intend to create new life forms that are optimized for alcohol production.
:-) Everything is falling into place.
That's perfect, seeing as how I'm optimized for alcohol consumption
Ian Ameline
Damn! And here I am built for consuming ethanol with speed and efficiency! And not even a microbe, either.
That is all.
Have you tried to watch Who Killed the Electric Car?
Fully electric cars are very realistic. For a brief period, they were done commercially. But it's politically improbable to restart that program. Oil companies don't want too many new competitors--or classic publicly-funded competitors--selling fuel, and car companies don't want too many new companies selling cars...
Hydrogen still requires refining and pumps, so it doesn't bother the oil cos. so much. And it still has to be burned, so it doesn't bother car cos. so much.
I myself feel that if hydrogen cars become popular, it'll be an inferno waiting to happen--imagine 200 million Hindenburgs...
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
This is really simple people - legalize hemp.
It produces 1000 gallons of ethanol, per acre.
Corn produces 330 gallons, per acre.
We grew it in WW2 - "Hemp for Victory!" was the slogan.
It grew amazingly well, and it's not like you're going to get high off of industrial hemp - it doesn't have THC.
... just can't quite pull it from the back of my mind. Just laugh and believe I did.
They are talking about converting cellulose to sugar to make ethanol. This has the advantages that bio-diesel has - it is made out of non-crop plants like wood-chips, grass-clippings, waste stocks of food plants, old paper. Plants like switch-grass and trees can be grown on very marginal land that cannot produce food. They are working on better enzymes to digest the cellulose to glucose, which is the problem.
A worthy goal, albeit not a new one; calling it by a new name ("synthetic biology") won't make it any easier than when people used to call it "genetic engineering".
Back to making sugar, I guess.... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6266712.stm They were said to be working in inhumane conditions on a sugar cane plantation in the Amazon. An ethanol-producing company which owns the plantation has denied allegations of abusing the workers. Human rights and labour organisations believe that between 25,000 to 40,000 people could be working in conditions akin to slavery in Brazil. Many farmers in the Amazon region who incur debts are forced to work virtually for free in order to repay the money they owe. Labour ministry officials and prosecutors discovered more than 1,100 workers working 14 hours a day and living in conditions described as "appalling". It is the largest such raid in Brazil, a country beset by the problem of slave labour. Officials said that the labourers lived in overcrowded conditions with no proper sanitation facilities. Ethanol industry The plantation was located about 155 miles (250 km) from the mouth of the Amazon river near the town of Ulianopolis. Amazon workers Many workers in the Amazon work on plantations to pay debts The company which runs the plantation denies the charges against it and said that the workers were paid good wages by Brazilian standards. But the BBC's Gary Duffy, in Sao Paulo, says many are thought to fall into debt slavery by paying for transportation to work far from where they live and by buying overpriced tools and food. Ethanol sells in Brazil at half the price for conventional petrol and is said to be a greener fuel for cars. Recently, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to bring industry leaders and workers together to "to discuss the humanisation of the sugar cane sector in this country". He was acting after being criticised for calling Brazil's ethanol producers "national and world heroes", despite critics accusing producers of exploiting workers in the sugar cane and ethanol industry. The Mobile Verification Task Force, which conducted the raid on the plantation, was founded in 1995 by the Labour Ministry and claims to have freed more than 21,000 workers from debt slave conditions at more than 1,600 farms across Brazil. The Roman Catholic Church estimates there are some 25,000 workers living in slave-like conditions throughout Brazil, most of them in the Amazon.
Currently, that's the deal, but one of the areas of agricultural research right now is to develop nitrogen fixing traits to high sugar yield crops, and to investigate and tweak non traditional crops that can be grown on marginal land, and make them drought resistant, etc..
No need to thank this non kid farm boy. google is your friend--and save your hair and lower your blood pressure, a lot of smart guys who are doing this for a living are WAY ahead of you with your observations, as in they are *fully* aware of how this works right now, both chemically and economically. Are you an agricultural professional, a farmer or a researcher with biofuels?
We are in a transition stage now-so of course it isn't as efficient yet.
We are doing corn in the US because that is what we are set up to do in humongous mass quantities at the current time, as in this freaking year we get the corn, so that next year we will have millions of vehicles on the road that are at least partially being fueled with some biofuel.
Baby steps. Farm equipment is quite specialized and quite expensive, we are using what we have right now.
By the way, how are your solar panels doing? Mine are just fine. Oh-you don't have any, like 99.999% of the other complainers out there? I bet you have just a ton of silicon using and electricity wasting devices though, ie, just part of the problem, no part of the solution at all besides a hot head and a sharp tongue.
Sure, it's a semi free country and you can talk all you want, but a lot of people are actually doing stuff to try and make this better for everyone rather than just blogging about it or complaining. If you got a better way, do it, even at a small scale prototype level, then submit an article about it, turn everyone on to your leet energy producing skills.
Your calculations neglect several factors, one of which you mentioned yourself.
1) The reward in your scenario is not merely the $1 million. It is $1 million + the value of the media coverage + the value of the IP.
2) In the grant scenario, you're assuming omniscience on the part of the grantor. $1 million spent will only yield $1 million in research if:
- The grantor spends $0 determining the best organization
- The grantor is 100% successful
3) You're also assuming the rules of the grant and enforcement of those rules are sufficient to maximize the expenditure of the grant funds after they've been awarded.
4) The grant process also contains a risk factor for the applicants, though it is admittedly less.
5) The risk premium demanded by competitors is unlikely to be near enough to compensate for the actual risk, as noted by our good friend Adam Smith, "The chance of gain is by every man more or less overvalued and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued and by scarce any man...valued more than it is worth."
By the time you've factored everything in (especially #2), a meritocratic approach is at least as attractive as a grant.
For the last. effing. time.
The real issue is curbing consumption, not trying to make our already ridiculous consumption levels more "green" somehow.
Our agriculture are already today depleting our soil, read more at http://www.energybulletin.net/28610.html. This new bio-technology will make it worse.
I'm hopeful that this becomes practical because, as a progressive, I want to see individuals at all income levels to be enabled to meet their personal transportation needs. There are some folks who call themselves progressive who want to use governmental force to coerce individuals out of personal cars and into mass transit. That's not progressive at all. In that Utopia, only the rich will have access to personal transportation. That's regressive.
So, funding research into affordable alternatives to gasoline for personal transportation is a progressive ideal.
If you have debt you pay it back. If you dont have money you work it off. Stop sensationalizing it by calling it slavery. Its no different than paying off million dollar houses in San Jose over 40 years. Its just another way of living beyond your means. Left to themselves most third world farmers would starve in a year as that is the xtent of their means- getting food to live for 40 years is living beyond their means for them. Sucks but thats capitalism. If you dont like it you should vote for the Communist Party of America candidate in the next election.
**Life is too short to be serious**
If we are going the genetic engineering route why not just genengineer Sugarcane to grow where corn grows? Sugarcane based Ethanol is a proven technology in Brazil. For that matter while we are playing god why not just genengineer humans to be able to run as fast as cars so we can just run everywhere . Also genengineer some of them to be able to carry huge loads at somewhat lower speeds and they can replace trucks and truckers. While this may be extreme how about genengineering humans to convert McD burgers to pure alcohol pee. We could solve the obesity and fuel problem at the same time. Cars would need to be modified to have sanitary fittings in the driver seat to get the fuel but Detroit should be able to do that. If not the Japanese are famous for innovative toilet fittings.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Scam companies like Monsanto will have a field day with us. Not only will they own all the worlds' food, they'll also own the worlds' energy production.
More roundup -and other- resistant crops, more pesticides, more newer experimental chemicals, more ground water pollution, more cancer, more agricultural destruction.
You go, human.
People have no idea what the hell is happening.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The version I am familiar with is an acre of hemp producing as much as 4 acres of trees. My question is always: are we talking about the same acre of land? Or are we comparing Ohio farmland with Oregon forest land? What kind of trees? A lot of forest production in the western U.S. is on land too steep or rocky to be cultivated and planted with an annual crop. Even in your hybrid poplar production systems proposed for riparian areas, we are talking about land that we don't want to be tilling every year for the production of an annual crop. From a physiological basis, I doubt that a C3 plant like hemp could outyield a c4 plant like corn or switchgrass (panicum spp.) in a favorable environment
The algae projects underway use concentrated CO2 to boost efficiency (gal/arce produced) so that they provide a second use of the carbon, but they are not carbon neutral because they rely on the use of fossil fuels for production. The GreenFuel pilot plant in AZ (about 0.3 acre) is getting 40% capture of CO2 according the Gary Leung who is with the company: http://www.greenfuelonline.com/. This all fine while we burn fossil fuels, but there will be a need to either do better with a 380 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2 or find a way to concentrate CO2 from the atmosphere that is more efficient than rooted plants. Global Research Technologies (discussed here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/2 6/0226222) is working on the latter problem. But, you are correct that only algae have the efficiency to produce liquid fuels on a scale similar to how we use them now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html.
s -selling-solar.html
On the other hand, we are facing constricted supplies of oil now and doing something about that quickly looks as though it is going the route of rooted plants. The reason why is because this is presently the path of least resistance. The ethanol pump is primed.
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Silicon: better than carbon for energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
How can this organism be confined? Can it be restricted to a certain kind of growing condition that doesn't occur in nature? Otherwise it will definitely upset some kind of balance; maybe dead plants will decompose in a different way than usual under the influence of these organisms in the wild.
It is easy... just stop making beer... who needs it anyways...?
I think that the clean-air groups might have a problem with making all engines diesel...
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Most cars in the U.S. are capable of running on E20 (20% ethanol, 80% gasoline) and many of them do (especially in the winter months). Many are capable of running on E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline). If we just increased the fraction of ethanol in the fuel formulation, we could get off of gasoline by just changing the requirements of new cars to run off of ethanol.
On the other hand, there's a problem with U.S. diesel that the rest of the world might not understand: U.S. diesel is high sulfur diesel. When it burns it gives off thick black smoke that makes a coal burning locomotive look clean. Because we don't have the infrastructure to make biodiesel in quantity, in order to switch over to biodiesel, first you need to get people to switch to diesel. If that happens we'll all be coughing up black lung-butter. So before that happens you need to mandate low-sulfur diesel. You know... that stuff they use in Europe... Now you've pissed off the oil companies because they'll need to spend some of their record profits refitting their refineries to produce low-sulfur diesel from crappy high sulfur crude. I'm sure congress will do that any day now. And if they do, I'm sure the president will sign the bill.
I looked at biodiesel when I bought my last car. The threat of having to use normal diesel on long trips made up my mind for me.
Support SETI@home
Just what we need--wood-burning cars!
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Octane rating really doesn't have a bearing on how much energy is in a gallon of fuel. Octane rating only describes how controlled a burn you can get from the fuel without nasty detonation and knock inside your motor.
Unleaded Gas Mid grade has around 125,000 BTU per gallon 89 Octane rating.
Ethanol is roughly 76,000 BTU per gallon but has 113 Octane rating
Diesel has roughly 126,000 (biodiesel) 139,000 (petroleum diesel) BTU per gallon but has octane rating of approx 15-25
...ehtanol -- "green" feul, etc -- would agree with you....
I HATE Archer Daniels Midland!!!!!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Two points -
We can already make petroleum in the lab, in fact these guys are already doing it:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_into_oil
This book details how the peak oil theory is false, and that oil is abiogenic:
Black Gold Stranglehold: Myth of Scarcity and Politics of Oil by Corsi and Smith
(available at Amazon)
Libertas in infinitum
Perhaps he meant that it's only been that long that people have researched mass-producing bacteria with the bacteria in mind.
Incidentally, I don't believe beer and bacteria mix well. Beer needs yeast.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Thank you!
... but it sure would have been nice if we'd started dumping hundreds of millions of bucks into fossil fuel alternatives the last time oil went through the roof. Seriously, this should have been a solved problem ten years ago. But no, OPEC decided to open the taps and no one wanted to use a half-ounce of foresight, and we stuck the needle back in our collective arm.
And, of course we have yo-yos who want to believe that oil is infinite to add to the mix. Brilliant.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It seems unlikely that biodiesel would all of a sudden start being produced in immense quantities while petrol suddenly disappears. Cheap, available biodiesel might help people buying a new cars consider diesel which is a step in the right direction.
It is not as if ethanol is magically "compatible" with the majority of cars already on the road. My car won't take E10 let alone something with a significant ethanol component.
There are no magic fixes. All solutions will take time to have an impact and no solution is an ultimate solution, rather we need to look to a variety of solutions together, put them out there and see what works.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
One way to go directly to ethanol is to gassify and then make the ethanol from the gas. This is the method adopted for a new plant in Georgia that just got approval: http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stori es/2007/07/03/0703bizrange.html. Here is a scematic of their process: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. Their planned production is 100 million gal/year ethanol with methanol and butanol also produced. This is larger than most new larger fermentation plants. Forests don't grow all that fast so their estimate for what Georgia can sustainably produce is 2 billion gal/year, less than recent additions to farm belt fermentation capacity.s -selling-solar.html
--
Cut out the chlorophyll middle man: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
If you've got a million dollar house on a 40 year mortgage, you have a fixed payment schedule that will get the house paid for in a designated amount of time. You can either make the payments, or lose your investment.
The difference, as I understand it, is that the debts incurred by the laborers are structured so that "work until it's paid for" is the only option (as opposed to foreclosure/repossession/etc.) and the wage being paid is such that they'll likely not be able to pay it off in their lifetimes.
Such practices were common in America after the Civil War, and were outlawed later for being inhumane.
BP isn't an "oil company", they're an energy company. As such, they'll capitalize on any technology or opportunity which allows for them to make more money off the sale of energy.
In this case, it's because solar cells are slightly less inefficient than they were before and people like the idea so they're buying.
As long as BP is making something that stores, produces or releases energy and someone is buying it, they'll be happy.
Most energy companies whose primary business lies in fossil fuels are neither dumb nor malicious and thusly they'll all seamlessly transition over to whatever the next energy store is, hell they'll speed the transition. Oil is going away either for political reasons or simply because it won't be there anymore, and people still need energy...
Producing ethanol is easy.
Producing ethanol in large quantities is easy.
Producing anhydrous ethanol is difficult, or rather requires a very large energy input.
Thats where the problem comes in - engines require ethanol that is not mixed with water. The only realistic way to separate ethanol from water is distillation which requires a lot of energy (ok I'll admit you can use a centrifuge to do the first stage of separation though I'm not sure if this is used commercially.
I'm also curious if the methanol is kept from the distillation... methanol burns quite happily, its not quite as high efficiency as ethanol so you may not want it in the mix in order to calibrate the engine correctly...
If someone can come up with a biological process to create ethanol that has zero water mixed with it then they will likely be very rich.
Personally I think its far more likely that we'll either use a difference fuel source or someone will redesign the engines to be happy running with ethanol/water mix - getting 24% ethanol is easy - there are GM yeasts that can do that already for wine making - I wouldn't be surprised if there were yeasts that could go to 40% or more (though not necessarily suitable for wine due to flavour concerns)
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
So let me tell this to you as someone who lives in a country where Diesel engines are obviously far more advanced; even so far advanced that they are *extremely* popular with the buying public. So advanced, that the government lobbied some anti-Diesel campaigns and raise particulate matter concerns. But then, this doesn't apply to the latest Diesel technology including particle filters -- and older technology can be converted for about 600 Euro.
More expensive than gasoline engines? True. About 2000 Euro with new cars. And you pay about 2 times as much Vehicle tax for Diesel cars in Germany, but since the Diesel fuel is about 20 cents per Liter cheaper (and because Diesel engines have a better mileage) those excess costs for the first year (2000 Euro for the engine, 200 Euro higher tax) are already amortized after 11,000km.
Sure, that tax stuff is a German thing and will most likely not apply for other countries. But then you might be still interested in the better fuel performance of Diesel engines compared to gasoline-powered ones.
What is definitely wrong, though, is that they're slow to start in cold weather or less agile than gasoline engines. That was true in some almost ancient times, but then, I take it, that in the US you still have a quite hard time to get sulfur-free Diesel which is required for modern highest-pressurized (1600-2000bar) Diesel engines.
So don't blame the Diesel technology for your lack of adopting advances in this very technology which otherwere in the world are already used for 15 years.
I would like to Submit the latest International News Events for discussion:
Russia and USA sign agreement on nuclear energy
President Bush and President Putin have signed an agreement on the development of nuclear energy. They agreed that they "share a common vision of growth in the use of nuclear energy, including in developing countries, to increase the supply of electricity, promote economic growth and development, and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, resulting in decreased pollution and greenhouse gasses."
source
US nuclear power stations near completion of all the additional measures to deal with terrorists.
The US regulator, the NRC, has said that almost all the additional measures taken in response to the threat of terrorists attacks at US nuclear power stations, including additional measures to mitigate the possible effects of a large fire or explosion, including those caused by the deliberate or accidental impact of a large commercial aircraft. Nuclear power stations are already robustly constructed as part of their safety systems but these additional measures should protect them even more.
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German Chancellor Merkel decides against reversing nuclear phase out- for now...
Angela Merkel rejected German industry calls to reverse that country's nuclear phase-out policy. However she only said that she did not see the policy being reversed before 2009, when new elections are due. Many members of Merkel's own party would like to reverse the phase-out, but Merkel's party is in a grand coalition with the anti-nuclear Social Democrats. Merkel commited Germany to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, compared to 1990 levels. German power utilities say they need to keep nuclear power stations operating to meet those goals.
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Soylent Gas is people! Peeeeeoooooooooppppppppppplllllle!
CoolBeans' post has just 1/3 of the original story. The DOE is establishing three Bioenergy Research Centers, one of which is the JBEI. The other two are the DOE BioEnergy Science Center led by the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, and DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center led by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI. All three centers are sharing equally in the funding. See the news page at DOE http://www.energy.gov/news/5172.htm.
Many diesel engines will run with biodiesel without any modification at all, only at the price of a somewhat reduced engine life. However, burning ethanol isn't difficult either. Most new cars in Brazil come with "flex" engines which can burn any mixture of ethanol+gasoline, from 0% to 100% ethanol.
What the fuckton did you just say?
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No, I'm not proposing helium cars as an alternative to hydrogen cars. A helium/electric hybrid might make a good flying car, though.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
As a Berkeley undergrad, let me say how ridiculous the BP deal is. While I think its a "good thing" that oil companies are throwing up some cash for something besides oil, they should NOT decide what to research. This deal effectively hijacked a lot of our top people away from their own research to put them on something that BP will eventually own. Some corporation shouldn't be making decisions about what our scientists research, let them hire their own scientists.
This, of course, is aside from the fact that ethanol in America is a retarded idea from the beginning. My chem professor last semester (Jean Frechet) is an expert in polymer chemistry, especially fuels, and taught us the following: In America, where the best source of biomass for conversion into ethanol is corn, it makes absolutely no sense efficiency-wise. The numbers for corn just don't work. Considering all of the other things we rely on corn for, and energy (read: money, space, etc.) required to grow/harvest/process it into ethanol, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. "FlexFuel" or whatever is a diversionary marketing tactic so Detroit and the oil people can look green.
In Brazil, where their climate supports massive growth of sugarcane, ethanol is feasible as a fuel for cars. In fact, it's in almost every car on the road there. Ethanol will work for a few places on earth where a lot of factors come together just right, but it sure isn't a silver bullet for everyone, especially us Ultimate Consumers here in the USA. We need to be pouring money in to gasoline engine efficiency in the short term, and production of super-cheap electricity (which could cut costs in every sector, not just one) in the long term.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Even the most efficient converters from sunlight to sugar or ethanol aren't even close to what we have for solar cells.
You need to remember what you're converting this sunlight into. Turning crops into ethanol, or algae/oil crops into biodiesel gives you a liquid transportation fuel. Solar cells give you electricity. We already have far cheaper energy (per kwh, or other energy measurement) in the form of electricity than we do transportation fuel. Heck, the whole hydrogen fuel cell car thing is an attempt to turn electric grid power into a transportation fuel.
Besides which, we have no need to conserve sunlight, so efficiency of conversion isn't important. Right now, just shy of 100% of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface is not used for industry (if you discount agriculture). What's more important is power produced per dollar invested. If you can reduce the cost per installed square meter of perpendicular surface area by more than you reduce the conversion efficiency (i.e. divide efficiency by 2 but divide costs by 3), it's a net gain. Consider the case of using using sea water to grow algae in pools in the desert: The land is dirt cheap, and so is the water. I haven't done the math, but I'd guess it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper to install a particular area of ponds like that than it is to install photovoltaic cells, even after you factor in the ongoing costs.
To give you credit, you did mention the difference in costs, but fixed costs are not nominal if they don't buy you what you need (transportation fuel).
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It's not exactly correct that we have the infrastructure to accomodate ethanol. Ethanol is water-soluble and therefore can't be pumped through pipelines -- water seeps into the pipelines and mixes with the fuel, requiring an energy-intensive redistillation at the station. The other ways to transport it are by truck (sort of defeats the purpose of saving fuel) and railroad tank cars (the current rail system doesn't have enough tankcars to accomodate ethanol as a primary transportation fuel). Also, ethanol is not a very volatile fuel, meaning you can only drive about 70%-80% as far on a gallon versus gasoline. It's better to think of ethanol as a transition fuel. The research & technology needed to efficiently convert biomass to ethanol is the same kind of R&D needed to create biodiesel, biobutanol, and other more practical fuels. Ethanol is probably the best place to start, and biofuels are probably going to be something of a moving target as our basic understanding of biofuel conversion improves.
Unless the DMVs start getting tougher on giving out driver's licenses in America, yes. You are presenting a dilemma: do we want to worsen the near-certain disaster of global warming, or do we want to risk a major EPA disaster every time there's a car crash? (As opposed to the current minor disasters.)
I don't object to nuclear power plants; I understand now that a well-run nuclear plant is safer than a well-run coal plant at present. I just don't think that cars should be fueled by nuclear power directly.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney