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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...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Because grown ethanol is carbon-neutral. You burn the fuel, CO2 is emitted, plants fix CO2 into carbohydrates via photosynthesis... you make ethanol out of these plants, and burn it, emitting CO2. Rinse and repeat.
Just like nearly every other system on the face of the Earth, it's just another way of using solar power.
>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
Grants are already quite competitive but let's try some numbers.
Let's say that it take $1 million to achieve a particular milestone and that there are 10 organizations that each have a roughly equal chance of achieving the milestone first. In order to provide adequate incentive, the payout for the prize will have to be $10 million (plus a risk premium - but we'll ignore that). That is, an organization that has a 1 in 10 chance of winning the prize for an outlay of $1 million will only compete if the prize exceeds $10 million. So, essentially, the government ends up paying $10 million for $1 million worth of research.
On the other hand, let's say the government holds a competition for grant funding. In that case, the government chooses the organization with the best chance of reaching the milestone efficiently and pays that organization $1 million to complete the research. In this case, the government is paying $1 million for $1 million worth of research.
Not only that, but if the government plays it's cards right, in the grants case the government can get the research released into the public domain. Strictly speaking, the government could also get the research released into the public domain in the prize case but in practice the organization is going to fight harder to lock the research away as it's own "intellectual property".
Speaking of intellectual property, that's really the key to understanding why the "free market" breaks down for scientific research. For physical property (e.g. an apple pie), there is a need to manufacture multiple apple pies. For intellectual property, once the first "apple pie" is "manufactured" then all the other pies become worthless. That is, you only need to make a scientific discovery once.
Damn! And here I am built for consuming ethanol with speed and efficiency! And not even a microbe, either.
That is all.
Well, in practice it can be quite difficult to reward innovation in a meaningful way. The current practice is for the government to impose artificial monopolies (patents, copyrights, etc.) but it's difficult to determine in a natural way how severe the monopoly should be.
Should the monopoly last 10 years or 100 years? Should the monopoly prevent anyone else from solving the problem at all or should the monopoly allow anyone else to solve the problem as long as the solution is not exactly the same? Does it matter if the solution is so novel that no one else would have thought of it in 100 years or if the solution is so obvious that there were dozens of other organizations that would have developed exactly the same solution within a few months of each other?
You can try to have a free market for "intellectual property" but, in the end, it's some government bureaucrat who (more or less arbitrarily) decides the essential features of that market.
More broadly, there are many examples of services that become extremely cumbersome when forced into a "free market" framework. An obvious example is the fire department. You don't really want to be shopping shop around the free market on the rare occasions that your house is burning down. Scientific research is not as immediate as a house fire so it's easier to "let the free market deal with it". In the end, though, if you want the benefits of scientific research then you're going to have to pay for it - and there are compelling reasons to think that some sort of government funding is the least cumbersome method of funding scientific research.
That's not to say that the current model of government funding for scientific research could not be substantially improved - just that the "free market" isn't some magical solution for funding scientific research efficiently.
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.
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
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.
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