Echeria Coli Co-Opted To Make Gasoline

Flask_Man writes "Technology Review has an article about a small biotech company in the Silicon Valley that has successfully produced renewable gasoline from genetically modified bacteria, including the nefarious E.Coli bacteria. A pilot plant is slated to be constructed in California in 2008, and it is claimed that hundreds of different hydrocarbon molecules are capable of being produced. The modified bacteria make and excrete hydrocarbon molecules that are the length and molecular structure the company desires. From the article: 'To do this, the company is employing tools from the field of synthetic biology to modify the genetic pathways that bacteria, plants, and animals use to make fatty acids, one of the main ways that organisms store energy. Fatty acids are chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms strung together in a particular arrangement, with a carboxylic acid group made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen attached at one end. Take away the acid, and you're left with a hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel.'" We discussed something similar to this earlier this year.

Comments

So this is what

[WillRobinson]

About 3500$ a gallon?

Re:So this is what

[utopianfiat]

So?! It's better than me giving up driving my SUV to work every day! Those damn communists want me to take the *TRAIN* to work from 20 miles out of town, can you believe them?!
You do what you have to for your survival, and I'll do what I have to to maintain my pathetic dependence on petrol!

Re:So this is what

[Hoi Polloi]

It would still be cheaper than milk.

Re:So this is what

[CaptainPatent]

Well, if you RTFA and saw this:

Del Cardayre estimates that cellulosic biomass could produce about 2,000 gallons of renewable petroleum per acre. or this:

Producing hydrocarbon fuels is more efficient than producing ethanol, del Cardayre adds, because the former packs about 30 percent more energy per gallon. And it takes less energy to produce, too. The ethanol produced by yeast needs to be distilled to remove the water, so ethanol production requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does. you may realize that after everything is up and running the price would actually be better than ethanol because it doesn't need to be processed.

Re:So this is what

[evilviper]

Where the hell do you shop, that buying a gallon of milk is $3501+?

Re:So this is what

[Hoi Polloi]

Sorry, I forgot to add the sarcasm flag to my comment.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

Just make the price higher and people will stop buying gas guzzlers. You can either tax the fuel or the cars - doesn't really matter. Or you could just make the roads really small like in Europe. Most people outside of cities in the US parallel park about 4 times in their life - including the driver's exam.

Re:So this is what

[Smidge204]

2000 galons of fuel per acre is useless without a time frame.

1 gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.53 kWh. 2000 gallons is 67,060 kWh of energy.

100 watts of sunlight per square foot times 43,560 sq.ft. per acre gives 4,356,000 watts per acre, or 4,365 kW per hour.So every 15 hours of peak sunlight conditions the energy equivalent of 2000 gallons of gasoline hits the ground. That's about three sunny days worth.

Killing off a large portion of that due to various inefficiencies... a 5% overall efficiency and you get 2000 gallons per acre year. That's not too bad, and is better than most vegitable oil yields for any crop I can think of by a factor of almost 2. (Algae not included)

Offhand this seems like a reasonable solution. Combine with other technologies and I can see us eventually replacing conventional petrolium fuels... someone check my math!
=Smidge=

Re:So this is what

[croddy]

raising the tax would discourage SUV owners the least. when you're driving around in a $65,000 cadillac escalade, you've already demonstrated you don't have any understanding of cost. charging $4.50 instead of $3.50 a gallon is not likely to affect you either.

raising fuel taxes is, however, realistically likely to break the bank for folks who are already driving used economy cars because that's all they can afford.

a more appropriate approach would be to simply regulate the vehicles off the road by passing appropriate licensing laws. anyone who's spent time on a U.S. road in the past five years will tell you: SUV drivers are the dumbest drivers on the road, largely because the size of the vehicle grossly exceeds their motorway intelligence quotient. placing SUVs in a separate vehicle classification and requiring more stringent driving skill tests would quickly disqualify most of the folks who have been presuming to drive these vehicles.

Re:So this is what

[cayenne8]

"Just make the price higher and people will stop buying gas guzzlers. You can either tax the fuel or the cars - doesn't really matter."

But why would we have to do that? If we can find ways like the e coli methods in the article to make gasoline which is renewable....and gets the US off the ME 'teet'...why do we have to worry about gas guzzlers? I'm not a fan of SUV's myself, but, I do like fast cars with powerful engines. I'd be looking forward to more fun cars coming back on the market.

Re:So this is what

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Yes, you're right, it doesn't really matter. That would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on any other sector of the economy. For example, in the U.S. there is a tariff on imported sugar. This was done to protect the American sugar industry. Guess what, candy and soda production has steadily been moving to Canada and Mexico for the cheaper sugar, taking all those American jobs with them and reducing the business of the American sugar producers anyway. The point is, artificially altering the price of something through taxes or tariffs ALWAYS has negative side effects and rarely (if ever) solves the "problem" for which it was implemented in the first place. Why is it that the solution for a problem always has to be the most drastic and painful one? Consumer pressure is going to drive the production of more fuel efficient vehicles as the price of oil continues go up naturally (ie outside of US influence). People who want, or more importantly, NEED to drive less efficient vehicles do not need to be punished by their nanny state.

Re:So this is what

[GreyPoopon]

placing SUVs in a separate vehicle classification and requiring more stringent driving skill tests would quickly disqualify most of the folks who have been presuming to drive these vehicles.

A much easier way to accomplish this is to pass a law that requires that all SUVs have a tamper-proof short-range wireless jammer installed that activates when the engine is running, thus preventing people from making mobile phone calls while driving. I think we all know exactly which class of people this would impact, and I'm going out on a limb and saying that it's the same people that have no concept of cost and value. Those people who actually NEED SUVs for either their job or the area they live in would still be able to get them without paying more or having to pass a more stringent driving test. Those who DON'T need an SUV would find an alternate vehicle that allows them to feed their mobile addiction while driving.

Re:So this is what

[farmerj]

Yields in agriculture are nearly always measured on a yearly basis as that's normally the production period. The yearly part is normally taken for granted

In cases where the crop takes multiple years to mature or is a perennial (this is the case for most of the crops which could be efficiently used to produce cellulose like miscanthus and short rotation coppice) it is usually given as the average yield over the expected lifetime of the crop.

Between miscanthus and sort rotation coppice my personal choice would be the miscanthus.

• It produces a crop each year
• It usually does not need to be dried, unlike the coppice
• It required very little additional fertiliser
• It can be harvested and stored efficiently using current agricultural equitment i.e. mowers and big square balers

Re:So this is what

[hedwards]

Because running out of oil is only one of the problems with gas guzzlers.

This kind of technique is not going to fix global warming, it isn't going to reduce emissions, it isn't going to magically lower CO or 03 in the atmosphere that I have to breathe. Sort of in short, it just reduces the effort taken to get the fuel, it doesn't actually make it cleaner. Well, it does a bit in that it shouldn't have the contaminants that are normally found in gas, but those can for the most part already be removed.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

What a novel concept. Let the market and people decide individually. Assuming peak oil is a near term reality, market forces will make people adjust their transportation habits accordingly without any intervention on the part of government or the nanny state, which, as you aptly pointed out, usually makes things worse rather than better. The anti-SUV crusaders are the moralizing prohibitionists of the era. They view SUVs as profligate waste, and not content to merely express their opinion, they want to legislate you and everyone else out of their lifestyle and economic choices.

Re:So this is what

[cayenne8]

"This kind of technique is not going to fix global warming, it isn't going to reduce emissions, it isn't going to magically lower CO or 03 in the atmosphere that I have to breathe. Sort of in short, it just reduces the effort taken to get the fuel, it doesn't actually make it cleaner."

While that is not one of my concerns....it has been pointed out in other posts, that the carbon produced this way is already 'above ground'...so therefore, not adding to the to the atmosphere any new carbon from underground such as with drilled oil.

Re:So this is what

[Anonymous Coward]

No the commuters want to take the train to work, the communists provide you with everything else you need to survive.

Re:So this is what

[ThePiMan2003]

Actually it kind of has to.

The only reason our CO emissions are a problem is that we are digging up carbon that has been buried for years, and releasing it into the air.

Any form of renewable gas (ethonal, weird bacteria, etc) have to get the carbon from SOMEWHERE. In the case of plant based sources it gets it from the air the plants breath and store in the sugar. I would assume that the bacteria are getting it from the same place. Either from the sugar they are fed so they can produce this stuff, or from the air.

The real question is what are they feeding the bacteria. The energy has to come from somewhere, nothing is free.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

So tax the trucks instead. I didn't say that it had to be a fuel tax. Make the $65,000 Caddy cost $80,000 - though you have to accept higher prices for sports cars as well since they guzzle just as much fuel. I'd also argue that pricing gas out of people's ability to pay is a GOOD thing - it gets people off of the road - though apparently not the people you want off of the road. It's going to happen anyway if we've really hit peak oil - may as well do it in a controlled manner instead of whenever the market decides to panic and take the lower-income folks off of the road overnight. These same lower income folks are probably driving around ill-maintained vehicles as well - polluting even more than the evil SUVs.

SUV drivers are lumbering, but they are not the worst. The worst seem to drive old beat-up Maximas and merge onto the highway at 2x the speed limit, simultaneously cutting across 4 lanes of traffic. They can also be seen running up the shoulder when traffic is slow, or getting as far ahead in the merge lane as they can. I guess you could call these people the "invincible drivers". The 2nd worst are the "entitled drivers"... the ones that spend a bundle on their high-end performance Beemer and clearly feel entitled to drive it faster than everyone else... you know, since they are so important. Since money is not an indication of driver skill, these folks tend toward being dangerous. The lumbering SUV is probably next on the list, with it's blind merging and completely skill-less chicken-shit driver. But at least they are easy to see and avoid, unlike the other two.

Re:So this is what

[daem0n1x]

Everything that extracts carbon from the atmosphere helps reduce global warming. The bacteria don't invent the carbon. They have to get it from somewhere.

Global warming happens because people are taking huge masses of carbon that's stored for millions years under the ground and release it to the atmosphere.

Re:So this is what

[TemporalBeing]

Producing hydrocarbon fuels is more efficient than producing ethanol, del Cardayre adds, because the former packs about 30 percent more energy per gallon. And it takes less energy to produce, too. The ethanol produced by yeast needs to be distilled to remove the water, so ethanol production requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.

you may realize that after everything is up and running the price would actually be better than ethanol because it doesn't need to be processed.

Yields in agriculture are nearly always measured on a yearly basis as that's normally the production period. The yearly part is normally taken for granted

That's really not that efficient, considering that a single gas station can go through 2900 gallons in a few days. So that is roughly 1 acre per gas station - already you're looking at needing something like 200+ thousand acres - and a scale of production on an every few day basis.

So figure it takes a week for a gas station to go through 2,000 (it doesn't - it's shorter actually, so this is likely a best case). That would take 52 acres to support a single gas station for a year of gas. Now, figuring that there are 200,000 gas stations in the US (likely more) - that's 10,400,000 acres of land. Or, using Wikipedia to find the size of an acre, Texas, Alaska, the United States, India, and Russia...

10,400,000 acres * 4,046.8564224 sq meters/acre = 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters / 678,051,000 sq. meters = 62.071004678055190538764783180026 land masses the size of the US State of Texas
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 1,717,855,000 sq. meters = 24.499918091433793888308384584264 land masses the size of the US State of Alaska.
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 9,631,420,000 sq. meters = 4.3697924909265715751156111975181 land masses the size of the United States
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 3,166,414,000 sq. meters = 13.29178900578382990979701327748 land masses the size of India
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 17,075,400,000 sq. meters = 2.4647918521943849045995994237324 land masses the size of Russia

That's a lot of land area - and just to support the United States. Now factor in the rest of the world and it is simply not feasible. Surely, it is a way to offset some usage, but it is not sustainable.

Re:So this is what

[TheRaven64]

Some random maths:

The US uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day.

A refinery produces roughly 20 gallons of gasoline per barrel, giving 400 million gallons of gasoline per day.

Per year, this works out at 146 billion gallons.

At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs.

According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.

In order to meet the current needs of the USA, 3% of the landmass would have to be dedicated to growing fuel crops. I might have missed a significant figure somewhere here, because this seems like a much smaller amount than I would have guessed.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

I am not an anti-SUV crusader by any stretch - in fact I drove a small one until 2 years ago when I moved to NYC. I am also a big fan of the free market. However, I must say that gas taxes are to low to account for several things. They do not collect enough tax to maintain the roads we currently have (witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota). Way more money is spent on roads than is collected from them - this makes the cost of traveling by car artificially low - ruining the market forces that you are talking about. Any talk of market forces is kind of silly when you have state, local, and federal money dramatically subsidizing the cost of driving.

I, too, think that the anti-SUV crowd is being kind of silly. In my experience, they are not the worst drivers on the road nor the worst polluters. Poor people tend to be the worst polluters with their ill-maintained cars - but it's not PC to take away poor-people's cars, so we'll attack the rich instead... SUVs are often a nuisance, but the world is full of them. I DO wish that the federal rules would count them as cars, though. This would reduce the number of people that could afford them.

Re:So this is what

[Mr. Slippery]

simply regulate the vehicles off the road by passing appropriate licensing laws

Actually, just enforcing existing laws would get many of them off the road. The larger SUVs and pickups exceed the weight limit on many streets.

Re:So this is what

[Mr. Slippery]

The point is, artificially altering the price of something through taxes or tariffs ALWAYS has negative side effects

So does externalizing costs. These gas taxes simply bring the cost of environmental damage and foreign policy brutality to the pump, rather than spreading them out in health care costs and war spending.

The market can only reach efficient solutions when all costs are included in the transaction; sometimes it takes taxes or tariffs to make that happen.

Re:So this is what

[nsayer]

They do not collect enough tax to maintain the roads we currently have

Actually, they do. That they don't spend the money efficiently is the issue. And, of course, for the government, it's business as usual.

Re:So this is what

[E 99]

10,400,000 acres * 4,046.8564224 sq meters/acre = 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters / 678,051,000 sq. meters = 62.071004678055190538764783180026 land masses the size of the US State of Texas
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 1,717,855,000 sq. meters = 24.499918091433793888308384584264 land masses the size of the US State of Alaska.
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 9,631,420,000 sq. meters = 4.3697924909265715751156111975181 land masses the size of the United States
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 3,166,414,000 sq. meters = 13.29178900578382990979701327748 land masses the size of India
42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 17,075,400,000 sq. meters = 2.4647918521943849045995994237324 land masses the size of Russia

That's a good point... but what's with the rough estimates? Couldn't you give us some numbers to 50 or 60 significant figures, so we have a clearer idea? ;-)

Re:So this is what

[xs650]

"42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters / 678,051,000 sq. meters = 62.071004678055190538764783180026 land masses the size of the US State of Texas"

Texas is now only 261 sq miles according to you. What happened to the rest of it?

Looks like you converted from km^2 to m^2 by multiplying by 1000 instead of 1000^2.

Re:So this is what

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Try reading my post again without the agenda colored glasses.

Re:So this is what

[nsayer]

You've got it about right. Consider that solar radiation hits the earth with several hundred watts per square meter (averaged over the entire year over the entire earth). Say, 200. Now assume that your agricultural conversion is 1% efficient. 2 watts per square meter over the entire US land mass would be 18 gigawatts. Why, that's enough to send Michael J. Fox to the 50s 15 times.

Re:So this is what

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The worst seem to drive old beat-up Maximas and merge onto the highway at 2x the speed limit, simultaneously cutting across 4 lanes of traffic. They can also be seen running up the shoulder when traffic is slow, or getting as far ahead in the merge lane as they can.

We call those people 'teenagers'.

Re:So this is what

[nsayer]

Whoops... Not 18 gigawatts... forgot we're dealing with SQUARE units. There are 10^6 square meters in a square kilometer. So we're talking 9.82663E12 square meters of area, times 2, equals 19 TERAwatts.

Re:So this is what

[mccabem]

SUV drivers are lumbering, but they are not the worst.

I dunno about elsewhere, but of the places I've lived the Volvo drivers are universally the worst. Not even the SUV'ers exuse of having a "lumbering vehicle".

And at least with SUV'ers it seems there is at least a subset of them who *can* drive alright. I have yet to encounter that group of Volvo-ites.

Re:So this is what

[jaweekes]

Good point. Here in SC the max. tax on a new car is $300, and that is hit when you purchase a car over $15,000. If we were to make the upper limit 2% then people buying a $15,000 car will still pay $300 but people buying $60,000 would pay $1,200 which is fairer to me.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

snip.

However, I must say that gas taxes are to low to account for several things. They do not collect enough tax to maintain the roads we currently have (witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota).

Here is where you get into the territory of unintended consequences. Road maintenance is paid for out of gasoline tax. Overall higher fuel efficiency means, on a per capita basis, declining maintenance revenue. In other words, the government NEEDS those gas guzzling SUVs for revenue generation. Some of the proposed taxes, like the $10,000 per year tax on SUVs, are idiotic. Yeah, you'll get SUVs off the road quite effectively. And you'll lose all of the state and Federal revenue that the SUVs were generating with their gas tax. The folks that are underpaying for road use are the people driving the 50 mpg hybrids, not the people driving 12 mpg Escalades.

Way more money is spent on roads than is collected from them - this makes the cost of traveling by car artificially low - ruining the market forces that you are talking about.

The taxes are collected from other buckets. With the exception of toll roads, there is no direct taxation on roads. Most of the money comes from gas taxes. Any talk of market forces is kind of silly when you have state, local, and federal money dramatically subsidizing the cost of driving.

The building and maintenance of roads is one of the primary functions of government. Whether the money for that comes from direct road tariffs, income taxes, trade tariffs, or some other tax vehicle is immaterial. Government intervention in roads in critical because they are the only party that can resolve right of way and public use issues.

Look, a lot of your points are valid, but none of them have anything to do with SUVs. What you are basically doing is indicting the system, but your* solution is doing away with SUVs...something that won't fix the system, and will actually make it worse (because revenue to fix roads will go down). But again, this argument really isn't about problems and solutions, it's about moralizing people trying to outlaw behavior they find objectionable that otherwise doesn't really involve them**.

I personally don't have a dog in this fight...I have a Jetta TDI as my main commuter, and an old pickup truck that I keep around because it's paid for.

* "Your" is generic pronoun here, you may not be one of the folks in favor of banning SUVs and SUV drivers. I'm using "you" because you replied to me, and I'm elaborating on part of my point.
** Generally speaking, an SUV driver affects you about as much as Jane Doe aborting a baby affects me. I find abortion morally objectionable. You find driving an SUV morally objectionable. How about we ban both. No? Just SUVs? A lot of the netroots crowd are enthusiastic supporters of abortion on demand and banning SUVs while at the same time talk about how the right wants to restrict their rights. I find the irony amusing.

Re:So this is what

[thrillseeker]

What a novel concept. Let the market and people decide individually.

Letting the market operate in a free manner does provide the fairest solution to all, but it does not get people elected. People get elected by providing a bias to those who will vote for them.

Re:So this is what

[homer_ca]

Hey, I think railing against SUVs out of eco-purity is pretty silly too, but face it. SUVs are a profligate waste when marketed as mass-market family sedans. It's one thing for a few offroaders and trailer-towers to buy them. A regular car won't do the job, and a few enthusiasts don't make a huge dent in total energy consumption. It's another thing to surrender the car market to the Japanese and push offroad trucks as passenger vehicles to people who will never see a dirt road or trailer hitch in their lives.

If you're an offroad or SUV enthusiast you should be mad about them diluting the brand. Congratulations, you now drive a soccer-mom-mobile. Not feeling like such a rugged outdoorsman any more, are you?

Re:So this is what

[TemporalBeing]

Looks like you converted from km^2 to m^2 by multiplying by 1000 instead of 1000^2.

D'oh...forgot my squares...My bad on that one, but it only makes it worse...

Re:So this is what

[TemporalBeing]

Couldn't you give us some numbers to 50 or 60 significant figures, so we have a clearer idea? ;-)

I was just punching them into Windows Calc and using copy/paste to put the numbers in...sadly, too easy to put too many digits in.

Re:So this is what

[Chris Carollo]

You can't have it both ways though -- you claim that increasing mileage will hurt road maintenance revenue, but then also say that taxes for road maintenance from other buckets. If we become more mileage efficient, we'll just have to adjust the allocations from other sources, or make more roads toll based.

I like the free market just fine for making broad adjustments, but it pretty clearly breaks down in actual practice. The goverment is certainly not hands off -- they're subsidizing road construction maintenance from tax sources that have nothing to do with the usage of roads. They provide tax breaks to oil companies. Their fingers are everywhere throughout the process.

Generally speaking, an SUV driver affects you about as much as Jane Doe aborting a baby affects me.

Hopefully we can skirt the actual abortion issue now that you've brought it up, but that's hardly the case. Regardless of your stance on abortion, it's clear that SUV drivers have far more practical impact on my day than a random woman having an abortion. All of these are far more immediate, personal, quantifiable concerns than any I can think of from an abortion:

- Visibility concerns. I can't see over or through most SUVs, so even with HMRBLs I often can't tell if the car ahead of the SUV is breaking. More than once I've been following an SUV and had them swerve around a slow/stopped vehicle that I didn't know was there until the SUV was halfway through its swerve.

- Gas usage. Drives my prices up when there's a shortage. Pollutes my air, leading more high-pollution days, increasing the chances that my city is going to have state/federal money withheld, and/or speed limits lowered. Increases my country's involvement in unstable and dangerous parts of the world.

- Collision concerns. Much more likely to do serious damage to a vehicle it hits, especially those SUV with high bumpers that tend to go over my bumpers and are more likely to seriously impact my windshield and windows. They're much more likely to roll over, causing serious injury to their passengers. Both impact my safety, as well as overall insurance premiums.

I don't have any particular "moral" objection to SUVs. I just think they're not good for society as a whole, and that most people are being selfish and exhibit a "looking out for #1" kind of thinking that I find pretty distasteful, and all too common.

Re:So this is what

[AaronW]

It would be great if they enforced this. I imagine some cities could make a bundle just driving down a street and seeing all the SUVs parked on the side of the road that exceed the weight limit, or at least just sit and pull over all the oversized vehicles. Overweight SUVs cause a lot more damage to the roads than regular cars to the roads. I'd love to see them ticket those vehicles and put that money towards fixing and maintaining the roads in the area, many of which are in terrible shape, and some of which is easily attributed to overweight vehicles. I see intersections where there are ruts where the tires sit at some stoplights, for example.

At least the larger commercial vehicles are designed to better distribute the weight, having wider tires or just more wheels to help carry the load.

Re:So this is what

[xs650]

Nope, it makes it better by a factor of 1000. It would 0.062 Texas landmasses instead of 62 TLM.

Then there is the way you estimated fuel requirements for the country, but it's good enough for ballpark type guestimates.

Re:So this is what

[AaronW]

There is a side benefit to road maintenance with higher efficiency vehicles. The higher efficiency is often in part created by making the vehicle lighter, which saves wear and tear on the road. I see streets with signs stating a 6000 or 8000 lb weight limit and I know many vehicles exceed this. For example, a Hummer H2 weighs between 6400 and 8600 lbs and a Ford Excursion has a gross weight of 9200 lbs.

The smaller and more efficient cars weigh quite a bit less and thus result in a lot less wear and tear on the roads, for example, the smaller SUVs like the Escape weigh under 4000 lbs. Most passenger cars are well under 4000 lbs (though a 2007 Crown Victoria has a curb weight of 4157 lbs). This is still well under the larger SUVs.

Re:So this is what

[zippthorne]

Perhaps you should try using google as your calculator instead of windows calc. You can enter units, and it keeps track of them for you. And as an added bonus, if your units don't match up, it fails to give an answer at all (until you correct it of course).

For example,

52 acres * 200,000 in square meters = 4×10^10 square meters
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(678,051 km^2) = 62 millitexas
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(1,717,855 km^2) = 0.024 Alaskas
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(9,631,420 km^2) = 0.0043 United Stateses
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(3,166,414 km^2) = 0.013 Indias
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(17,075,400 km^2) = 0.0025 Russias

Or my favorite,
(52 acres * 200,000 )/(3,144 km^2) = 13 Rhode Islands.

Re:So this is what

[Anonymous Coward]

Admittedly you don't mention CO2 emissions, concentrating instead on CO and O3; just the same, carbon-neutral solutions such as this one offer great benefits when weighed against simply continuing to use gasoline and diesel. Since the grain products upon which the E. Coli feed absorb the CO2 which is then released later (at least in majority part) when the fuel is burned, the net effect is zero, or better (depending on the efficiency of the burn, transportation of the fuel, etc). For myself, if given the choice at similar cost between shale oil and products produced by E. Coli, I'd most certainly choose the E. Coli solution. At least that way we're not reintroducing to the atmosphere CO2 that had been absorbed hundreds of millions of years ago, but instead only that from the last several years.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

Okay, they don't collect enough money for government to maintain the roads we currently have. It's a moot point since we have government maintaining nearly all of our roads. Either taxes should increase or some sort of privatization program should occur. And then you'll just have a statutory monopoly - so you really can't win.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

It used to be worse - I used to really curse getting behind a Volvo. The new Taurus-looking ones must attract some slightly more daring people. :)

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

There is a side benefit to road maintenance with higher efficiency vehicles. The higher efficiency is often in part created by making the vehicle lighter, which saves wear and tear on the road.

No doubt it does, but unfortunately, we don't tax by mileage and gross weight not that we aren't far away from that being feasible. But right now, road use taxation is effectively based on gallons of gasoline used. And I think this is a pretty fair approximation of impact and use. If you compare a Prius owner driving 50 miles a day vs an Escalade owner driving the same, the Escalade owner is going to be paying out about 5x the taxes that the Prius owner is. We could probably come up with a complex formula using wheel base, gross weight, tire tread, and mileage and guestimate what the road impact is and assess a yearly tax, but it's probably simple and almost as accurate just to put a tax on each gallon of gasoline.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

I hate to break it to you, but most cowboy hats and cowboy boots aren't sold to real cowboys, and neither are most trucks for that matter. That rugged outdoorsman thing is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of SUVs. But I recoil against the holier than thou types that think they have a right to legally restrict me or any one else from purchasing a vehicle that is within one's financial means simply because they don't like them or think that soccer moms who own them are bad drivers. This isn't Communist Russia yet...although we are getting there inch by inch.

Re:So this is what

[cayenne8]

You know...for all the bashing you've done on different drivers, most of your venom seems to be at people that can afford expensive cars. I don't know if you are, but, it does make you sound a bit jealous.

I agree with you largely on some people that can't drive, but, really.....if someone can afford to buy and drive a very expensive car...why should it bother you or anyone else?

I dislike SUV's, but, I'm a sports car nut. I'd rather have a high performance vehicle...that I can use to get away from and avoid poor drivers. It also allows me to go fairly fast where safe to....the vehicle is designed for it (power, handling, braking). Every day driving to me, is a small new adventure. Sure makes the drive to/from work fun...

Re:So this is what

[--daz--]

SUV drivers are the dumbest drivers on the road

Hrm, in my experience, it's usually:

1. Pickup-trucks (bonus: They can't park either, and even when they can, they still prevent others from parking near them due to the width and length)
2. Prious/Hybrids and Old-beat up mini-cars/economy-cars that spew noxious fumes into the air (bonus: usually driven by a pretentious liberal claiming holier-than-thou because they drive economy, even though their spewing out the pollution of 3 suburbans combined)
3. SUVs
4. Dump-trucks (usually older ones, bonus: they also fling out deadly stones and boulders that terrorize the highways and have a sign that says 'stay back 200 ft.' that can only be read from 50ft away or less

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

I'm not an SUV hater! Re-read my message... I owned one!

Overall higher fuel efficiency means, on a per capita basis, declining maintenance revenue. So then you raise taxes to make up for the loss. I don't really see the problem.

The taxes are collected from other buckets. And that's my beef. I don't even have a car... why am I paying road taxes? I accept that I need to pay some degree of local taxes to maintain the local roads, but even that should be offset to a large degree by the tolls coming into town, the parking meters, charges on taxi medallions, etc.

I think a tax on the gross weight of the vehicle is not a bad idea. Of course, that is effectively what CAFE is, since there is a very good correlation between fuel efficiency and weight.

Again, I was not arguing the pros or cons of any vehicle type - simply expressing that taxes are currently too low to fund the roads that we have today, and so increasing vehicle taxes is probably the best way to accomplish that.

Re:So this is what

[cayenne8]

"Good point. Here in SC the max. tax on a new car is $300, and that is hit when you purchase a car over $15,000. If we were to make the upper limit 2% then people buying a $15,000 car will still pay $300 but people buying $60,000 would pay $1,200 which is fairer to me.",

Hey, you guys get off cheap. In NOLA, sales tax and all is about 9%.

Doesn't stop you from buying cars of any kind here.

:-)

Heck, if you buy outta state and register here...they get you with the USE tax, but, if you paid sales tax in another state, they'll usually give you credit of up to about 4% of that towards your 9% for LA.

Again...why do so many people bash people that can afford and like to buy nice $$$ cars? Can't you be happy for them rather than hateful and jealous? I've never understood why some asshats key cars.....I guess there are just a bunch of people out there that can't stand to see someone they perceive to be getting 'ahead' of them in life.

I'm seeing some car keying sentiment here for sure...

Re:So this is what

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had this exact dream for a few years...okay, so I was thinking something other than e.coli, but hell, they make methane, so why not hexane or octane?

Re:So this is what

[homer_ca]

Well, the holier than thou types have a ways to go because right now light trucks are subsidized over cars. They have a lower CAFE standard, they don't pay the gas guzzler tax, and until recently, we had the Hummer loophole where trucks over 6500lbs were fully deductible as a business expense. Let's get them competing on a level playing field before we rail about Communism and command economies.

I understand about the outdoors and cowboy image being a marketing tool, but those are the marketing tools of a cult brand with exclusivity. SUVs have gone way beyond that to being a mass-market item. Everybody and their mom has one.

Re:So this is what

[Bryan Ischo]

SUVs are more dangerous to other non-SUV vehicles on the road. Their bumpers are higher, their weight is greater, they carry their weight higher, and correspondingly they have worse performance characteristics in an emergency situation. Not to mention the visibility problems SUVs cause for other drivers. Some SUV drivers go so far as to put bars on the front of the front grill to maximize the damage their vehicle will do to another vehicle or pedestrian in an accident.

This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.

I think SUVs should be banned for these reasons. I agree about letting the market decide how fuel efficient a vehicle should be (and correspondingly, I agree that the artificially low gas prices in the USA should be eliminated to allow this mechanism to work properly), but I don't agree that the market should decide how safe a vehicle should be to others. We can and should legislate against unnecessarily dangerous vehicles.

However, I have taken a different approach to solving this problem in my own life. I left the USA and moved to New Zealand, where although there are some SUVs on the road (and to my disgust, I have even seen a Hummer or two around town), they are nowhere near the epidemic proportions they are in the USA. Also gas prices are much higher here (although they are still cheaper than European prices) which I think helps to mitigate this issue.

Re:So this is what

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Hawaii perhaps? :)

Re:So this is what

[rujholla]

Some SUV drivers go so far as to put bars on the front of the front grill to maximize the damage their vehicle will do to another vehicle or pedestrian in an accident.

I would like to think that most do it to MINIMIZE the damage to their vehicle rather than think that they are out there intentionally trying to do more damage to other people or their property.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

What??? I said the worst kind of driver was the beat up old Maxima "invincible" driver. If that's your idea of an expensive car, well....

I just hope that you aren't one of those guys weaving in and out of traffic - making everyone tap their brakes. That's what causes traffic jams if volume is sufficient. High performance cars are awesome and I can appreciate a nice 400HP beast as much as the next guy - hell, I built and raced a formula car in college. But people shouldn't drive like they are on a track when they are on the freeway. Twisty mountain roads are about the most fun you will have off-track without endangering people.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

I think SUVs should be banned for these reasons.

I think stupid people should be banned. They take up oxygen that could be put to better users. This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.

Interesting that you would say this, considering your being incredibly selfish and self-centered by trying to eliminate activity that you simply don't approve up but otherwise doesn't affect you. So, once you get SUVs banned, are you going to go after light trucks? And after light trucks, how about sedans that are more than 6 inches taller than the average econobox? What about folks that tint their windows and prevent you from being able to see through their windows. The argument that you use is nonsensical, because it can be pushed down and down until you're comparing skateboards to pedestrians.

Oh yeah, Bryan, I went to your web page. Some libertarian you are. I think you have a promising future as a commisar ahead of you. But I think you failed life as a libertarian.

Re:So this is what

[Bryan Ischo]

For what it's worth, your personal attacks mean nothing to me.

Re:So this is what

[homer_ca]

It's a prisoner's dilemma. An SUV feels safer psychologically, but it actually is safer in just one scenario: if you crash into a smaller car, at the expense of the car. In every other type of crash they're the same or more dangerous than a car. If everybody defects (in the context of the prisoner's dilemma), it leads to an arms race of ever escalating size. When two big SUVs crash into each other, they're no safer than before, and you're still stuck with poor braking and cornering compared to a car which doesn't help safety either.

Re:So this is what

[Belgarath52]

Sorry to butt in on this discussion, but this thread is obviously in need of internet etiquette guidance. Both of you appear to be very upset, apparently without understanding the long-standing tradition of saying the Magic Words:

"People like you are why Hitler came to power."

Using this phrase ensures your immediate victory and terminates the discussion. No need for thanks - I'll be here next time you need me.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

For what it's worth, your personal attacks mean nothing to me.

It's not worth much. Hey, shouldn't you be out burning books you don't like or pulling cigarettes out of the mouths of smokers? An allen wrench through those detestable hummers would show those disgusting flaunters of wealth too.

Re:So this is what

[bozojoe]

Instead we need a tax based on the number of wheels on the vehicle, or perhaps the size of the wheels. Motorcycles require high traffic skill levels, dont clog the roads, easy to park, oh and use less fuel. Next up trikes, and then the lowly 4 wheeled commuter car.

Re:So this is what

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure where you drive but I know a bunch of volvo drivers who would love to challenge you.

Re:So this is what

[redcane]

Most people who can afford expensive cars, can afford to buy efficient cars too. It bothers people who see it as a waste of human effort, that society has put that person in that car. They've earned/allocated themselves a larger than usual portion of what society produces, and then used it for a superficial or not so useful purpose. It's not so much jealousy as the "better than others" attitude that is incubated within people like this that puts people offside. BTW, even though there are many cars designed for going fairly fast, public roads are designed that way. Thats what race tracks are for.

Re:So this is what

[redcane]

You have to worry about gas guzzlers for the same reason you have to worry about anything that uses a lot of resources - the resources have to come from somewhere. Now it may be better for the US to get it domestically rather than from the middle east, but there is always an opportunity cost. Fuel production may compete with agricultural land used for food production, forcing the society as a whole to decide between more food and more fuel. At this point a rich person buying a gas guzzler, is likely depriving a poor person of food. Efficiency is never a bad thing, if you can have a car that performs exactly the same, but consumes less resources, thats a no disadvantage situation.

Re:So this is what

[redcane]

No you are completely right. Let the factories pour heavy metals into the rivers, it'll regulate itself when their customers die off! Better that than the business moves to China to wreak the same havoc there!

Re:So this is what

[redcane]

In reply to ** The difference is it can be seen that an SUV driver does affect others, whilst it's hard to show that Jane Doe aborting has an effect on others (I'm going to stay out of the argument of whether the unborn is one of the others for this post). Jane Doe would have gotten the same effect by not having sex leading to pregnancy, so the main ways she affects people is by making someone put up with a condom, or not have sex. The SUV driver makes the roads less safe (even just with vision blocking concerns), perhaps changes the climate, aside from road damage. I hope you can see how someone might feel the SUV driver is infringing upon others freedoms more than the aborter, even if you don't feel that way yourself.

Re:So this is what

[redcane]

It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market. Nice crack about the communists! 52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government, sure sounds like central planning to me!

Re:So this is what

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

I'm talking about taxes and tariffs. I didn't say anything about regulations.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

Agreed - I didn't mean to sound so inflammatory... sorry! An unskilled driver in a fast car is much more dangerous than an unskilled driver in a slow car, though, and that is the point I was trying to make. There is also a sense of entitlement that some people have in a fancy car that they just wouldn't have in a piece of crap. Together, these things make for a certain type of driver that is both aggressive and dangerous.

I did NOT mean to imply that every BMW driver fits this stereotype - I happen to like BMWs very much.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

It's obviously an unfair stereotype, but at least in the US, Volvos were for a long time marketed to affluent mothers concerned about safety. These are exactly the type of people who come to a complete stop in the highway merge lane. :) Most of the time if I was behind a slow Volvo, it was a wagon.

Re:So this is what

[mgbastard]

At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs. According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.

It may be more relevant to compare that with our current cropland use, to demonstrate how much of a change that would be. See USDA. We have somewhere around 230Million acres of cropland in use, domestically. So that works out to about 1/3 of our CURRENT harvested cropland use that would need to be diverted to fuel production, assuming all the previous calculations to be somewhat true.

So that is still feasible. Remembers, those figures are just current use. We can support the use of a lot more of US land than we currently do for agriculture

Some more recent data, apparently our government doesn't update this but every 5 years: USDA 2002 Ag Census. Those figures report that we have 938 Million acres currently available in farms. That census also reports we use almost 60 million acres just for grazing livestock. That's awfully close to the 73 million quoted previously. The sky is falling argument of we CANNOT afford the land use or water use fails.

Re:So this is what

[cayenne8]

"Most people who can afford expensive cars, can afford to buy efficient cars too. It bothers people who see it as a waste of human effort, that society has put that person in that car. They've earned/allocated themselves a larger than usual portion of what society produces, and then used it for a superficial or not so useful purpose. It's not so much jealousy as the "better than others" attitude that is incubated within people like this that puts people offside. BTW, even though there are many cars designed for going fairly fast, public roads are designed that way. Thats what race tracks are for."

You seem to think that I have some type of responsibility to the public in general if I make well in this world? While I do like to give money, and help other, I do not feel in any way OBLIGATED to help anyone else in this world aside from myself, my family and friends. I earn extra money for the sole reason of making myself and my life happier. I give to others when I feel like it, but, just living on said earth does not obligate you to do anything for the 'greater good'. I seriously doubt many people have the altruistic streak that you appear to have, or say others should have.

Having extra money is FOR superficial things....treats to yourself beyond the basic necessaties.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market.

You here this a lot, especially in reference to the price of gasoline. "The price is only low in the US because we ignore the externalities like environmental damage and CO2 emissions". The problem is, the market really doesn't have any way of pricing that information, does it? The extra taxes that Europeans are paying on their gas isn't going to fix those externalities, so the externalities are still there for Europeans, but the EU governments get a little tax money so they can do important stuff like publish new regulations mandating the minimum size of a banana. 52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government

RIF. 52.6% of Americans get some sort of financial assistance, not their entire financial means, from the government.

Nice crack about the communists!

Thanks. You'll notice I said we're getting their inch by inch. And we are. Between the folks that want to ban everything they don't like and the folks that think the government owes them something out of your pocket, there isn't much room for the folks that simply want to live their lives and be left alone.

Re:So this is what

[MightyYar]

I share your distaste for people who feel like they are owed a piece of your pie, but there is one problem with your argument as it applies to cars. You have a right to do whatever you want UNLESS it negatively impacts other people's same rights. In the case of cars, you do not have the right to buy a car that runs on coal and belches black smoke. This affects everyone's air and quality of life. The same argument can be made regarding CO2 emissions and global climate.

HOWEVER, as long as you are playing by the rules and buying a legal car, I don't really see what the issue is. If SUVs were really such a menace, they would have been banned outright. Relying on individuals to act in the best interest of the swarm is not the nature of our species, and people that get their panties in a bunch because not everyone acts altruistically all the time are not living in the real world. If you want to reduce CO2, then make it a law - don't furl your superior brow at people. It's obnoxious.

Re:So this is what

[Smidge204]

Land area isn't really a problem. Problems with agricultural methods usually get in the way long before arable land gets scarce. For example, does this fuel-crop farming require fertilizer? If so, where does it come from? Hopefully not industrially manufactured fertilizer... Perhaps the biggest hurdle that few consider is water for irrigation. Preservation of fresh water reserves is a fairly important topic today, and adding another 10 million acres or so isn't going to improve things.

Perhaps the best long-term solution would be to use or engineer plants that can tolerate salt well, and then you can use seawater for irrigation. Algaes and sea grasses are obviously well suited for this purpose. There is even optimistic calculations to use specially selected, high-oil algae for biodiesel production, which would go a long way towards our energy needs if they ever get that working.
=Smidge=

Re:So this is what

[zippthorne]

Oh, I like algal biodiesel. I'm not particularly an environmentalist, but it appeals to me. Quite a bit more than the ethanol that stereotypical dumb farmer is hawking for BP.

But my pet peeve is carelessness with units in calculations. Especially when there are tools like google calc available to take most of the thinking right out of the equation. Literally.

Re:So this is what

[edittard]

when you're driving around in a $65,000 cadillac escalade, you've already demonstrated you don't have any understanding of cost. charging $4.50 instead of $3.50 a gallon is not likely to affect you either.

You're joking - that's another 25 cents per mile!

Re:So this is what

[Hognoxious]

.....if someone can afford to buy and drive a very expensive car...why should it bother you or anyone else?

It'd bother me if I was the person getting shot at to provide the oil for it.

Re:So this is what

[croddy]

No, of course you should not feel obligated to help others.

You should do it because you know it's the right thing to do.

Re:So this is what

[Xonstantine]

Sorry, no. By Jane Doe aborting a baby, she's depriving me and the state of a future tax payer. Manifestly, that's about as substantive as your claim that the SUV driver makes it less safe for everyone else. The point about abortion isn't about tax payers, and the point about SUVs isn't about safety. It's about control. And me telling a woman she can't have an abortion is no different than you telling me I can't own and drive an SUV. The woman wanting the abortion and the would be SUV owner will both tell you it's none of your damn business. An SUV driver doesn't infringe on your freedom, and you're an idiot if you think he does. Does he stop you from voting? Does he stop your freedom of expression? Your freedom of association? Does the SUV owner prevent you from buying a green-friendly car? Oh I get it, he infringes on your freedom from being disgusted by wasteful SUV owners. For some reason, I don't think that's one of those Constitutionally protected rights.

Renewable Bio-petrol...

[russlar]

...anybody else see the irony?

Re:Renewable Bio-petrol...

[JosefAssad]

...anybody else see the irony?

Yes.

Re:Renewable Bio-petrol...

[Anonymous Coward]

this reminds me of this legendary quote from Mad Max 3:
- bullshit !
- no !! pig shit !

Re:Renewable Bio-petrol...

[mikael]

Right next to the coppery and the nickely.

"Echeria Coli"? What the hell is that?

[g0at]

Oh, right, Zonk is illiterate (the hallmark of a model "editor"). I guess he really means "Escherichia Coli".

-ben

Questions of feedstock

[Control Group]

Since the summary doesn't mention it, I'll do a bit of karma-whoring and answer the obvious question: they're using sugar, derived from corn, as a food source for the bacteria. They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints. The goal is to replace the use of sugar with cellulosic material.

That out of the way, this is obviously promising work. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons. Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better, but I don't think the development of such a technology will be hindered by making it feasible to extend the use of hydrocarbons (I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."). A gap technology that staved off the critical problems of hydrocarbon dependence would give us breathing room to pursue work on other technologies.

After all, while nothing may focus the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, of the focused mind can't avoid the hanging, it doesn't matter.

All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean. There's (obviously) far more oceanic surface area than arable land area; using that would completely solve the problem of competing with food crops.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[mwvdlee]

But feedstock on the ocean surface might be difficult to harvest :)

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Hoi Polloi]

This would be a good way of using atmospheric carbon instead of fossil carbon that has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years.

Ocean farming is an interesting idea. If the bacteria could be in some form where their remains sank to the ocean floor when they died it would also provide a carbon sink mechanism for removing excess CO2.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Spudtrooper]

While this solves the problem with using non-renewable petroleum, we'd still be burning gasoline and pumping out CO2...

Re:Questions of feedstock

[jonnythan]

True, but that doesn't matter one bit if the CO2 in the gasoline came from biomass.

For instance, if they feed the bacteria corn syrup, the carbon that will go into the gasoline comes from the CO2 absorbed by the corn from the atmosphere.

It's OK to put CO2 into the atmosphere as long as it came from the atmosphere to begin with. That's why ethanol is "cleaner" than gasoline - it's carbon neutral. Compare this with releasing as CO2 the carbon that has been stored in oil and coal reserves for millions of years.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[inviolet]

This would be a good way of using atmospheric carbon instead of fossil carbon that has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years.

Humans are Mother Nature's way of getting her carbon out of the ground and back into circulation.

/kidding
//sort of

Re:Questions of feedstock

[LWATCDR]

I doubt that they would directly produce gasoline but yes I feel that the making of hydrocarbons in the while could be a very bad thing. What if these did get into the wild and started trashing food fresh water supplies.
I guess the next step would be to make an algae that could do the same thing.
As long as they didn't get loose in the environment it could be a good thing. If they did it could be very bad.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Bohnanza]

It would seem to me better if the modified organism was a form of photosynthetic algae instead of bacteria. This would pretty much solve the "feedstock" problem, although I assume there would still be some need for "fertilizer".

Re:Questions of feedstock

[russotto]

Since the summary doesn't mention it, I'll do a bit of karma-whoring and answer the obvious question: they're using sugar, derived from corn, as a food source for the bacteria. They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints. The goal is to replace the use of sugar with cellulosic material.

Yeah, so aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? Efficiently converting cellulose to sugar is one of the big problems in biofuels; converting sugar to fuels is relatively easy. It's nice to get gasoline instead of alcohol, but it doesn't solve the fundamental issues.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Control Group]

I wasn't thinking of putting the bacteria itself in the ocean - though that might be a strategy worth pursuing; I don't know - but rather, growing plant (algae?) feedstock to be harvested and pumped into the centralized bacterial conversion facility.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Jasin Natael]

Hey, if it's all being bioengineered, why not make migratory plants? In the winter, they all swim in to shore to be harvested. Sky's the limit, right? Or perhaps we just engineer them to clump into miles-wide clusters, and throw a hook or two in to tow the whole thing to shore.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[IConrad01]

All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean.

Got you one better. Ever heard of skyscraper farms? Dubai is in the process of building one "from scratch" -- they plan to have it operating by the end of next year, and its capital investors expect to make a profit from it within 15 years. I figure, if strawberry farmers can use greenhouses to grow on one acre what they otherwise could have on 30, then yes -- we have a great deal of "compaction" (it's fun to neologize -- or at least neologize usages) left to work with in terms of food production. Besides -- why bother with the sea floor when you could just use algae or kelp? Turn the Sargasso sea into one massive petroleum resource. (Just keep re'seeding' it...)

Re:Questions of feedstock

[eth1]

I'm not so sure that this method would result in a net increase in atmospheric carbon. If, as you state, they're aiming to use "cellulosic material" to feed the bacteria, where is that going to come from? Some sort of plant, probably. So the carbon that's released into the atmosphere comes from a plant, which, in turn, got it from the atmosphere. The carbon release is only an issue when it's coming from under the ground and being burned, not when it's just being cycled through.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[BrokenHalo]

Hey, if it's all being bioengineered, why not make migratory plants?

1. Migratory plants are usually algae, and
2. Yes, we can do that (i.e. tweak algal DNA to produce specific molecules), but...
3. It's a lot harder to insert useful sequences into the DNA of a eukaryotic (i.e. plant, fungal or animal) cell than it is to do the same with a prokaryotic (bacterial) cell. E. coli tends to be the whipping-boy of molecular biologists since its biochemistry is so well-researched, so it is the obvious choice for this job.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Control Group]

Yes - though I obviously didn't say it clearly enough, that's exactly what I meant. This development is good precisely because it avoids the problem of burning buried petroleum. The carbon released is carbon that was fixed in the short term carbon cycle.

Insofar as this can be scaled out to real production, it addresses both problems with burning gasoline: the finite supply of petroleum, as well as the introduction of "new" carbon to the atmosphere.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Anonymous Coward]

"I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones.""

Considering the ongoing popularity of brick houses, granite countertops and marble floors, I would contend the stone age has not ended, it's just gone high-end. Kind of like vinyl LP records.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Azghoul]

Ummm..... "feedstock"?

Noone's talking about growing the bacteria that make the damn gasoline in the ocean, foolio.

"Even idiots get mod points", indeed.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Afell001]

If I remember my biology correctly, in addition to several bacteria that can break cellulose into less complex sugars, there is the entire fungal kingdom that has made it their existence to break down any number of plant and animal material (to include cellulose, I'm sure) and to do it efficiently (possibly more efficient than bacteria).

We know how to grow and culture fungus. We know how to grow and culture e. coli. Essentially, what we are left with is a brewing process that feeds wood pulp, straw, recycled paper, livestock waste, etc., on one end, and outputs refined gasoline on the other. And I'm sure the biomass that is generated besides the gasoline will find some productive use, even if all it does is become fertilizer (after it has been irradiated to keep any GM fungi or bacteria from getting into the wild).

I'm sure if someone were to market their gasoline as "green" or "organic", there would be a segment of the population willing to pay a premium to make use of it. The same segment of the population that buys organic milk, organic produce, and drives their biodiesel Jetta or hybrid Prius to their Sierra Club meetings.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[E 99]

For instance, if they feed the bacteria corn syrup, the carbon that will go into the gasoline comes from the CO2 absorbed by the corn from the atmosphere.

It's OK to put CO2 into the atmosphere as long as it came from the atmosphere to begin with. That's why ethanol is "cleaner" than gasoline - it's carbon neutral. Compare this with releasing as CO2 the carbon that has been stored in oil and coal reserves for millions of years.

So carbon-neutral seems like a bad idea -- as our total capacity for food production is limited to the carbon content of the atmosphere, if we're storing some of that carbon as fuel, we should replace at least that much of it from elsewhere. Anyway, by your reasoning, isn't burning fossil fuels "carbon neutral" as well, over the long term, as that carbon content originally came from the atmosphere as well?

Re:Questions of feedstock

[skwang]

Anyway, by your reasoning, isn't burning fossil fuels "carbon neutral" as well, over the long term, as that carbon content originally came from the atmosphere as well?

I realize you are asking a rhetorical question to make another point, but to address it anyway: the difference is that the carbon content of fossil fuels was "captured" from the atmosphere over millions of years. While humans have been burning said fuel in quantity for the last 200 years or so, more so today than in the past. So while it is correct to say that we are returning the carbon in coal/oil/gas back to the atmosphere, the problem is that we are dumping it back all at once.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[maz2331]

AND... it's important to realize that the carbon released from biomass fuels would end up in the atmosphere anyway in the form of methane and CO2 as the biomass degrades naturally. Thus it is a net zero emission, all you're doing is harnessing this currently wasted carbon to do useful work.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[jonnythan]

Carbon neutral is not a bad idea. It's the best idea.

Growing food uses an incredibly small percentage of the atmosphere's carbon. That's not the limiting factor.

We're not "storing some of that carbon as fuel." It's getting fixed by living organisms, converted into fuel, and then burned to release the carbon back into the atmosphere. It's a very fast cycle to go from atmosphere -> plant -> fuel -> atmosphere.

This is in opposition to fossil fuels. The carbon in the massive amounts of fossil fuel we burn every day has been out of the atmosphere for millions of years. It's been slowly stored away by the planet. Now we're blasting through it all, releasing all of that stored CO2 all at once on an unprecedented scale. We are measurably and significantly increasing the levels of carbon in our atmosphere every day.

Using a carbon neutral fuel source (biomass) does not increase the level of carbon in our atmosphere. It very temporarily stores it as biomass, then fuel, then immediately gets released.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Anonymous Coward]

our total capacity for food production is limited to the carbon content of the atmosphere Wrong. Our total capacity for food production is mostly limited by freshwater supplies, fixed nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (other factors can contribute too though).

When was the last time you ever heard of a plant growing poorly because it had a shortage of CO2? Think man, THINK!

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Ian Bicking]

What, if we didn't grow corn the fields would be no-CO2-absorbing wastelands? http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2007/02/12/biofuel-is -not-carbon-neutral/

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Anonymous Coward]

All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean. There's (obviously) far more oceanic surface area than arable land area; using that would completely solve the problem of competing with food crops.

If you think algae blooms are bad, wait until you see vast colonies of genetically modified bacteria releasing GASOLINE into our fisheries. That'll be really great for the fish! (For that matter, given that E. Coli like to live in our intestinal tracts, what's to kepe the modified ones from getting free and poisoning us from there?)

Re:Questions of feedstock

[GWBasic]

That out of the way, this is obviously promising work. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons. Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better, but I don't think the development of such a technology will be hindered by making it feasible to extend the use of hydrocarbons (I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."). A gap technology that staved off the critical problems of hydrocarbon dependence would give us breathing room to pursue work on other technologies.

Besides, it's economically unfeasable to immediatly throw away every single petroleum-based internal combusion engine. A technology like this can (hopefully) significantly reduce our carbon emmissions without changing our lifestyles.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[An Onerous Coward]

If the corn you're turning into ethanol requires pesticides and fertilizers, the picture becomes much messier, because both are derived from petroleum products.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[Anonymous Coward]

...this is obviously promising work.

Except that laboratory produced E. Coli variants have demonstrated a remarkable capability for getting out into the wild, where some exhibit some really nasty and sometimes fatal effects on their new hosts. A small factory of a few acres of petroleum producing E. Coli will be harder to manage safely than a descendant of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Full scale production will assure that there will be die-offs from industrial accidents.

There is no promise here but death through dehydration by diarrhea.

People need to realize that genetic engineering isn't something done on just an isolated strain of bug or corn. The natural container for genetic material is the entire ecosphere to which it might eventually migrate. This whole bit about "species", "genus", and even "phyllum" and "kingdom" is an abstract categorization we impose on the world to make it simple enough to talk about, but genes are not obligated to recognize the boundaries we have drawn, and they won't. We aren't talking about something like chemistry's periodic table, where there are nice sharp boundaries and our concepts are neatly aligned with what is really going on. We are talking about the messiness of life, where one guy's excrement is another's dinner and the tails of neighboring bell-shaped curves intertwine and sometimes even flow under the bellies of the neighbor curves.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[rtb61]

The other problem is, do you really want highly flammable bacteria of algae growing in the wild (depending upon the nature of stored molecules and possible end of life cycle accumulation, flammable toxic sea foam accumulating and drying on beaches). I would think any modified bacteria of algae of this nature would be engineered so that it specifically can't survive in the wild.

Re:Questions of feedstock

[cohort]

Seattle's Green Lake has a problem with Eurasian water milfoil - and has for quite some time. They use a 'lake mower' to help deal with the issue, carting off many, many tons of plant matter monthly.

If you look closely at this, you can see a lake mower at work: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.6,-122.316667&sp n=0.1,0.1&t=k&q=47.6,-122.316667 (of course, you can't see it very well, but it's the only shot I can find.) (the green stuff is an algae bloom, not the plants)

There are a great many lakes with this problem, why not use it to our advantage?

Symptoms of infection include:

[AltGrendel]

1) High fever

2) General listlessness.

3) Urinating gasoline.

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[Hoi Polloi]

Hundreds of frat brothers discover the party entertainment potential of lighting their urine streams on fire.

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) High fever
2) General listlessness.
3) Urinating gasoline. So that why it burns when I pee!

Thanks, Geritol.

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[freg]

3) Urinating gasoline.

Doctors advice:

1. take asprin

2. don't drive

3. avoid the electric fence

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[ThosLives]

Oi, this gives new meaning to the already troubled phrase "Freak gasoline fight accident."

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[MadCow42]

There is a new meaning to "I have a burning sensation when I pee..."

MadCow

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[Obsi]

People won't need rest stops anymore! Gotta go? Go in your tank!

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[russlar]

suddenly burning something down and peeing on its ashes takes on a whole new meaning

Re:Symptoms of infection include:

[CaptainCarrot]

I think you've just discovered an entirely new method of performing circumcision.

Wonder what would happen ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

... if that strain of genetically fudged bacteria escapes into the wild and undergoes some more unexpected mutations ... And should this thing meet the wild grass that has gained immunity from Round UP by cross fertilization between Roundup-Ready-Corn... That would be quite interesting, to put it mildly.

Re:Wonder what would happen ...

[Hoi Polloi]

I wouldn't mind if it mutated to break down plastics like polyethylene. Preferably under special conditions, like exposure to UV light or salt water so plastics in storage didn't break down. The millions of water bottles cluttering our land and water alone will be with us for thousands of years.

Re:Wonder what would happen ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing would happen at all. The modifications made to these bacteria put them at a huge selective disadvantage compared to anything that can utilise nutrients properly; they wouldn't last five minutes in the wild. I *think* bacteria are immune to Roundup anyway; Roundup inhibits amino acid synthesis pathways which are non-issues to things that small and that different in their biochemistry

Re:Wonder what would happen ...

[spun]

Mmmm, genetic fudge...

Re:Wonder what would happen ...

[zentinal]

I think the parent was envisioning millions of hectares of wild grasses, as flammable as gasoline...

Grasses that biodegrade plastic, good.

Gasoline wildfires the size of Kansas, not so good.

Re:Wonder what would happen ...

[wikdwarlock]

Aha! 140Mandak262Jamuna is really Michael Crichton.

Dupe!

[Harmonious Botch]

I already produce gas from bacteria. Move on, nothing new here.

Re:Dupe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us know when you can get a car to run on your gas.

Just... no videos or images showing how you refuel, please.

Curious...

[Lumpy]

So how do they get past the fact that e.Coli dies in gasoline? how did they change the bug to have a higher tolerance to their new unnatural excretions?

If you can keep the bugs alive in the media and the desired product then your output will be far higher than when the bugs end up killing themselves quickly.

Re:Curious...

[SuperBanana]

So how do they get past the fact that e.Coli dies in gasoline? how did they change the bug to have a higher tolerance to their new unnatural excretions?

Science.

Re:Curious...

[ArcadeX]

I would imagine that the e.Coli can survive surrounded by the simple hyrdocarbons, the bacteria doesn't produce gasoline, with all it's addatives and refinements.

Re:Curious...

[everphilski]

ah, but the laws of science be a harsh mistress -Bender

Re:Curious...

[shellacked]

You're assuming this is some type of batch process where the output is gasoline. It would likely be a continuous reactor where the feed stream is food for the e-coli and the outlet is enriched in the gasoline (or diesel) precursor which would have to be distilled and purified.

Re:Curious...

[SpaceLemur]

Unless there were some sort of emulsification, the hydrocarbons would glob together and float to the surface. This is of course assuming the bacteria are being grown in some sort of aqueous environment.

Re:Curious...

[mhh5]

the article doesn't say the "excretions" are gasoline... the excretions appear to be "fatty acids" -- which can be converted into gasoline. But in any case, they'll have to find ways to separate the bacteria from the excretions.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't this be "Escherichia" coli?
Attack of the spelling police...

Re:E d i t o r s

[!ramirez]

Escherichia coli.

At least if you're going to correct someone, correct them [b][i]correctly[/b][/i].

name

[Scholasticus]

I thought it was Escherichia coli.

Re:name

[Spy der Mann]

I thought it was Escherichia coli.

Gesundheit!

Re:name

[JDevers]

It is. I think it is funny that no other poster pointed that out when M.C. Escher is such a common reference here and yet an organism named after him is blatantly misspelled in the title of a submission...

Re:name

[expatriot]

TFA said E. Coli
Not Escher, from Wikipedia:
Escherichia coli (IPA: [..kj ko.la]) (E. coli), is one of many species of bacteria living in the lower intestines of mammals, known as gut flora. When located in the large intestine, it actually assists with waste processing, vitamin K production, and food absorption. Discovered in 1885 by Theodor Escherich, a German pediatrician and bacteriologist,
I'm beginning to wonder if this really a geek site. Especially after the thread above trying to figure out how to divide.

Re:E d i t o r s

[utopianfiat]

protip: it's not that either.

"nefarious E.Coli"

[circletimessquare]

actually, every person on the planet has e coli in his or her gut, and in fact, the bacteria is symbiotic with us, not a parasite. that is, without it, we would have trouble digesting, absorbing food, and be vitamin K deficient

however, we often hear e coli in the news in connection with lethal outbreaks, and this is due to another strain of e coli getting into our guts, usually one or another that produces toxins, including some that shut down the kidneys permanently

yes, these strains are ugly, but the scientific truth is that e coli is not nefarious, and in fact is almost as vital to us being human as our own cells

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[PJ1216]

I haven't read the article yet, but maybe they're referring to the dangerous strain, in which case, they'd be correct in stating "nefarious E.Coli." Either way, I applaud any use of the word "nefarious." It sounds really cool.

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[Anonymous Coward]

random fun fact: only about 10% of the DNA in your body is human

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[anoopsinha]

Like the parent poster says, Escherichia coli is part of our gut flora... but that does not mean that it does not cause diseases in humans.

It is the COMMONEST cause of urinary tract infections. It can cause various forms of diarrhoeal diseases, including traveler's diarrhoea and haemorrhagic diarrhoea. It easily acquires resistance to multiple antibiotics in the hospital environment... and is a very common agent in hospital acquired infections. Treating an infection caused by multi-drug resistant E. coli is a HUGE pain in the butt (I speak from experience).

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[Anonymous Coward]

only about 10% of the DNA in your body is human

even less if you're a porn actress

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[Robert Dobalina]

"It is the COMMONEST cause of urinary tract infections." Talk about burning... !

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[WindBourne]

Try getting along without it. You will starve to death, or be on a VERY unique diet.

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[TheLink]

Evidence please?

Re:"nefarious E.Coli"

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

Actually, not every person on the planet has e. coli in his or her gut: healthy newborn babies are totally sterile inside until they've picked up some intestinal flora from the external environment.

Spelling Error

[nandu_prahlad]

Sorry for being a grammar nazi guys, but it's spelt "Escherichia coli". It's one of the most common bacteria.

and "nefarious"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"nefarious"? That's no way to talk about your life partner! You may prefer not to think about what's going on in your tract, but the truth is we're all full of shit. And our coliform friends are helping us out with our situation. And now, they're giving us gas.

Re:and "nefarious"?

[ncc74656]

the truth is we're all full of shit. And our coliform friends are helping us out with our situation. And now, they're giving us gas.

You say that like they haven't been doing that all along.

Re:Braindead editors

[g0at]

it's spelled: Escheria coli

I thought it was Escherichia coli.

-b

thinking

[thatskinnyguy]

1. How are they going to produce this on a massive scale?

2. How is this going to be economical?

3. What does OSHAA and the California Board of Health have to say about people working with e. Coli on a massive scale?

4. People should quit whining over spelling errors. Nobody is perfect.

Re:thinking

[SomeGuyTyping]

People should quit whining over logical errors. Nobody is perfect.

Re:thinking

[An Onerous Coward]

Most E. coli is fine. It lives happily in our gut, and provides us with goods and services. But there is a particularly acid-resistant strain called Escherichia coli O157:H7 that is found in the guts of grain-fed cattle. Feeding the cows grain (grasses are their natural food, not grain) raises the acidity in their stomachs, making the deadly strain much more prevalent.

The ideal solution would be to feed cows grass, which would basically eliminate 73,000 cases of food poisoning every year, while being more humane to the cows themselves. But the meat industry says this is too expensive. Another alternative would be to feed them grass just for the last couple of days before slaughter. Again, the meat industry argues it's too expensive.

Now their filth is ending up downstream, in other agricultural products like peanut butter and spinach.

But that's just my tangential why-can't-everyone-just-be-vegetarian rant. The point was that the plant probably won't be using the deadly strain of E. coli.

Re:thinking

[thatskinnyguy]

Yeah but how do they breed it in the first place? I just don't see this as being economically viable.

Re:thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... I grow several gallons of E. coli a week in big glass flasks in a biotech lab. We use the bugs to make proteins. It's non-dangerous. OK, I wouldn't drink the culture, but it's not as if we have to use moon suits or anything. Frankly it's on a par with anything that invovles growing yeast on a commercial scale.

Don't malign the E. Coli

[arkham6]

It always annoys me when people say E. Coli is a dangerous bacteria. ONE strand of the bacteria is dangerous, but in fact another strand is needed by humans to live. We have billions of them in our large intestines, processing waste and making vitamin K. If we did not have the e. coli inside us, we would die from dehydration.

Re:Don't malign the E. Coli

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only do I have E. Coli in my gut, but they are already producing gas!

Re:Don't malign the E. Coli

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, the strain that is in the body all the time can become dangerous. The dangerous strain is not actually a different one than what occurs naturally inside the human body, it is just that under certain conditions e. coli changes the way it expresses certain genes and when that happens it becomes hazardous to the host (usually this change occurs when e. coli is outside the body). It has been a long time since I took the biology class where this was discussed so my explanation will leave something to be desired.

Re:Don't malign the E. Coli

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be painful living in a world where words can mean more than one thing. Your pedantic heart must break at least two or three times a day. I realize that context is a luxury few can afford, and that to purposefully misconstrue is something we all love to do.

I agree wholeheartedly, when referring to E. Coli it is imperative that in each and every instance we also append the specific strain to which we are referring, context cannot, and must not suffice.

This Just In!!!!!

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

E. Coli that may be in your digestive system produces GAS!!!!

Re:Braindead editors

[cohomology]

Also, Escheria coli is not "nefarious." It is usually
benign, and makes up a lot of the volume of your gut.
Bacteria are always present in healthy adults, and the
common varieties protect you from more dangerous stuff.

Nefarious?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently nefarious about Escherichia coli . In fact, the ones that live in your gut are very useful. Only certain *strains* of E. coli are dangerous, and those are the ones that make the news when people are exposed to them, unlike the huge numbers of E. coli (and other bacterial species) happily living inside you and contributing to your health.

Re:Nefarious?

[weak*]

Nefarious implies intent. It means evil. E. coli (you capitalize phylum, class, order, family and genus, but not species) is not sentient, therefore not evil. Lighten the fuck up, Socrates.

Call me a troll... You're a troll.

like any gasoline replacement

[circletimessquare]

you have to talk about "is it cheaper than digging energy out of the ground"

of course that is getting more and more expensive, but most schemes for the replacement of gasoline are still orders of nagitude more expensive such that they aren't at the economic break even point on replacing gasoline

this e coli step is of course a wonderful development, but you have to ask what the cost of the stuff is that the e coli is eating to process into gasoline: not cheaper than digging gas out of the ground

the ideal would be a creature, probably a bioengineered algae, that produces octane after exposure to sunlight. the e coli is merely a processing step on a larger chain of energy. sich a hypothetical algae would be the whole process in one little cell

something that takes sunlight and produces it directly into gasoline, that would be the ultimate killer app of our time

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

I think our current scheme for getting gasoline will hold out for a good long while. As long as wee keep the population living over the crude stores in our service, by keeping them disarmed, we will prevail.

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[roman_mir]

probably a bioengineered algae, that produces octane after exposure to sunlight. - Of-course this is great for producing fuel, but beware, once (not if but when) this kind of thing breaks loose and populates the seas and the oceans with itself by outcompeting the normal algae (the kind that produces Oxygen,) this planet is fucked.

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[DeadChobi]

Well it would be cool and all for algae to produce a hydrocarbon using the energy from sunlight, but you're missing the fact that you'd have to input chemicals into the process, making it essentially a light-powered version of the E. Coli. Either that, or there's something unsaid that I'm missing. It seems like you're forgetting conservation of mass.

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[Jeff DeMaagd]

you have to talk about "is it cheaper than digging energy out of the ground"

That's not the only cost, though that's the only one people see. This cycle might be carbon-neutral, for those with greenhouse considerations. Then there's the cost of going to war once a decade or so over energy, the cost in lives and money for such activities, and this also might mean less money to those that would use it to fund terrorist activities.

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[Digital Vomit]

but most schemes for the replacement of gasoline are still orders of nagitude more expensive

Is that a comparison of the different intensities that your wife has to nag you to do something before you actually get up and do it?

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[ylla24601]

Well, hopefully if they can get this to work with cellulose, we wouldn't then have to worry about the cost of producing sugar as a foodsource, which may nonetheless be less expensive than digging for oil, and it would get us closer to true "carbon neutrality (no net CO2 emission)."

And you're right about the brilliance of the photosynthetic solution (bacteria who fix carbon inthe form of gaseous CO2 using energy from the sun)...as you know that was invented once before in our ancient primordial soup. Our ancestor bacterium, clever little bug, produced a poisonous oxygen species that changed the course of evolution and selected for those bacteria who could cope with this newly abundant molecule in the atmosphere via aerobic respiration...and wouldn't it be funny if we actually made that next bacterium...? Maybe some life will emerge that can cope with a high octane atmosphere...but it's not us!

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[Control Group]

of course that is getting more and more expensive, but most schemes for the replacement of gasoline are still orders of nagitude more expensive such that they aren't at the economic break even point on replacing gasoline

True, but that's a self-solving problem. As petroleum becomes arbitrarily scarce, the marginal cost of the next barrel becomes arbitrarily high. Assuming that an alternative process exists that does not itself depend on the price of petroleum, at some point break-even will be reached, and the alternative becomes economically attractive.

The problems, of course, are

A) if the price of oil rises too fast, the economy will not have time to adjust. We very much depend on relatively cheap energy from petroleum. If the price of oil rises steadily but slowly (below some unknown rate threshold), the economy will simply adapt to the new costs. Overall productivity will drop, but it won't be catastrophic. Above that threshold, disaster ensues*.

B) the cost of introducing "new" carbon to the atmosphere is not factored into the measured economic cost of a barrel of oil. Which means economic break-even for the alternative fuel doesn't take into account whether or not it's a good idea from a carbon-neutral perspective.

this e coli step is of course a wonderful development, but you have to ask what the cost of the stuff is that the e coli is eating to process into gasoline: not cheaper than digging gas out of the ground

the ideal would be a creature, probably a bioengineered algae, that produces octane after exposure to sunlight. the e coli is merely a processing step on a larger chain of energy. sich a hypothetical algae would be the whole process in one little cell

Absolutely. In my mind, developments like this E. coli tech are strictly gap technologies, not solutions in themselves. They buy us time - potentially a lot of it - to find yet more efficient methods of converting sunlight into kinetic/electrical/thermal energy.

If we can get past the externalities of petroleum dependence, the market really will work towards providing more efficient (i.e., cheaper) energy conversion chains. The problem now is, as you say, petroleum is cheap in all the ways that we directly measure.

*That is, an increase of one percent a year is absorbable. An increase to infinity over a day (i.e., "oh noes, we're out of teh oilz!") would be a disaster. Somewhere between those extremes is the threshold. More accurately, probably, a range of such thresholds corresponding to noticeable but minor effects all the way through flat-out the end of civilization as we know it.

Re:like any gasoline replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

There's something you're missing, but I'm not sure what and am too lazy to guess. Because it's being done. Personally, I think it's WAY cooler than gasoline from sugar. MIT had a demonstration unit scrubbing exhaust from a small powerplant on campus, and growing up algae. They then could squeeze the algae for oil.

See: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18138/

Re:E d i t o r s

[LiquidCoooled]

if your going to use formatting tags, use them Correctly .

Dang! Just in time to REALLY show off my strength.

[Anonymous Coward]

With all those tainted foods I had a few months ago in some dodgy restaurants, I can now truly say that I have enough strength to move a car!

Hooray! Free energy at last!

[ydra2]

I'm going to post this exact same text on every article about fuel cells, batteries, bio-fuels, wind power, solar cells, wave energy, geothermal, nuclear, tidal action, and all the other silly articles about imminent energy breakthroughs that never seem to amount to anything substantial in any amount of time. This one won't either.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Shades of Neal Stephenson's Zodiac....

[phil-trick]

Hmm,

Creepy sounding to me.

Reminds me of the Chlorine producing bacteria in Zodiac..

Flatulence, not urination.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Hundreds of frat brothers discover the party entertainment potential of lighting their urine streams on fire.

E Coli live in the bowels, not in the kidneys or the bladder.

Think lighting farts with a match.

Re:Flatulence, not urination.

[Hoi Polloi]

I know, I was playing off of the parent comment "3) Urinating gasoline"

Not sure I'd want to poop fireballs either though.

Net energy return

[minerat]

The real question is what is the net return on energy? Is it greater than gasoline in its current state?

The problem with many alternative hydrocarbon sources is that the amount of energy required as input is to get a gallon of gasoline is greater than the energy required to extract oil and refine it into gasoline today. We're going to be in a severe energy shortage when we run low on oil to extract - we're used to cheap, high density energy in the form of oil and gas. We won't have the excess energy to throw into making gasoline with bacteria unless it's a lesser or equivalent cost to what it is today (and can be scaled up without competing with food for arable land). The only way out of the mess of the pending energy crash is fusion or extreme conservation starting now. All of this talk of replacing gasoline or making it carbon neutral is really beside the point.

Re:Net energy return

[aukset]

All of this talk of replacing gasoline or making it carbon neutral is really beside the point.

Thats a pretty silly thing to say. How long do you think society could continue to function without energy for transportation? Our entire economic infrastructure relies heavily on fossil fuels. Transporting goods requires portable energy. Transporting people to and from their place of employment requires portable energy. Its very irresponsible to claim that one issue is greater than the other. They are basically the same issue - we need not just energy but portable energy. Even if it is more expensive and is a net loss, without it we are even more screwed.

You claim the real question is what is the net return on energy. I claim that that is only one question among many. How about, how does production scale? Can this method, on its own or in combination with other methods, produce enough fuel for our needs? Because if not, the cost or net energy of the process is irrelevant.

Re:Net energy return

[rcs1000]

OK. I'm about to begin my energy rant.

Oil (and its byproducts: kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc) is one way of converting cheminal potential energy into energy that does actual work. The process of breaking down hydrocarbons creates heat, which through either the internal combusition engine, or turbines, gives us movemement or electrical energy.

Right now, and indeed for the past 30-odd years, oil has been far from the cheapest way of generating energy. There are next to no oil fired power plants in the world. And even when oil was sub-$20 a few years ago (and the consensus was for it to stay that way for ever... remember The Economist headline "Drowning in Oil"?) no-one was rushing to build them.

If you want to generate energy in a fixed place, you will use nuclear, coal or gas. (And in places where emissions are taxed heavily, the sun shines brightly, or the wind is strong and reliable, you might consider alternative energy sources.)

In the last 30 years we have weaned ourselves off oil as our primary source of electrical power. What we have not done is weaned ourselves off oil as our transport fuel, despite the fact that a calorie of energy generated by a nuclear fission plant is undoubtedly cheaper than one generated by burning gasoline.

This is because energy storage, infrastrcture and transport are the real problems. Generating calorific energy with oil is not the problem, having it power your SUV is. Gasolene is a very concentrated source of calories, and is one with an established distribution channel. The only reason we are looking at these strange ways of generating synthetic gasolene is because of its properties as a store of power, and because of our existing infrasture.

In the long run, some form of battery will be needed, to take the clean generated electricity from nuclear, wind, and the sun and allow us to drive Hummers.

Re:Net energy return

[minerat]

It isn't irresponsible because the overall energy debt comes first.

We'll have a massive energy shortfall without fossil energy (currently comprises about 85% of our total energy consumption in the US). We're not going to be able to create alternative potable sources because we simply won't have enough power to do so - existing biofuel generation is about break even on energy returned vs energy invested. The only way we can sustain our current consumption is if producing this alternative is more efficient than extracting oil and refining (and can scale up - i did note this in my original post). If we can't produce it because we don't have the spare energy, carbon neutrality is moot.

Re:E d i t o r s

[Stanistani]

You are correct, and I am [b]sorry.[/b]

(Somewhat) obscure Vonnegut reference

[antifoidulus]

Let me guess, the bacteria eat homeless?

Just speeding up the process a few million years

[Anonymous Coward]

What's ironic about that?

What about greenhouse gases?

[hellfire]

Burning gas is burning gas. Does this fuel burn any cleaner in our cars than the gas made from oil we pull out of the ground? I'm a bit of a treehugger but frankly while I'm concerned about the economic impacts, I'm more concerned about the environmental impacts, personally. Saving $1000 on fuel a year vs having a biosphere where the human race can continue to exist... well I lean just a wee bit to the latter.

Re:What about greenhouse gases?

[Jaysyn]

It's carbon-neutral.

Re:What about greenhouse gases?

[chalkyj]

The carbon they are creating the fuel with is being extracted from the air. When we burn it, we are simply putting it back into the air for the bacteria to suck up again and make more fuel.

Re:What about greenhouse gases?

[DontLickJesus]

I think it's a bit early to call a judgement call here. The article mentions that the bacterium can be altered to make sulfer-free crude, so there's obvously the potential to make a cleaner gasoline/fuel by eliminating or "refining" the refinery process (See EPA Tier 2). Perhaps if anyone could shed light on the necessity of carbon in gasoline? If it's not necessary, this could be a path to a carbon negative(?) fuel system.

Re:What about greenhouse gases?

[Anonymous Coward]

carbon is what is oxidized in the engine, you need it.

Re:What about greenhouse gases?

[Control Group]

Yes. It releases carbon into the atmosphere that was fixed from the atmosphere in the near term. This solves the biggest current problem with burning petroleum, that it's re-introducing carbon to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years.

The other pollutants that result from gas-burning engines are manageable. Not ignorable, certainly, but there are known technologies to mitigate them to a great extent.

Re:Just speeding up the process a few million year

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on. The "million years" part realistically negates the "renewable" part.

Story in not too distant future:

[obergfellja]

Another family dies in E-Coli Car Accident. Many Lives at stake in surrounding areas (via Air polution). Bio-Medics and Fire Fighters are on the Scene to contain the bacteria Fire. On a Similar note, Al Gore has announced that we have a new Global Warming Problem coming from our E-Coli enhanced Cars.

No, it's free, but you gotta barter for it

[monkeyboythom]

Obligatory Mad Max Quote:

Max: Bullshit!
Aunty Entity: No. Pig shit.
Max: What?
The Collector: Pig shit. The lights, the motors, the vehicles, all run by a high-powered gas called methane. And methane cometh from pig shit.

Good idea

[Wolf von Niflheim]

Once again one of the ideas in my head is seeing implementation. I really hope I have some left by the time I make it out of the academic world and into the corporate world...

But hey, with a planet filled with 6 billion people chances are that once you think of something, several other people are having the same thought. Take the Wilcoxon rank-sum test for example, I guess there will be many more examples.

Re:Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again one of the ideas in my head is seeing implementation. I really hope I have some left by the time I make it out of the academic world and into the corporate world...

But hey, with a planet filled with 6 billion people chances are that once you think of something, several other people are having the same thought. Take the Wilcoxon rank-sum test for example, I guess there will be many more examples.

what is the feedstock

[cdn-programmer]

It accomplishes little to have the critter if we have little to feed it.

One ton of dry organic matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil on an energy basis if one can convert it for free. This is the cellulose to fuel pathway.... cellulose and pentosans and liganans. T. verdii which is the fungus that brings us stone washed blue jeans is cited as a candidate for cellulostic ethanol but T. verdii is a cellulose digester. Other fungus digest the pentosans and lignans as well - fungus such as P. ostrates and it also will live in liquid culture.

Now the issue with the bacteria is the food supply. Are they to digest woody plant materials? Are they to digest a fungus which digests woody plant materials. Is there some other food source being proposed?

Another fact is that if 100% of the USA corn crop were to be converted to ethanol - then this would supply USA liquid fuel needs for about 2 weeks. Any bushel of corn converted to ethanol will come out of someone's mouth. It may be a pigs mouth or it may be a mouth in the 3rd world - but someone has to give up their food so that we can feed a car.

Personally I think bio-fuels have a bright future. However I'm not convinced these guys are on the right track. Alga can produce bio-diesel from sunlight. Here we know the energy source. In the case of e-coli and other bacteria the energy source is sugar which leaves us with exactly the same issues of ethanol... namely: there isn't enough corn and other grains around to make much of a difference even if we can perfect the technology to convert it into a fuel for almost free.

However if we can convert the cellulose, pentosans and lignans then maybe because there are a lot of herbacious plant wastes kicking around. If so - then one tonne of dry plant matter will convert to about 2 barrels of oil. If a barrel of oil is worth $75 bux then one has $150 bux per tonne in the budget to obtain and convert the plant matter.

Something to consider is that normally in the case of agriculture this material is returned to the soil where it contributes to the organic matter that creates a high quality soil. If this material is carted off to a fuel plant then what happens to the quality of the soil?

Re:what is the feedstock

[Wolf von Niflheim]

The thing here, in my opinion, would be to get a biological network going. Kind of the same thing that is used for the "purification" of water from sewers. That way you could get a microbial supply chain going. I really like your idea of adding photosynthesis to the mix. However, the problems with this kind of setup is keeping the entire system balanced (there is some strange and spooky math on that subject).

I don't know if the methods proposed by this company are the way to go, but I do have a strong suspicion that bioreactors will see more and more implementation in the future

Re:what is the feedstock

[Insightfill]

Any bushel of corn converted to ethanol will come out of someone's mouth. It may be a pigs mouth or it may be a mouth in the 3rd world - but someone has to give up their food so that we can feed a car.

Recent figures put human consumption of corn at less than 5% of the US production. I've seen figures cited as low as 2%. It's coming out of the pig mouth.

Currently, about 14% of the crop is going to produce fuel.

Re:what is the feedstock

[cdn-programmer]

your numbers look about right. Yup - pigs' and cows' will go hungry. Well - cows can get along quite well without grain but not so with pigs and chickens. So we can expect the economics of poultry and pork producers to go into the toilet and eventually we should see the cost of same go up.

Thing is that from an economics standpoint we have this: One needs to be able to brew beer at $2.50 per keg in order for ethanol to compete with Gasoline at $1.25 per liter. Why? Because beer is 5% ethanol and a keg is just under 60 liters. 5% of 60 = 3 and 3 liters of ethanol contain about as much energy as 2 liters of gasoline. Given these economics our pork and poultry producers might be able to compete without all that much of a price increase for pork and poultry products. Besides the brewers grains which are left over are a high source of protein which is not a surprise at all considering the starch was converted to ethanol.

Now the 14% of the crop. If 14% which is almost 1/6th goes to fuel production then this is 14% of 14 days (100% would provide fuel for about 2 weeks) so that is about 2 days worth of fuel.

Its really only a drop in the bucket.

Remember, the USA consumes about 20,589 thousand barrels oil per day - page 13 of the 2007 BP statistical review.

We still have a very big problem and I don't think ethanol is going to be much of a solution.

I for one ...

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our microbial hydrocarbon excreting overlords.

Great...

[kiick]

Germs that make gasoline.

So soon I'll be able to contract a flesh-eating, anti-biotic resistant, EXPLOSIVE infection.

Just great. While you're at it how about a pill that turns body fat into C4?

--
I for one, welcome our explosive bacterial overlords.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

While you're at it how about a pill that turns body fat into C4? The middle east is gonna LOVE that.

Think again...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they get past the fact that yeast dies in alcohol? It's a non-issue. Yeasts survive to a certain point, i.e. 10% to 20% ABV. The same happens with these bacteria. If they're spewing gasoline, remember that gasoline floats, and this may be even more of a non-issue if the bacteria are grown in a water "substrate."

Rivers of petrol...

[flyingfsck]

So, once they have bacteria that can eat celulose, we can spray them on a large forest and turn the whole Amazon river in a stream of petrol.

Re:Rivers of petrol...

[iron-kurton]

We could also spray it on Rosie O'Donnell and get the same effect.

Re:Rivers of petrol...

[BrokenHalo]

Bacteria that eat cellulose (that utilise or secrete an enzyme called cellulase) already exist. Ruminant beasties pretty much depend on a symbiosis with these bugs to get what they need from grass or other green leaves.

Re:Rivers of petrol...

[QRDeNameland]

No, that's cellulite. And thanks for ruining my appetite for the day.

Is there anything

[Vexor]

that e-coli can't do? My friends insulin (Type1 Diabetic) is "modified" e-coli. Now we're making gas with it too. What's next?

they're using the laboratory strain

[circletimessquare]

e coli is a biotech workhorse because its a very simple organism that is very easy to modify genetically. the laboratory strain has also lost its ability to live inside people and animals. this lost ability was not done purposefully by scientists, but evolved naturally

the wild type e coli has a saccharide coat which helps it survive the human and animal immune system. the laboratory strain, not faced with this kind of attack, has lost this ability because its a very expensive to produce, this saccharide. so after many generations and natural mutations, a variety of e coli without a saccharide coating came to dominate in the laboratory, because it could grow faster and outcompete the wild kind with the expensive immune system fighting saccaride coat that also makes it grow slower

however, bacteria have sex (no, really) and exchange genetic information with other bacteria (in fact, sometimes totally different species). such that anything introduced into e coli in the lab could wind up in wild e coli, and visa versa. antibiotic resistance is one such genetic trick that bacteria freely trade with each other in the wild and evolved in the wild. however, just like the saccharide coat, extra gene tricks incur a production cost that slows reproduction, such that e coli without extra genes always win out in the end (unless they are in hostile environments that require the expensive protective gene to survive)

I sense an inaccuracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get it right, editors. Another KDAWSON-esque mistake.

It is spelled Escherichia coli

Re:I sense an inaccuracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that, but I admit I wasn't sure. i could have looked it up ... but then so could the editor.

Re:I sense an inaccuracy!

[Eideewt]

Even I knew that off the top of my head. What exactly are the editors doing with their time.

US Subsidy

[DontLickJesus]

Reading the end of this article, a goal has been set by the U.S. Department of Energy to replace 30% of our petroleum. Without deviating too far from the subject, can anyone shed some light on this? Does "current petroleum use" me crude oil or refined fuels? The phrase "fuels from renewable biological sources" points out that this doesn't just mean gasoline, but I'd like to know more about this goal. Links to DoE sources would be appreciated.

Thanks

Yeast die in alcohol

[Weaselmancer]

Right around 12-14% concentration, which is what wine is.

Basically, the yeast die out when their own waste product strangles them out of their environment. Sort of like if you put a person in a perfectly airtight plastic bag. They'd live a while until their own co2 strangled them.

Probably the same with these little gasoline critters. Soon as their waste product reaches a toxic level for them, they croak.

Re:Yeast die in alcohol

[TheRaven64]

I obviously didn't RTFA, but I wonder if the solubility makes a difference. Ethanol, unlike gasoline, is soluble in water. If it were not, then it could float to the surface as the yeast made it, and skimmed off, without the yeast dying, in exactly the same way a person doesn't die when they put their head in an airtight umbrella.

Re:Yeast die in alcohol

[s31523]

Oh, the irony of our own situation...

Basically, the yeast die out when their own waste product strangles them out of their environment.
Kinda like us (humans), as our waste products strangle us out of our environment in 100 years...

Re:Yeast die in alcohol

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, hydrocarbons have boiling points far lower than ethanol, and under slightly reduced pressure, could be easily distilled right from the surface of the aqueous medium where the E. Coli bacteria are growing while having minimal effect on the bacteria themselves.

Re:Yeast die in alcohol

[cgb8176]

Right around 12-14% concentration, which is what wine is.

Not all yeast die at that concentration, and many die at a lower concentration... there are high-gravity yeast used to make high-alcohol beers which can go as high as 25%.
For example, http://www.whitelabs.com/gravity.html

Think Fermentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeast dies in ethanol, as well. That hasn't stopped people from making e.g. beer and wine. Think about it, a bit.

Re:"Echeria Coli"? What the hell is that?

[cpotoso]

And why "nefarious"? You know you do have millions of E-coli in your gut? Mostly they are helpful (although some variants are very bad for you).

you're ignorant on the science

[circletimessquare]

extra genes incur extra production costs. such that any cell that produces something it doesn't actually need to survive reproduces more slowly than cells that don't produce that extra whatever-it-is that isn't necessary for survival. and so releasing such an algae inot the wild would do nothing: that algae would be outcompeted and cease to exist

i don't have to talk about this in the abstract, this is observed in e coli

e coli is a biotech workhorse because its a very simple organism that is very easy to modify genetically. the laboratory strain of e coli has lost its ability to live inside people and animals. this lost ability was not done purposefully by scientists, but evolved naturally

the wild type e coli has a saccharide coat which helps it survive the human and animal immune system. the laboratory strain, not faced with this kind of attack, has lost this ability because its very expensive to produce, this saccharide coat. so after many generations and natural mutations, a variety of e coli without a saccharide coating came to dominate in the laboratory, because it could grow faster and outcompete the wild kind with the expensive immune system fighting saccaride coat that also makes it grow slower

furthermore, bacteria have sex (no, really) and exchange genetic information with other bacteria (in fact, sometimes totally different species). such that anything introduced into e coli in the lab could wind up in wild e coli, and visa versa

antibiotic resistance is one such genetic trick that bacteria freely trade with each other in the wild and evolved in the wild. however, just like the saccharide coat, extra gene tricks incur a production cost that slows reproduction, such that e coli without extra genes always win out in the end (unless they are in hostile environments that require the expensive protective gene to survive)

therefore, even if e coli evolved complete resistance to all forms of antibiotic resistance, all you would have to do is wait a few generations, and the resistance would naturally fade in nature. because the resistance is expensive to produce, and mutants lacking the resistance would grow faster and outcompete, if there were no antibiotics around. the e coli would then be vulnerable to antibiotics again (but also would quickly re-evolve resitance upon exposure). only in an environment of constant antibiotic use does e coli have resistance to antibiotics ready and waiting close by. that's why its bad to take antibiotics for each and every little sniffle you get, and why its bad to constantly feed animals antibiotics to grow bigger

likewise, people who fear biotechnology, about a mutant gene escaping from the lab and taking over the world, are simply ignorant on the actual science. of course, if someone gave e coli or another organism a gene which increased survival abilities in new environments, or did not incur any biological production costs, then yes, that organism would take over the world or colonize new areas. but mother nature is already randomly handing bacteria these genes already in the form of mutations, and in the form of gene transfer with other creatures, so its unlikely humanity can think up and give e coli or another animal some gene that mother nature has not already thought of herself via random mutations, millions of years ago

everything biotechnologists do to e coli and other organisms today involve adding genes that require extra effort to produce. such that they give the organism with that gene an automatic survival disadvantage

Re:you're ignorant on the science

[smellsofbikes]

I'm not disagreeing with your summary, I'm *expanding* it.

Part of why living organisms lose genes they don't need is because, as you've said, if you have two organisms and one is producing unneeded genes and the other isn't, the one who isn't has a very slight competitive advantage. But a larger factor is that mutations in unneeded genes will have no effect on the organism's survival, but will be likely to make the gene nonfunctional. There are mutations going on all the time, across the whole genome; the ones that are deleterious, by the very definition, kill or impede the organism's progress. The ones that aren't deleterious just accumulate.
This process is a major way we determine how closely related species are, by measuring the accumulated mutations in unused genes, because they build up linearly over time.

Also, for the record, there are some species of pathogenic bacteria for whom producing genes that help them resist antibiotics make them *more* pathogenic. For those, the bacteria with the extra genes win out in the end, even though they're having to transcribe/translate more material and reproduce somewhat more slowly. It's accurate to say that generally antibiotic resistance is associated with reduced competitiveness with wild-type bacteria in the absence of antibiotics, but that's not 100% true, just generally true.

Re:you're ignorant on the science

[Control Group]

Thanks. Seriously, thank you. I had never looked at genetic evolution through the lens of simple thermodynamics, despite my sig. Once you say it, of course, it's obviously true and I wonder why I didn't realize it sooner (kinda like those single-serving Crystal Light packets. No idea how I didn't come up with those).

In any event, having something of a fundamental truth revealed is a big deal to me, so thanks.

Re:you're ignorant on the science

[roman_mir]

You talk about it as if it has already happened and you read it in a history book. Your example of E-Coli is fine and good, except that it means nothing. The GP was talking about creating a new type of algae, a kind that would be able to provide us with our fueling needs. Well, considering that algae has to cover certain area size in order to produce the fuel, it would be best to create the kind of algae that will survive outside of a laboratory experiment.

This poses a question: if this algae should capable of surviving out in the wild and must not destroyed by other forms of algae (we wouldn't want that, we want the fuel) that would mean we would have to create an organism that is actually capable of competition. You said something about the nature that must have already tried making different types of algae and the kind that exists on the planet is the kind that is the most efficient in terms of energy usage, and again it's all good, except that we would have to create something stable enough that we wouldn't have to receed an entire fuel-producing area every two days. Given that we have certain ingenuity in our species, we should be able to make something that while might be not as energy efficient, but it would have to have some other useful traits for survival, maybe it will be less succeptible to dangerous levels of UV radiation, it may have higher tolerance levels to certain chemicals.

Whatever, your argument may hold true in the long run, but in the short run (just a couple of hundreds of years really,) our franken-algae just may be better at survival, which could mean serious reduction in Oxygen levels, pollution of the large bodies of water with toxic fuel, destruction of various water based species, etc.

While you are telling me that I might be 'ignorant of the science', I am telling you that without specific details on this particular type of development you are also ignorant of the science. I understand what it means to be the fittest organism from point of view of optimal energy use, but you haven't though through what it may be that we would have to do to force an organism to survive in the large open bodies of water while producing fuels.

uh

[circletimessquare]

the guys living over the current stores are also the most violent guys on the planet

Re:uh

[Anonymous Coward]

And you reveal to us yet another subject you've been TV-educated about.

everyone can be youtube fart-fire guy

[peter303]

One of the early youtube "hits" was a guy who kept a flame going by supplpying it with farts. Imagine what happens if this brand of Ecoli escapes and gets into the human ecosystem.

Nefarious?

[Pedrito]

...including the nefarious E.Coli bacteria.

Nefarious implies intent. It means evil. E. coli (you capitalize phylum, class, order, family and genus, but not species) is not sentient, therefore not evil. Furthermore, you're confusing it with a specific variant of E. coli which is pathogenic. Most variants are not pathogenic and in fact, it is the most common of the intestinal bacterial fauna in humans...

Call me a troll, but it's a geek site. Geeks should know geek stuff and proper capitalization of genus and species is definitely a geek subject as is the nature of E. coli).

USA fuel consumption: 20589 thousand BOPD

[cdn-programmer]

(BOPD = barrels oil per day)

One of the best sources for this information is the BP statistical review of world energy. You can find it on the BP website: http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?categoryId=684 8&contentId=7033471

It doesn't much matter what you start with: raw crude or refined fuel... what is at issue is the percentage. 30% of either is about 7 million barrels per day equivalent and lordy I have no idea where they plan to get it. Alberta for instance is running flat out trying to boost tar sands production to about 3.3 million BOPD by 2015.

Note that world production is around 81 million BOPD. World production is close to being flat. On page 10 of the report we see that Saudi Arabia's production declined. This is very significant when you consider that the largest field in the world... the Ghawar field - is in Saudia Arabia and has been reported as being in decline. If so then the top four (4) fields are in decline and these fields produce say about 15% of the world's production. Normally when fields go into decline the production shortly thereafter drops by about 10% per year. If so then the world will shortly be seeing declines at least in the range of about 1.5% per year which will exceed a million BOPD and this will compound exponentialy.

We better hope someone figures out how to make up the shortfall. If not we all go on an oil diet. Personally I see nothing over the horizon other than perhaps high prices and gas rationing.

conservation of mass?

[circletimessquare]

"Either that, or there's something unsaid that I'm missing. It seems like you're forgetting conservation of mass."

dude, the input is CO2 and sunlight, just like any plant on this planet, producing, at best, energy rich sugar. this is something most 4th graders know. we just want them to produce energy rich octane instead, that's the holy grail

but please, put down the marijuana before posting next time

Re:conservation of mass?

[DeadChobi]

Thanks buddy, I'll be sure to stop toking up and posting on Slashdot while HIGH AS A KITE.

Whole Foods Market refuse to sell bio-petrol... ;)

[conspirator57]

because of GMO e.coli used to make it. :P

Re:"Echeria Coli"? What the hell is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Escherichia coli, or E. coli after mentioning the unabbreviated version once. Binominal names have the generic epithet capitalized and the specific epithet not capitalized, and both epithets should be italicized. So, Homo Sapiens or T. Rex (for example) are technically wrong (they should be Homo sapiens and T. rex). Well, unless you're talking about the band, in the latter case.

If you're going to be pedantic, do it right :-)

Re:E d i t o r s

[smenor]

Just to be pedantic - Escherichia coli (italicized; yes it matters!)

well

[circletimessquare]

your prostate can develop cancer, and kill you. but, because of that, i wouldn't call it my "nefarious prostate". because by and large, a prostate is a good thing

same with e coli. with all of the bad that certain e coli do considered, 99% of e coli's role in humanity is still best described as an indispensable part of our daily lives. such that, while you can call certain strains of e coli unmitigated evil, e coli itself is most definitely not nefarious

How is this helpful?

[thepacketmaster]

Granted, the current political and economic situations cause a problem with the supply of gasoline. If it isn't OPEC cutting quotas, it's a war somewhere, or not being able to find fresh oil patches. But the real problem here is that we're slowly (or maybe quickly) destroying our home by burning these fuels. While this is a very interesting technical breakthrough, finding or producing more gasoline isn't the problem. The efforts of those involved would have been better spent finding new ways to produce alternative fuels. This could be likened to the tobacco companies saying they found a new way to make cigarettes without tobacco plants. Same deadly affects, and less hassle producing it. It almost sounds like someone needs to remind these people that the game plan is to fix the problem of polluting our planet, not just fix the "oil dependancy" problem.

Re:How is this helpful?

[Control Group]

Frankly, you're completely wrong.

There's nothing inherently wrong with burning gasoline. The problems we face from it are:

a) introducing new carbon to the atmosphere
b) finite supply of petroleum

This development, if it turns into a full-scale production technology, solves both those problems.

Re:How is this helpful?

[BECoole]

In order for the bacteria to make hydrocarbons, they must have carbon. Where will this come from? If you are converting vegetable matter, it comes from the vegetable matter which gets it from CO2 in the atmosphere. We live in a self-contained environment. The only other "problem" with gasoline is the pollutants. These come from incomplete combustion and contaminants originally in the oil. Since these organisms make pure hydrocarbons, the only combustion product would be water and CO2. You can't get much cleaner than that.

mod parent up ;-)

[circletimessquare]

you, well, we, just invented a new sniglet

Ringworld collapse, plastics eating bacteria ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

I wouldn't mind if it mutated to break down plastics like polyethylene. Preferably under special conditions, like exposure to UV light or salt water so plastics in storage didn't break down. The millions of water bottles cluttering our land and water alone will be with us for thousands of years.

Civilization would probably collapse, if not immediately, then probably after a relatively short time span. Other plastics in the field would break down, UV gets reflected like visible light, is sweat different enough from sea water, your proposing a mutating bacteria so further mutation expanding if food sources are possible, maybe even likely. Have your read Larry Niven's Ringworld? IIRC a plastics eating bacteria destroyed it. A fun read.

Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argument

[WebCowboy]

They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints.

This is a tired argument already. Soybeans are an important feedstock, and have long been used heavily in the production of non-foodstuffs such as plastics, waxes, industrial lubricants, etc. The same thing goes for oilseeds like Canola. Just because it is edible doesn't make it a sin to use it for non-food purposes (it might be considered a good thing, as we know its toxicity is limited). As long as we explore a multitude of energy sources there isn't really a problem with *edible* energy sources (after all, our bodies are mechanisms powered 100 percent by edible energy sources ;-). This all stems from the fallacy that there is a global food shortage--there is no shortage of or threat to capacity to feed the world's population. Sadly, famine today is almost 100 percent due to politics and logistics. Untold volumes of grain have been burned, buried or dumped in the ocean while children starve in Africa in the name of global trade agreements, market manipulation and so forth. It is tragic but agricultural commodity markets are are amongst the least-free, most-manipulated markets out there.

After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons.

Well, pretty much ANYTHING we grow gets the bulk of its carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis so I'd say that problem is gotten around pretty well if we can use plant matter as fuel (well, plant matter that hasn't been trapped underground since dinosaurs roamed the earth anyways).

Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better

Ultimately even conventional oil is "solar conversion", albeit inefficient since we are releasing soalr energy that was collected, stored and converted underground by natural processes over millions of years. Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis. Then there is the question of storage. In much of the world, much of the time, solar energy is most abundant when energy consumption is the lowest, so storage is very important. How do you store solar energy? You can't really store light, and storing heat on a large enough scale is very difficult as well (drill deep into the ground, or store it as huge tanks of hot water, etc). Large-scale storage of kinetic energy is difficult too. Then there is electricity--besides the fact that solar cells are very inefficient the batteries contain environmental toxins and all batteries "leak" to some degree (lose charge).

If we let mother nature collect the solar energy and help it along (through biotechnology) to convert it to petroleum then we can take advantage of a storage and delivery infrastructure that has been gradually built up over more than a century, and the challenges remain the same (efficient release of the stored energy).

All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean.

Don't underestimate the ability of humans to mess up the ecosystem. Humans have already messed up out ocean-bound feedstock--that being the fisheries. Wouldn't there be some consequence to growing crap on the surface of the ocean? I'd imagine that might deprive sea life at shallower depths of needed sunlight.

That said, the ocean definitely has a much less limited capacity to supply our energy needs. There is the capture of kinetic energy using big wave-riding mechanical "snakes" already. There is also a LOT of kelp and plankton that is in and under the water that could be used by this bacterial process. Better to dilute our impact on the ecosystem through the entire volume of the ocean and use multiple means of collecting energy, rather than concentrate it on the surface of the ocean where its effects would be felt more acutely.

It is - escherichia coli

[Ottumwa]

Helps to find data if the name is accurate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli

Not to be Gloom and Doom, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have E.Coli in your water supply, you have to boil the water or you might get sick.

If you have gasoline in your water supply, even in parts-per-billion, the water is no longer drinkable, from what I understand. Now that limit may be the "nice" limit and not the bare minimum to avoid poisoning, but basically it would be a BAD THING for these things to escape into the wild and start digesting fish poop.

Drug rotation to avoid resistant bacteria?

[AHumbleOpinion]

if there were no antibiotics around. the e coli would then be vulnerable to antibiotics again (but also would quickly re-evolve resitance upon exposure)

With a sufficient pool of antibiotics I wonder if a drug rotation could help avoid resistant bacteria? Only use certain drugs in certain years?

yes, but those aren't economic costs

[circletimessquare]

i'm not in any way denigrating your concerns, because i in fact agree with you 100% that they are real costs

but they aren't economically quantifiable costs. or at least, they aren't economically quantifiable when i go to the gas station and fill up my car, or when exxon buys a tanker of crude from kuwait. the abstract costs from using gas dug up comes in the form of a suicide bomber or a stupid war or hurricane katrina... sometime later

in other words, your concerns are a lot harder to address than a concern which has an immediate and obvious economic cost up front

again, i am not DOWNPLAYING your concerns, i am merely pointing out that these concerns, which i share, are very hard to address

so then the question is:

1. is it easier to convince people, who are essentially lazy and short sighted, from the town drunk up through joe schmoe, up through mayor quimby, all the way up to the president, to consider these more abstract costs

2. or is it easier to simply give them bioengineered gasoline (without the abstract costs you mention) which is economically cheaper UP FRONT when compared to the form of gasoline that is dug up (which has those very evil, very real, but unfortunately very ABSTRACT costs associated with them)

in other words, all i am saying is that the energy needed to devote to fighting the ugly side of shortsighted human nature is probably a heck of a lot more energy than the energy needed to develop an algae that makes the economic question a lot easier for shortsighted people to accept

the ugliness of humanity's shortsightedness is a question you don't really want to address. mainly because it's so depressing, and so thick. i am merely proposing that you sidestep it. i feel the urgency of your concerns, but i think the biotech answer to those concerns is a lot easier to stomach, and a lot easier to implement

Re:yes, but those aren't economic costs

[cowscows]

You're spot on about the immediate costs vs. long term costs, but I'd add that the main system that civilization has developed to deal with this type of issue is the government. Governments can muster the resources to do long term research without an immediate or even certain payoff. 20 billion dollars worth of research over five years is a heck of a risk for most any organization out there, but the US government can throw that kind of cash around easily enough.

You really only need to convince a handful of people to make this a priority, and the money will flow, and things will get done. The problem is that you're competing with a bunch of other priorities for the attention of these few people. It's a shame that more of those people haven't gotten behind this yet. It's an opportunity to build a whole new, huge industry. People love to complain about how making our energy and industry more environmentally friendly is going to slow our economy. It will likely slow some existing industries, but at the same time, developing all of this stuff is going to require a ton of industry and commerce. There's billions and billions of dollars to be made. We just need a few strong leaders who are willing to take a stand and put in some work.

Oh just great

[BigGar']

And when they escape they'll change the planet into oil.

Repent, the "gray-goo" scenario of nanotechnology is at hand.

It's a bit cheaper than that

[WebCowboy]

The bacteria-digestion of sugars and cellulosic matter into fatty acids described here is pretty novel, but the conversion into gasoline is actually pretty easy--probably easier than the transesterfication process used to make biodiesel. I imagine that onec the digestion process is perfected the manufacturing cost would be more in the range of $3.50/gal than $3500. Since it costs me the equivalent of US$4/US gallon to buy gasoline right now that makes it cost competitive.

Can they eat garbage?

[BobMcD]

Okay, so they can eat corn. That's okay, because I'd expect that we COULD grow a hell of a lot of it were the market to make it worthwhile. But...

If they'd consume offal, landfill material, non-rec-plastic, nuclear waste, etc, that would be much better. That's essentially what the earth does to make conventional oil, isn't it? Dead plants, animals, etc compressed into peat, into crude? Lets find a useful product to make from all this trash we create!

Replicate that, and you'd have something interesting. Kinda like this: http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into -Oil1may03.htm

Though, if I recall correctly, I heard that the plant was closed, due to the smell.

Re:Can they eat garbage?

[LeadSongDog]

Dead plants, animals, etc compressed into peat, into crude?

Finally, somebody is doing something about the high cost of funerals!

Re:Can they eat garbage?

[BobMcD]

...and we commit his body to the E Coli; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust; down with foreign oil...

absolutely, good idea

[circletimessquare]

but my criticism would be that that requires centralized control to implement. the problem is the farmers and the small town pharmacists in far off countries who aren't part of your centralized control

of course, given the reemergence of drug resistant tuberculosis and staphylococcus on the world stage, then such centralized control becomes a lot easier to implement with military and legal enforcement: people begin to understand what is really at stake. unfortunately, shortsighted as people are, i don't see your rotation scheme idea being implemented and enforced until a lot of urban middle class non drug addict non criminal healthy young people in the prime of their lives started dying from universally drug restistant tb

which is coming, btw ;-(

Re:absolutely, good idea

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

until a lot of urban middle class non drug addict non criminal healthy young people in the prime of their lives started dying from universally drug restistant tb

which is coming, btw ;-(

Considering that drug resistant TB is LESS able to infect people in the first place than normal TB, and that normal TB only makes immunocompromised people sick, you scenario is unlikely.

It would take another mutation that would make it more infectious.

Please don't be annoyed

[Anonymous Coward]

Which ONE "strand" is the dangerous one Dr. Science?

Coincidence?

[Tabernaque86]

I seem to recall an incident early this year regarding a CA facility selling fruit/vegetable drinks contaminated with the E. Coli virus.

Looks like instead of bringing their facilities up to code, they just re-vamped production purposes.

no, it's actually true

[circletimessquare]

it's a simple product of world history

the middle east is the meeting point, the center of eurasia and africa, the largest land mass in the world. such that the people living there, since ancient times, have been exposed to more violent inroads from surrounding cultures than any other place on the planet. this has led the evolution of the most violent cultures on the planet. simply out of survival necessity

the amish, for example, espouse a nonviolent and nonwarring livelihood. well, this has less to do with the superiority of such a peaceful philosophy, and more to do with the fact that the amish can afford to be so peaceful, living as they do in the idyllic peaceful coccoon of lancaster county pennsylvania

but if you took the amish and dropped them in the middle of kurdistan or somalia or the caucasus mountains you would see one of two things:

1. the amish taking up ak-47s to survive

2. the amish disappearing from the face of the earth, taking with them into extinction their peaceful philosophy

the middle east is indeed the most violent place in the world. it has to be. to survive

Re:no, it's actually true

[E 99]

but if you took the amish and dropped them in the middle of kurdistan or somalia or the caucasus mountains you would see one of two things:

1. the amish taking up ak-47s to survive

2. the amish disappearing from the face of the earth, taking with them into extinction their peaceful philosophy

3. sailing to lancaster county to escape the violence, like they did before.

Next on Yahoo Finance...

[HungWeiLo]

Load up on stocks from McDonald's, Jack in the Box, and Sizzler's.

Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[cdn-programmer]

Give us a break!

Gasoline and liquid motor fuels are primarily alkanes. These have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). If n=8 you have octane and I assume you have heard of the octane rating of gasoline.

You _can't_ have gasoline without carbon unless you are god and can change the laws of chemistry.

Ethanol is C2H5OH. It is a partically oxidized alkane. n=2 in this case. the OH makes it an alcohol. The reason ethanol carries less energy than gasoline is simply because it is partially oxidized. Note it is liquid also because of the oxygen in the molecule. Methanol: CH3OH is also liquid for the same reason.

It would make sense to convert Methane (CH4) to methanol (CH3OH) instead of trucking and shipping it around as Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) except for a couple factors:

1) methanol is poisonous. <rant> This is why it is sometimes used to denatured alcohols. This is also why methanol is often used instead of ethanol even though industrially ethanol can be made for about the same cost as methanol and often either will do the job.

    The idea is that instead of the kid simply getting drunk if he gets into the photocopier cleaner... we blind him or kill him. Anyone working with alcohol based wood finishes also gets caught in this trap.... instead of using a reletively safe alchohol (ethanol) - one gets exposed to a known carcinogen instead (methanol). Why? Well we wouldn't want the guy to mistake his shelac thiner for a beer now would we? Better to kill him or blind him instead. Righto! </rant>

Industrially if we have large amounts of CH3OH being hauled around then expect many accidents. Its a poison we are better off without.

2) that oxygen in the molecule both reduces the energy content per gallon as well as adding dead weight. The OH will eventually end up as H2O when the fuel is fully oxidized. One way to look at this is that chemically by weight it is about 30% water already.

If you manage to eliminate all the carbon from gasoline you are left with hydrogen. There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liguid hydrogen. Also - there is a LOT more energy.

In fact - we have a serious shortage of hydrogen. If we had a surplus of hydrogen then one of the best ways to transport it would be to toss in some carbon and turn it into gasoline. This is what they do in order to make synthetic crude. Its part of the Tar Sands operations. Shell for instance has built a HUGE plant in Alberta to do precisely this.

The short of it is that hydrogen as a motor fuel probably doesn't make much sense. Ideas of converting alkanes to hydrogen by eliminating the carbon don't make much sense. The CO2 is a plant nutrient anyways. The biosphere can easily cope with CO2 levels even 20x greater than they are now. Biological studies of crop production in greenhouses for decades have been focused on CO2 enrichment.

As for global warming driven by CO2. IMHO its hooey. One needs a better handle on the most important green house gas: Water Vapour. Levels of water vapour in the tropics and sub tropics are in the vicinty of 40,000 PPM compared with CO2 in the range of 380 PPM. We do not know if water vapour goes up 5,000 or down 5,000 and we don't know if there are any long or short term trends. Meanwhile it is true that CO2 is up by about 90 ppm over the last century. With the increase in CO2 we see an increase in plant growth.

Geologically, CO2 has been over 15x greater than now. Our paleoclimatologists say CO2 is not linked to planetary temperatures in the geological record.

Natural or via GA?

[WindBourne]

The simple fact is that some amount of e.coli will be able to handle gas. All that is needed is to encourage its growth, which is VERY trivial to do; Create a plate agar with gas embedded in it and streak with loads of e-coli. Something will grow.

With GA, a bit more expensive, but simple inject a set of genomes in. You can do it simple chemical steps, or you can just use a virus. Take your pick.

In the end, these bugs will tolerate some amount of gas, that will simply be seperated out. Considering that gas floats on h2o, I would guess that they will grow the e.coli in a vat of water, and allow the gasoline to float to the top where it is skimmed.

agreed

[circletimessquare]

and as you said, i'm not disagreeing with your summary, i'm *expanding* it:

my point in what i said is that this fear of some bug escaping the lab and taking over the world is simply science fiction. but this scenario motivates a lot of people against biotechnology, even though it's impossible

so it's important to note that your antibiotic resistant bugs with a survival advantage that you allude to evolved NATURALLY. it was not a mad scientist who made this bug, but mother nature

i'm not here to defang fear of antibiotic resistant bugs, they are real and scary. i'm here to defang fear of biotechnology

i think if mankind is doing anything bad in the environment with new genes, it is by introducing new animals into new ecosystems. the gypsy moth, for example, was introduced unnaturally into the usa, and is still damaging native forests. this kind of manmade damage is real, and scary, and continuing, and artificial: without mankind, the gypsy moth would still be far away in eurasia

so if you want to hate/ fear something, hate/ fear mankind in general, not science and biotechnology. in fact, if the damage gypsy moths or another foreign biological invader is doing to ecosystems is to be fought, it is probably through the work that biotechnologists are doing

and yet you have these anti-genetically modified this-or-that morons, running around in fear and hysteria. when the truth is, according to THEIR OWN AGENDA, biotechnology is an aid, not a hindrance! they are just ignorant about the real science

Re:agreed

[smellsofbikes]

Yep, I agree entirely.

The thing is: people are scared of new things, people are scared of things originating from sources they don't know or trust, and so forth. We have lots of very good fear reflexes, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years -- they're just overwhelmed today. I try and get people to read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear" and I'm currently working through a book called "Risk" that talks about how to intelligently assess and understand hazards. One of the things the authors talk about is how if Oprah Winfrey hands you a glass of some liquid, and a chemist from a large company hands you a glass of liquid, most people would prefer to drink the one Oprah handed them, if they know nothing about the liquid, because they have preconceived notions of trust. In the same way, people irrationally trust processes they understand (breeding animals to get traits) and don't trust ones they don't understand (cloning.) Biotech is a tool, and could be a very scary and destructive one, but only if people make an effort to develop it that way: it's certainly not innate.

With all that said, I think the stakes are higher when people are designing gene systems because they can do things evolution simply can't in any sort of reasonable timeframe -- evolution isn't going to produce rabid flying vampire cats, while biotech might be able to. Or, more seriously, vibrio cholera redesigned to produce proteolytic enzymes and released into the wild would be pretty horrible. But, again, that requires intent on the part of the engineer. Biotechnology is an amplifier, not an innately dangerous thing.

Re:agreed

[circletimessquare]

exactly

Hey look, the ocean's on fire!

[dwheeler]

[once] this kind of thing breaks loose and populates the seas and the oceans with itself by outcompeting the normal algae (the kind that produces Oxygen,)....

Never mind "outcompete" in terms of reducing the number of oxygen-producing algae. Worldwide ocean fires will eliminate a lot more than the algae.

Let those get out in the wild

[HangingChad]

We'd all be crapping highly volatile hydrocarbon compounds. That would certainly raise the stakes for tossing a cigarette down the toilet, now wouldn't it? Perhaps spawning a new type of domestic terrorism.

I've got diarrhea and a lighter! I'll take all of you with me!

It would give TSA something new to look for. "AH-HA! This man is carrying X-Lax! Take him away!" Definitely make you long for the old days when all you had to do was take your shoes off, eh?

Re:Ringworld collapse, plastics eating bacteria ..

[Teux]

Actually, it was a plague that targeted room temperature superconductors that took out the Ringworld civilization...

I do agree that the Ringworld books are a must read for any sci-fi fan. Louis Wu is my hero!

no problem

[circletimessquare]

my grudge is with those work against biotechnology and genetically modified this-and-that out of fear and ignorance and hysteria

but if they took the time to study the science, they would discover that biotechnology AIDS the agenda of the typical anti-walmart, environmentally conscious green

but they fight biotechnology. and they do that out of ignorance, not out of intelligence. with intelligence, they would co-opt biotechnology, perhaps use it, in underground and revolutionary fashion, to help the poor of the world, and free biotechnology from corporate dominance and corporate agendas

(but then they'd probably be labelled terrorists, cooking up new diseases or something... which some asshole might actually do someday, yikes)

Re:no problem

[shadowbearer]

  Just chiming in with a sincere thank you, as well. That was absolutely fascinating :)

  Nice ammo to use in the debates I get into with people scared of biotech, as well. Thanks again.

SB

They're not even in the running . . .

[hawk]

SUV drivers aren't even close . . .

--*any* car with a cell phone
--A significant subset of truckers ("Golly-gee, I don't want to climb this grade at 35. I'll pull out and manage to pass this guy at 36!" and so forth)
--cab drivers
--bus drivers
--smokers (I've noticed over the years that they seem "pacified" and less likely to react ot, well, just about anything)
--anything with Arizona plates

and last, but by no means least: Winnebagos (*shudder*)

hawk

Serious Tin Foil Hat

[HiggsBison]

I've been waiting for the current administration to enact laws mandating all keyboards to be federally licensed, and to include a packet of napalm gel, so that when a hacker is detected: Ka-FWOOM! Just like in the cyberpunk movies and books. That is how black ICE works, isn't it? Isn't it?

Anyhow: Now all the NSA has to do is send covert agents into 2600 meetings and such, and swab all the keyboards with a mutant E.C., and it'll make the napalm while living off all the Doritos crud.

But don't forget: "The street has its own uses for technology". Ka-FWOOM! heh. heheheh.

Um... knock at the door... BRB... [p@@~@pp~~[[ NO CARRIER

well said

[circletimessquare]

cross your fingers

Say NO to Frankenfuel!

[AgentBif]

Genetically engineered gasoline? That's not NATURAL!

And, and... what about cruelty to microorganisms?!

Have you no shame?!

The numbers don't work too well

[jmichaelg]

The DOE says we use a little less than 400,000,000 gallons of gas every day. The article says that if they get their switch grass process running, it'll produce 2,000 gallons/acre. That means we'll need 200,000 acres of switchgrass a day. 200,000 acres is roughly 1/4 the area of Rhode Island. So we need roughly 80 times the area of Rhode Island to produce our current gasoline needs.

Re:The numbers don't work too well

[maz2331]

Round numbers here... 200,000 acres * 365 days = 73M acres. 73M acres = 114,100 square miles. This would be a square about 337.75 miles to a side. Iowa is 55,869.3 square miles. Nebraska is 76,878 square miles. Kansas is 81,823 square miles Missouri is 68,898 square miles In other words, just in a few Great Plains states we have more than enough land area, much of which is already growing crops. Using the waste stems/leaves etc. from these crops is a LOT of biomass to convert to fuel. Rhode Island is a particularly small state. Compare with say, Texas at 268,601 square miles of area. Really, we need a total area about the size of Texas to feed this thing with enough biomass to totally meet energy needs. It's a big area, but not in relation to the size of the country, and especially not since we have great big swaths of farmland already producing cornstalks and such that can be fed into it. Build lots of these as small-scale plants located on farms, give the farmers the ability to sell the raw fuel produced, and we can probably also eliminate the need for farm subsidies, free the country from foriegn energy sources, and make the greenies happy with a carbon-neutral fuel source.

Re:The numbers don't work too well

[Anonymous Coward]

...and make the greenies happy with a carbon-neutral fuel source

Most folks have given up trying to make the greenies happy.

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[Just Some Guy]

How do you store solar energy?

One fairly efficient way is to use a water reservoir. During low-demand periods, use the energy to pump water uphill. During high-demand periods, turn that stored potential energy into electricity using turbines.

It's cheap, we're pretty good at building dams, and it scales well.

you've gone to the next level

[circletimessquare]

beyond ignorance of the science: fear and hysteria

making octane requires a certain energy investment which permanently retards that algae's growth

in the bioreactor to make octane, that's fine, as humanity controls that environment. in fact, in reality, you would probably have the plant manager constantly complaing about how the heck did wild algae got into the bioreactor and destroyed the latest crop cycle by outcompeting the octane making strain. because wild algae would outcompete and destroy the octane making strain ANYWHERE, anyhow

no matter WHAT humanity did to it to help it's octane making genetically modified strain survive: nothing you can do gets beyond the conservation of energy. the gene to make octane is a permanent, unalterable, unsurmountable obstacle to that algae's survival. NOTHING you can do can erase that energy expenditure or make up for it with some other gene. it's a permanent handicap

in fact, say you killed every single wild algae in the entire world (impossible, but let's say you could do that for argument's sake to prove how hysterically wrong you are) and then seeded the world with this octane making algae:

some of the octane making algae would experience a mutation that knocked out the genes directing the animal to make octane. such a mutant algae would experience a population explosion, since it was suddenly freed from the energy expenditures required to make octane. THAT algae would then take over the world, reestablishing normal algae populations

but don't let a little common sense about thermodynamics get in the way of your ignorant hysteria. you're in the wrong forum friend. go post on a newsgroup devoted to hollywood fictional script writing. you might find that audience more accomodating to your ignorance and fear mongering

Re:you've gone to the next level

[roman_mir]

but don't let a little common sense about thermodynamics get in the way of your ignorant hysteria. you're in the wrong forum friend. go post on a newsgroup devoted to hollywood fictional script writing. you might find that audience more accomodating to your ignorance and fear mongering - well, first of all I think you should go back to your kuro5hin trolling. But that's beside the point.

You are arguing on something that doesn't even exist yet as if you know the details of the modification that is required and not only that, but all other details on all other modifications required to make sure that such an organism can actually be successful outside of a laboratory. Fear and hysteria? You can throw any number of these cliches at me, the fact remains: you have no clue about the details of these possible modifications and the devil is in the details. Your kuro5hin style crying that the gene that would make octane is nothing more than in impediment is misguided, it is only an obstacle iff the rest of the organism is not changed in any way to make use of its modifications, and again, to make an organism that would survive outside of the lab it wouldn't be enough to simply make one modification. The organism will have to be modified in many more ways than that.

Now, you may not understand it (being a troll and all,) but it is important to actually raise these issues before a machine like that is released into the wild. It maybe that the final organism will not be lethal to the food chain and oxygen production and general health of this planet's ecosystem after all. The question still has to be posed, there is no way a modified organism of this nature should be released without taking a look at the possible destructive scenarious.

Re:you've gone to the next level

[naoursla]

Could you create an environment with a poison that the octane producing algea was resistant to but that would kill wild strains? Or would the genes for the poison resistance just transfer over to the wild strains?

Quagmire, giggity-giggity

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It was transparently obvious years ago that this step would be made eventually, and that oil running out would be a chimera. Nobody listened because it's much more fun to disasterbate.

Don't worry, though. You guys can still disasterbate about the new, indefinite ability of humanity to burn fossil fuels.

Re:Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[E 99]

Good info. That's amazing that there is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen...

Geologically, CO2 has been over 15x greater than now. Our paleoclimatologists say CO2 is not linked to planetary temperatures in the geological record.

Minor correction: CO2 concentrations are strongly linked to planetary temperatures, but as an effect rather than a cause. CO2 changes lag temperatures by 400-1200 years. Some people attribute this to CO2 absorption by the oceans, but it seems to me that it's more likely linked to the increase in animal and fungus life as the temperatures, ice-free surface areas, and amount of plant life increases.

Re:Braindead editors

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Escherichia coli. You DO NOT capitalize the coli as that's the bacteria's species name, you ALWYAS capitalize the Escherichia of E. coli.

teehee ;-)

[circletimessquare]

i look forward to finding the lost tribe of ultraviolent commando suicide bombing amish, who got stuck in the wrong tradewind, and wound up north of mogadishu

awww...

[ItsLenny]

I posted this same story 2 weeks ago.. but it never made it past the fire hose :-(

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[Control Group]

I'm not sure what you're arguing with, here. First, I'm not complaining about their use of sugar as a feedstock. It's not as good as cellulosic material for the reasons I mention: you don't run into any dual-use problems, and you get more total fuel per unit plant. Might soy be an adequate feedstock? Perhaps; I haven't performed a real analysis of the situation. My gut tells me not, since we're already using all the soy we're growing (obviously, or we wouldn't be growing it - though this is not to say we couldn't potentially grow more), and the energy demands we place on petroleum products are fairly high. According to the CIA factbook, the USA use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day in 2004. That's a lot of product to replace with something else, and it's going to take a lot of feedstock of something to do it.

But maybe soy would be adequate, I don't know. Even if it is, though, I don't see how it's better to use only one part of the plant as opposed to the whole thing.

I'm also under the impression that the current demand on corn as feedstock for ethanol supplies has materially driven up the price of corn such that it's had a significant deleterious effect on the ability of Mexico to feed its population. But I don't have hard evidence for that, so you may be right.

Well, pretty much ANYTHING we grow gets the bulk of its carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis so I'd say that problem is gotten around pretty well if we can use plant matter as fuel

Yeah. That's what I said. That's why this is a good development, it solves the carbon problem of burning gasoline. But I appreciate you reiterating it.

Ultimately even conventional oil is "solar conversion", albeit inefficient since we are releasing soalr energy that was collected, stored and converted underground by natural processes over millions of years. Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis.

Again - yeah, I know. That was my point. A more efficient method of transforming solar energy into kinetic energy is, obviously, better. Using E. coli to do it is a step in the right direction. If at some future point we find a yet more efficient way of turning solar energy into kinetic energy than using chemical energy as an intermediary, that would be good. I'm still not sure what you're arguing with, here, since you keep restating what I said in my post.

If we let mother nature collect the solar energy and help it along (through biotechnology) to convert it to petroleum then we can take advantage of a storage and delivery infrastructure that has been gradually built up over more than a century, and the challenges remain the same (efficient release of the stored energy).

Yes. As I said in my original post.

Don't underestimate the ability of humans to mess up the ecosystem. Humans have already messed up out ocean-bound feedstock--that being the fisheries. Wouldn't there be some consequence to growing crap on the surface of the ocean? I'd imagine that might deprive sea life at shallower depths of needed sunlight.

This is a valid point. I glossed over this problem in the interests of brevity, and because my initial solution may be based upon false data. I believe - though I'm not certain - that there are large areas of the ocean that are, to all intents and purposes, devoid of life. Now, that may be for reasons that also prevent them from being useful for the purpose of growing anything intentionally, but it may also not be. My first thought is that we could use those areas.

My second thought, though, is that we already do this to arable land - we harness essentially all the sunlight that hits the area we farm, thereby destroying whatever ecosystem was already there. I don't think it's worse to do that in the ocean than on land.

That said, the ocean definitely has a much less lim

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[SatanicPuppy]

Or convert it to hydrogen for portability.

heh, i'm the troll ;-P

[circletimessquare]

dude, as YOU say

"the devil is in the details"

i'm not going to reiterate basic science to you. either you understand the details, the facts, or you don't. i gave you some intellectual charity in my previous post, i'm not going to give you more of the same if you can't grasp it

you're just ignorant

but, please, by all means, tell me how much of a troll i am. because that changes basic science

pfffft

Re:heh, i'm the troll ;-P

[roman_mir]

You are assuming plenty and yet you are pretending that you are using basic science in your assumptions. You have assumed that I am in principle against genetic modifications for example, this is incorrect. I do not mind getting fuels out of genetically modified E-Coli. However this does not mean that we should release such organisms into the wild without testing and understanding what would happened if such organisms were to break out into the real wild where they would compete with normal algae. Now, it is obviously correct that an organism competes better when it uses energy in more efficient ways, but it does not mean that a more complex organism would not compete better against less complex organism for reasons other than just energy efficiency.

The point I was making is now out there, the details of the real discussion will have to wait until there are such organisms that can actually produce fuels in the wild.

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[Just Some Guy]

Or convert it to hydrogen for portability.

Oh, definitely. The main advantage to my suggestion is that we already know how to make dams and we're good at distributing electricity, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't 100 other goods ways.

Bless you

[Weaselmancer]

I have found my new winter project. 25% alcohol mead. I can't wait. =)

dear troll

[circletimessquare]

please tell me one aspect of an algae with a massive energy sink attached to it called the gene to make octane that would also make it outcompete an algae that did NOT have this massive energy sink attached to it

go ahead, use your imagination. please make sure this adaptation doesn't already exist in the wild

you can't think of one. one doesn't exist

now let's make believe, for the sake of argument, you COULD think of one. what would happen? what nature already does: wild algae would coopt the advantageous gene from the lab algae... and outcompete the octane making algae again! ;-P

now, let's go to yet another insane abstraction of science and reality to provide yet another refutation fo your retarded fearmongering: make believe wild algae couldn't adapt this gene from lab algae through some miraculous modification

so now you have octane making algae in the environment, outcompting natural algae. ok, what's going to happen in this scenario tha tis so evil and bad?

i believe the original retarded fearmongering in the post above on this retarded thread is that no oxygen would be produced by this algae, with me so far?

dear glorious moron, follow the bouncing ball:

water + CO2 -> sugar + oxygen

is what plants do now. to modify this, to make octane, you modify algae so that:

water + CO2 -> octane + oxygen

(all of this greatly simplified, for the sake of argument, and for the sake of your simple mind)

the whole point being, where exactly is the scientific source of your retarded fearmongering about no more oxygen, dear retard?

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Re:dear troll

[roman_mir]

You generalize in stupid ways, like water + CO2 -> sugar plus oxygen,
yet your bovine head is not even capable of figuring out the small details of energy use (photosynthesis) that will be required to produce the sugar. It is quite pathetic, you are obviously a troll generally speaking and in this particular case.
Water and CO2 you say?
You are an idiot.
Photosynthesis will produce Glucose, obviously this always releases Oxygen. But right after this step the produced sugar (like C6H12O6) will have to be converted to a more complicated molecule to get Octane, and this step will produce CO2 and probably free hydrogen, my dear asshat. C6H12O6 ---> C2H5(OH) + C02. Oh yes, there is a little matter of the fact that other elements can be used, after all seawater has plenty of Cl and Na+. But what does a pecker head like you understand about details? You are all about generalizations and consistent trolling. If anyone is simpleminded, it is you, the one who believes he has got it all figured out, it's great for your ego, but it means nothing for the question at hand.

Now can I think of a way that an algae capable of producing Octane can outperform algae that does not do such a thing? Your little primitive mind can't, but it is not that complicated, really. If you pulled your head out of your ass you would see all around your, life forms that do things in more complicated way, it's called specialization. The simplest answer can be this: the water pools for these modified algae will contain extra chemicals that could be deadly for the normal algae yet the modified algae will use these chemicals in their reactions. After all, it is not going to be as simple as 'water + CO2 = octane + oxygen'.

What can I say your ignorance can only be matched by your arrogance. You assume that photosynthesis process itself will be modified to get algae to produce Octane, I argue that photosynthesis will be just the first step of the process and that much more than that will have to be done. Oxygen producing photosynthesis will provide a step in Octane production, the next steps will consume energy, oxygen, and will most likely output CO2 and H. Most likely these algae will be introduced into an environment that itself is corrosive to other life-forms but will provide important elements needed for the fuel production. The algae will be specialized and will thrive in that kind of environment. Whether it can then compete with the normal algae and whether it can lead to environment problems are actually correct questions. Your posts are simply trollish outbursts.

what the hell is echeria

[Anonymous Coward]

its escherichia

that echeria actually made my head hurt.. weird, its like i got nauscious and thought I had dislexia for a second..

Re:Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[cdn-programmer]

You are correct if you look at temperature data and Co2 levels over say the last couple million years.... IE the Volstok ice core data shows CO2 levels trailing temperature increases by something like 1000 years. A good explanation for this is that the freezing of the ice ages shuts down the actions of micro-organisms and the organics simply don't break down until the next thaw.

However 2 million years is a very short geological window. In the longer planetary time scale say going back 500 million years we don't see a correlation between planetary temperature and Co2 levels.

For instance during the Ordovician the planet started out about 10C warmer than now on average and with CO2 levels between 13x and 17x greater than now the planet plunged into an ice age.

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[Abcd1234]

Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis

Umm... what? According to Britannica, photosynthesis is at most 1-3% efficient at receiving and storing solar energy. In fact, theoretical efficiency of photosynthesis is only around 26%.

Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, the first commercially available solar cells had a conversion efficiency of about 6 percent, and these days, the numbers are much higher (I believe commercially available photovoltaics are in the 17-20% range, though I may be mistaken).

Of course, one might argue about the amount of energy that's put into producing a solar cell. I might rebut that it takes an awful lot of energy to grow, harvest, and convert a crop of soybeans or sugar cane into usable energy (with numerous losses along the way, not the least of which occurs during combustion).

Fuel production sequesters CO2

[tepples]

This kind of technique is not going to fix global warming, it isn't going to reduce emissions, it isn't going to magically lower CO or 03 in the atmosphere that I have to breathe. I don't know about ozone, but biofuel production does pull carbon oxides out of the air. Any method of making fuel that involves chloroplasts, such as production of biodiesel from vegetable or algae oil, pulls carbon out of the air when the plants store the carbon to make oil.

thanks for keeping me huming along

[ralph1]

Just so those tree hugger know even if gas is 1000.00 per gal i would still drive a hummer or whatever i like.

Re:E d i t o r s

[TechyImmigrant]

You weren't being pedantic, you were being pernickety.

Re:E d i t o r s

[smenor]

Tell that to a room full of biologists.

Re:"Echeria Coli"? What the hell is that?

[MachineShedFred]

He can't even spell it right, and you want him to get the exact strain (E. Coli 057:H7) right?

You must be new here.

Hel-lo-ho? Some education anyone??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called *Escherichia Coli*, for gawd's sake. Man, what is the world of nerds coming to, if even nerds don't know how to spell nerdy words anymore? And it's in the freaking *headline* ... !!

Re:Were we go with the tired old "feedstock" argum

[Anonymous Coward]

soylent green is made from people!

Re:Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[DontLickJesus]

Firstly, thanks for the info cdn-programmer. I know nothing of the chemistry of fuels, so I appreciate you sharing in such detail.

Secondly, I agree with your C02 position. If people seriously wanted to eliminate C02 they'd plant more. Instead we look for labs to fix it... hard work scares 'em away every time.

I'm going to go a bit off main topic, but I swear, I'm interested in your mind...

Now that I understand that Gasoline - C = H2 (basically), and having read this article Carbon Based Paper, could this "paper" be used to contain H2 fuel effectively? The article states that water causes it to break down, but I don't have the knowledge to determine if it's the H2 thats the problem.

Thanks

E. Coli

[Fenster Karton]

They are the last bug you shouild play with since they have a common relationship with man. A bug making petrol in you gut would be very very bad.

Re:Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[cdn-programmer]

People can also put more insulation in their houses. This will save the CO2 from the fuel burned and save the money spent to buy the fuel. Next the house is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter and we save our non-renewable natural resources for our children.

We need about R50 in the walls and R70 in the ceilings and this will cost about $1 bux per square foot of building envelope surface area in addition to what we spend now. IE. Its DIRT CHEAP to do it during construction.

But - You are right IMHO. People would rather a lab somewhere fixes the problem. I don't think this problem needs to be fixed in a lab and I'm not sure a lab can do all that good a job. A little sweat mind you will go a long ways. Teaching people what they need to know is very important.

I do not think the carbon paper you refer to will do much for storing hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very small molecule and it gets into metals and embrittles them. It doesn't like to be compressed and as everyone knows even NASA has had its problems when its in the liquid phase. Witness the Challenger. I honestly don't think we want to be toting around much liquid hydrogen. In the gaseous form under pressure its also not fun. Ask a welder about safety with his pressurized welding gases.

Even a semi-tractor tire can be dangerous. In the small town garage where I grew up is a ring in the ceiling left behind by a split rim. This was not at pressures in the 1000's of PSI. Even 100's can kill a person quite easily. In the case of the garage with the neat ring in the ceiling no one was hurt. But they still like to talk about it.

Note: Toss in carbon and we get high energy well behaved liquid fuels that clearly are quite safe to use. We are going to have to learn a great deal about nature before we can top what we already have.

This is why the Oil Industry here in Alberta is investing over $10 billion per year in synthetic oil. You may hear about it as synthetic crude or synthetic fuel or synthetic oil. Its all the same.

We are mining hydrogen poor bitumin with an H:C ratio a wee bit better than 1:1 and we add hydrogen and bring the ratio up in the range of 2:1 in line with the alkane series: CnH(2n+2). For each atom of carbon we mine we need to find an atom of hydrogen. To do this we are building some of the largest hydrogen plants in the world.

We can produce synthetic crude from coal and from any other carbon source as well including plant matter. The issue is these are all hydrogen poor fuels. This is why coal is solid. Plant material is partly oxidized so it carries dead weight. Plant matter is (CH2O)n. These are the sugar polymers that build up through the simple sugars into starches and later into cellulose, lignans and pentosans.

IMHO a really good area of research is fungii that can live in liquid culture and which digest trees. There is much talk on T. Reesie. Trichoderma reeshie is a strain of T. veridi which was isolated in Guam in the 1940's. Its used industrially because it is a cellulose digester. But over 1/2 of most plants are not cellulose. I think we have a situation of holding a hammer and thinking the world looks like a nail.

Non the less. There are millions of species of fungii we know next to nothing about and many produce the enzymes we need to digest cellulostic waste products. If we next have a strain of E. coli which can produce an alkane precursor then this may very well form the basis of a renewable fuel industry.

If so... then we won't have carbon free fuels. I personally don't really worry much if they are carbon neutral fuels as measured by a bio-cycle. Note Volcanoes will continue to spew geologically aged CO2 into the atmosphere and sometimes the rate of spew is very very high. Witness the Deccan and Siberian trapps.

What I'm worried about is having fuel available "at all". The 2007 BP statistical review shows world oil production basically flat. It shows Saudi Arabia in decline last year. I side with th

Re:Carbon free gasoline? huh?

[An Onerous Coward]

Water vapor is not the most important greenhouse gas. Sure, it's trapping more heat than CO2 is. Thank god, or we'd freeze to death. But water vapor doesn't drive temperature change. It only reacts.

For instance, if you put several billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the stuff stays up there. You put the same amount of H2O up into the atmosphere, it falls back into the oceans within days, long before it has a chance to change the heat balance of the planet.

The amount of H2O is pretty much a function of atmospheric temperature. When CO2 rises, temperature rises, so the atmosphere can hold more water. IOW, water vapor is a feedback agent, not a forcing agent. [more]

The "increase in plant growth" you attribute to CO2 is only true if all else is held constant. If the Earth gets hotter, and some areas get drier, then the increased CO2 will lead to less plant growth. But maybe that could be counterbalanced by increased plant growth in currently permafrosted areas. But won't the thawing of those areas release vast quantities of methane, another very important greenhouse gas? Anyhow, plants aren't likely to act as a CO2 sink for long.

Even if (as you believe, and I doubt) there is substantial disagreement about whether anything bad will happen, then we have a choice.

1) We do nothing. If you're right, climate change falls flat and we end up with a somewhat improved economy. If I'm right, all sorts of nasty things happen. Floods, droughts, mass extinctions, increased hurricane activity, and so on.

2) We devote a sizeable fraction of our economy to fighting climate change. If you're right, we just wasted a whole bunch of money, and will have to stagger along with a weaker economy than we would have had. If I'm right, climate change means avoiding devastation to vast swaths of the economy. I would also argue that a shift away from fossil fuels is going to carry all sorts of unrelated benefits, like increased energy security, reduced pollution, technological advancement, etc.

As the argument goes, we have no control over whether climate change is real. All we can control is our response. Knowing that climate change is possible, it strikes me as insane to wait until it's absolutely certain before deciding whether to respond. In terms of risk management, there is no reasonable alternative.

Little late in the posting but...

[JimboFBX]

All these attempts at renewable energy remind me of when inventors all went crazy trying to create a flying machine in the late 19th early 20th century (or whatever timeframe I dont feel like looking up but). A lot of ideas, but virtually all of them do not work in practice. Plants just simply are too inefficient at storing energy to liken giving up our precious earth to use them to fuel our cars (I'd much rather we planted more PERMANENT trees and plants anyways to absorb this increase in heat and CO2). No renewable energy source will work without population controls either, because our petri dish we call Earth is running out of room. Quite simply, our population continues to grow to infinity (unless we get in some serious war) and we have a finite amount of space to harness renewable energy.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Some elemetary biology facts

[Byzboy]

E.coli is the workhorse of molecular biology. It can be grown in a huge range of carbon sources (from acetate to glycerol to glucose etc) and a range of nitrogen sources (from ammonia to complex proteins). It also needs some phosphorus and a small amount of trace elements. In other words it will grow happily in human waste. Let me restate this, E.coli grows in (as well as making up) SHIT.

So what these guys have done is engineered E.coli to make hydrocarbons. E.coli is the most well understood organism in all of Science. It doesn't need light to grow so is not bound by seasons. It grows very fast and as mentioned it can thrive on simple carbon/nitrogen sources. This is a fantastic development and doesn't need land the size of Texas or whatever is claimed in some posts below or to be fed corn or some such. Some processing of organic waste and perhaps a conversion of sewerage waste treatment plants to include biofermentors and E.coli could become a supplement to biofuel production. Sure not a panacea but an efficient supplement.

Re:Ringworld collapse, plastics eating bacteria ..

[Anonymous Coward]

If bacteria haven't mutated yet to do this what makes you think they can make a leap from breaking down polyethylene to something like PVC? The only thing they have in common is being polymers. Make the bacteria require a special nutrient or enzyme not found in nature to digest. Then add it to landfills until they have broken down the waste then stop and the bacteria die off.

I doubt civilization would collapse either. It existed for thousands of years before plastics were invented.

Re:Ringworld collapse, plastics eating bacteria ..

[AHumbleOpinion]

I doubt civilization would collapse either. It existed for thousands of years before plastics were invented.

Civilizations collapse when things they depend upon fail. The nature of these things do not matter, only the dependency. Also you seem to imply there has been one civilization, this is untrue. There have been many, one collapses, another sometimes arises over time. Our civilization could collapse just as manner others have.