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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.
About 3500$ a gallon?
Oh, right, Zonk is illiterate (the hallmark of a model "editor"). I guess he really means "Escherichia Coli".
-ben
myselfmusic
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.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
1) High fever
2) General listlessness.
3) Urinating gasoline.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I already produce gas from bacteria. Move on, nothing new here.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"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.
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.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
Let me guess, the bacteria eat homeless?
Monstar L
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?
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.
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?
~Vexed and loving it!
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)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
(BOPD = barrels oil per day)
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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=68
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints.
;-). 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.
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
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.
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.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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-Int
Though, if I recall correctly, I heard that the plant was closed, due to the smell.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Right next to the coppery and the nickely.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
No, that's cellulite. And thanks for ruining my appetite for the day.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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.
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.
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