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Solar Powered Microbes Manufacture Biofuels
esocid alerts us to news that scientists from the University of Texas at Austin have created a microbe capable of making cellulose, which can then be turned into ethanol. The bacteria use sunlight as an energy source, and the cellulose can be harvested without destroying them. Quoting:
"The new cyanobacteria produce a relatively pure, gel-like form of cellulose that can be broken down easily into glucose.
'The problem with cellulose harvested from plants is that it's difficult to break down because it's highly crystalline and mixed with lignins [for structure] and other compounds,' Nobles says. He was surprised to discover that the cyanobacteria also secrete large amounts of glucose or sucrose, sugars that can be directly harvested from the organisms."
The figure quoted in the gp is for traditional 'corn' based biofuels. There's a prediction that this process could reduce it to 3.5% of this area that's 28700 Square miles (about the size of South Carolina).
The other fact that's quite interesting in the article is that these bacteria are happy in salt water conditions.... Can you think of any large expanses of salt water around the place?
From the Article:
"Brown and Nobles calculate that the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.
They hypothesize they could produce an equal amount of ethanol using an area half that size with the cyanobacteria based on current levels of productivity in the lab, but they caution that there is a lot of work ahead before cyanobacteria can provide such fuel in the field. Work with laboratory scale photobioreactors has shown the potential for a 17-fold increase in productivity. If this can be achieved in the field and on a large scale, only 3.5 percent of the area growing corn could be used for cyanobacterial biofuels."
By my math 3.5% of 820,000 is 28,700 sqaure miles. Which by most metrics is a lot of land, but not nearly what the karma whore was suggesting.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
From YFP (your frickin' post): ...
"So
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
- More likely it was newly discovered.
- Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.
OK, so not created."
From TFA:
"Nobles made the new cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) by giving them a set of cellulose-making genes from a non-photosynthetic "vinegar" bacterium, Acetobacter xylinum, well known as a prolific cellulose producer."
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Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I'll bet you a nickle that oil doesn't cross $150 in the next five years.
Cellulosic is being industrialized as we speak. People are noticing that butanol isn't nearly as polar as ethanol and has a higher energy density to boot. Junk to diesel processes seem to work. There is plenty being done; trying the 10,000 best ideas isn't necessarily better than trying the 500 best ideas.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
28,700 square miles is a little less than 20 million acres. That is a lot of land, but it is not a ginormous amount of land. Other U.S. land use figures for comparison (2002 USDA figures, in millions of acres):
Forest-use: 651
Grassland, pasture, and range: 587
Cropland: 442
Special uses: 297
Miscellaneous land: 228
Urban: 60
In other words, we are talking about the equivalent of 1/3 the total urban area in the U.S. or 4.5% of the total cropland in the U.S. or less than 1% of the total land area of the U.S.
Back up. Where was "the carbon produced"? Hint: The carbon cycle using fuel from this process is closed.
"These scientists should get a Nobel prize for this, this is way cooler than dynamite or nitroglycerine
The invention of dynamite provided the endowment to establish the prize.
Alfred Nobel was a nerd, he loved explosions and was utterly oblivious to human nature. He thought dynamite was so powerfull that people would never use it as a weapon even in all out war. The offer of a peace prize can be seen as anknowledgement by Nobel that he failed to shock people out of fighting each other, OTHOH his delusional view of human nature was the precursor of the current MAD strategy of international politics.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Actually you don't need super-high efficiency in converting solar to usable energy. There's a huge amount of energy hitting the ground.
Ignoring clouds, the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kWh/m)/day) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation)
Based on other posts they idea microbe needs 20m acres. Let's see what solar energy that gives us.
20m acres = ~81B/m2 * 6kWh/day/m2 = 486billion kWh per day or 486,000 GWh/day = 177,390,000 GWh/year
Let me say that again: 177,390,000 GWh. In 2005 Total U.S. electricity generation was 4,054,688 GWh
Those are rough numbers but even if you lower it by HALF and then only get 10% efficiency in conversion you've still out-produced the entire USA. Of course, we'd rather dump billions upon billions into elegant solutions (oh, and the war on terror) that have produced basically nothing than actually DOING something on a noticable large scale.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Without knowing too much about the bacteria at hand: TFS says they rely on sunlight. Stacking water vertically decreases the amount of sunlight almost exponentially with height, so in this case vertical cultivation may be tricky to impossible.
I know it's a subjective word, but I don't think "drastic" applies to doubling fuel mileage over 15 or 20 years. I don't think it applies to getting 10-20% more people into public transit. I don't think it applies to convincing people to try some of the new electric cars that seem to be coming out.
Drastic is more like forbidding people to own more than one car, or reducing speed limits to 40MPH. Rationing fuel... that's my definition of drastic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.