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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."
Starts out well ...
...
... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.
... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.
AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.
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.
Then, going on, it all sounds rather silver bullety. So just some sane basics:
- It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing
- It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work
Anyhow. Good news, good job, my car is still running on refined crude until further notice. Wake me up when this stuff is at the pumps at two bucks a gallon.
[no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]
yes, we have no bananas
Because this is the real world. And in the real world we have these people, called politicians. It is their job to go out and get reelected every term. Which means that they need two things, money and votes. You get the money from oil companies, and the votes from dumb farmers in the midwest who think that corn ethanol is a great idea and ignoring the whole thing about food prices almost doubling from a year or two ago.
The best idea is probably to diversify our energy sources instead of relying on just one or the other.
The "parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground" get broken down by microbes thus returning nutrients to the soil. It's the decaying plant matter that makes soil soil instead of a bunch of microscopic rocks. If we start using the whole plant instead of just the ear, we're going to wind up turning the midwest into a giant dust bowl.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Fantastic!! It would be great to get off the fossil fuel, and dependency on foreign countries for our energy needs. No more having to pay high fuel costs...and as a by product, maybe we see the return of fun cars like in the muscle car era!! I'd love to get behind the wheel of a 455 engine, accompanied by modern fuel management and the like. No more fugly Priuses.
On a side note...I wish we could drop the subsidies for corn and drop the tariffs on sugar...it would help keep costs for animal feed down, and maybe we could get a proper Coca Cola with cane sugar in it again. And get the damned HFCS out our our diets. I've started looking for that on food lables, and I am shocked that it is in damned near everything you buy at the store. It is hard to find a loaf of bread without the high fructose corn syrup in it....???
Hmm...rambling....time for morning coffee....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm sure there's enough roof surface area that can be reused for this purpose that we can get to 1/3 to 1/2 of that figure fairly easily.....and I'd gladly put something on my roof if it would offset my fuel costs. (And yes, I've strongly considered going solar for a while now).
Layne
Um.. to "dumb farmers" corn based ethanol IS a good idea. Higher demand drives up the price for their corn, making them more money.
Sounds like you are the dumb one for not realizing why farmers are pimping their corn for ethanol.
And no, I'm not saying corn based ethanol is a good idea, because it's not.. I'm just saying to farmers in the mid-west it's a good thing because they make more revenue. I guess the sad thing is there are a large number of "super farms" that are owned by New York businessmen.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Has anyone seen any information regarding whether or not this process removes CO2 from the atmosphere in significant amounts? It would seem that if they're making carbohydrates (sugars) that this process would be pulling carbon from the environment to do it, which is another side benefit to the process if non-trivial. In other words, not only do we get usable fuel relatively cleanly, we remove greenhouse gases from the environment at the same time.
By the way, I'd like to remind people that how expensive a process is isn't always the only thing to consider.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Not to be a doomsayer, but isn't talking about putting this stuff in an ocean (or anything much connected to an ocean) a bit premature? Sort of like bringing rabbits to Australia?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And we can go further, because simply growing gasoline does not have to be our only solution.
Double fuel mileage and you only need 14350 square miles. Get commuters on more public transit: 12000 square miles. Get 25% of the cars on the road to go electric, 9000 square miles.
Now we're in New Hampshire territory, and that's without doing anything really drastic.
Unfortunately, gasoline isn't going anywhere... even increasing the mileage of our cars would reduce the cost of gas to the point that no one would be developing these alternatives.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Combining this technology with algae after treatments like those used by GreenFuel Technologies and you have a true closed carbon cycle. Greenfuel uses sunlight and CO2 from power plants to grow massive amounts of algae. The algae grows rapidly because of high concentrations of CO2 and large surface area of the bubbletubes.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
At the moment we burn huge amounts of fuel just moving our fuel around to different places.
Localized 'fuel farming' could greatly reduce this waste.
No sig today...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.