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."

Comments

Precision in Reporting ...

[the bluebrain]

Starts out well ...

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 ... 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.

- 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 ... 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.

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]

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Anonymous Coward]

The best idea is probably to diversify our energy sources instead of relying on just one or the other.

Re:Why, oh why..

[Ogive17]

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.

What about carbon sequestration?

[BVis]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[MightyYar]

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.

Could also solve the distribution problem

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[MightyYar]

We're already making cars that go 30mpg. That's true, but the CAFE number today is less than that at 27.5. We could double it to 55 without too much heartache by 2020 I would think. Cars would have to get lighter and so safety would be compromised - but if done slowly enough the entire fleet of cars on the road would get lighter together and safety would not be an issue. People would have to accept cars that aren't quite as fast, too. A lot of engine efficiency improvement has gone towards performance instead of efficiency.

switching to electric just means you're getting your power somewhere else. That is true, but you still wouldn't need as much land to grow a gasoline alternative. You could do whatever was most efficient - maybe even solar cells on the same land area. In short, electric cars give you more options when it comes to where you get your energy from since delivery to the car is not going to have to change.