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

Very large surface area needed

[SlashDev]

According to the article, 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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[sakdoctor]

I don't think that was his intention. The area required to farm any useful amount of karma would be around 820,000 square miles.
That's an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Err neither of you appear to have read the article.

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?

Re:Very large surface area needed

[bhima]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Anonymous Coward]

[everything you wrote]

I think you got lapped, dude. You were so insightful, moderation overflowed longint and wrapped back around to -1 troll. One more mod point and you'll unset all the bits and be back at 0.

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:Very large surface area needed

[budgenator]

Corn for just ethanol is a bad idea, but corn pressed to remove the oil for biodiesel,
sugar removed for fermentation to ethanol
the stover used for cellulose conversion,
and the high protein distiller's dried grain fed back to cattle for food production, not so bad.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[fastest fascist]

But how is anyone supposed to set up a lucrative, patent-protected energy monopoly/cartel with all that diversity?

Re:Very large surface area needed

[camperdave]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Archades54]

Gatorade factory?

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[cayenne8]

"But it would seem that with this bacteria, we wouldn't need the area the size of the entire Midwest to produce fuels. Even if we stayed with using corn, we can now use parts of the plants that weren't possible/practical before. Parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground. We could use the grass clipping from your front or back yard, the grass clipping from public offices, we could grow commercial forests of trees to extend the hight of the plants and maximize the area being used. (think taller = more usable product instead of an earn of corn per plant.)"

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....

Re:Very large surface area needed

[SQLGuru]

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

Re:Very large surface area needed

[CrimsonAvenger]

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?

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?

Re:Very large surface area needed

[theophilosophilus]

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.

Not really. If we start planting corn on corn to cash in on high prices we will. Crop rotation accomplishes the replenishment of the soil you are referring to. Corn is followed by soybeans, a legume. Legumes are responsible for the phenomenon you are referring to. Crop rotation was started in response to the problems of the dirty thirties.

The biomass technologies currently being pioneered by companies such as Poet simply use the chaff, leaving the corn's root system to provide cover over the winter.

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[theophilosophilus]

According to the article, 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. This is why the debate over energy alternatives is so skewed. I don't think any proponent of ethanol claims its the magic solution to all energy needs. The debate is about how we can use our surplus corn to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

If there is a better source of ethanol that comes around, then so be it. Corn ethanol has stimulated development of the next generation of technology.

Implicit in the parent's argument is the idea that ethanol competes for food crop acres and thus raises prices. That is correct. However, the sensationalist media and proponents of other energy alternatives neglect several components of the equation. One component is the argument that high food prices is bad for the third world. The argument seems confusing when you discover that these are usually the same people that argue farm subsidies are causing food prices to be too low . Recent Wall Street Journal articles indicate that high crop prices are finally stimulating investment in third world agriculture. Another component is the argument that today's high food prices are because of ethanol. This is also confusing because similar price increases have been witnessed in products that have nothing to do with corn production. Rice for example, has shown the same percentage jump and yet does not compete with corn acres. My last point is that fuel prices are a major cost of corn production. If we eliminated ethanol production today, the increase in fuel prices due to reduced dilution from ethanol would mean that food prices would hardly change (if at all). [Note this is a little too simplistic because eliminating ethanol would distribute increased fuel costs over a market broader than agriculture - the net effect is the same].

I am not arguing that tying energy and food production together can't be dangerous. I am arguing that we haven't reached that point. Further, in a sense, energy and food production have always been tied together.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's got what cyanobacteria crave!

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Firethorn]

I was figuring a desert type environment, with salt water pumped in more or less straight to provide the water would be a lot cheaper than many other environments. Fresh water is getting expensive.

As for release into the wild, most likely not a big deal - conditions conductive to their growth isn't universal, areas conductive probably have non-altered species of cyanobacteria already that are more competitive.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[Hatta]

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.

That might be harder than you think. We're already making cars that go 30mpg. Maximum theoretical milage is around 120mpg. Doubling milage would put us at 50% of the theoretical maximum, which would be a very impressive technical feat. Getting more cars off the road would help, but switching to electric just means you're getting your power somewhere else.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[darthflo]

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.

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Very large surface area needed

[MightyYar]

LOL... I've seen this, too. Another reason to hate driving. At least you can't claim to be bored!

This, by the way, just feeds my friends theory that cars are too safe. He claims that putting a giant metal spike in the middle of the steering wheel will make everyone safer (and presumably dissuade horn usage).

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

[Rogerborg]

I imagine that what they'll get is a horse's head in their bed, courtesy of InterGlobalPetroCorp.

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

[tsotha]

That seems to be the problem with every story about revolutionary technology. A mention on slashdot every couple years, then nothing.

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:Precision in Reporting ...

[cosmicaug]

It looks like they they need to control the simple sugar secretion problem. This is not only an organism which wastes energy (from its "perspective") for no good reason by making cellulose but also an organism which is considerate enough to potential competitors to give them an easy to use energy source in the form of simple sugars.

The former (the part we want) makes the organism weak but might be manageable. The latter, makes the organism "stupid" and, if it produces large enough quantities of simple sugars to sustain high densities of other microbes feasting on simple sugars, suicidal since secondary metabolites (or simply overwhelmingly high numbers of competitors) will probably make a population of this organism unsustainable.

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

[arotenbe]

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. The Sun produces a lot of energy. If we had some super-efficient way of converting sunlight to usable energy, we could replace oil for most uses. Lack of energy from the Sun is not the problem - efficiency and limited funding is.

On an unrelated note, I'd like to point out the last lines of TFA:

Brown and Nobles are now researching the best methods to scale up efficient and cost-effective production of cyanobacteria. Two patent applications, 20080085520 and 20080085536, were recently published in the United States Patent and Trade Office. Patents on biological processes are never good. What are these patents and what does this mean?

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

[cosmicaug]

The BBC article (which is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll in her grave were she not still alive) was actually reporting on an article investigating homologies of cellulose synthases in several species of cyanobacteria. Curiously, the current U of Texas at Austin is not about harnessing native cellulose production by some cyanobacterium but rather about "Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100". I guess that they decided that inserting required cellulose biosynthetic enzymes from an organism (apparently) known to produce a lot of cellulose was easier than trying to optimize the miserly levels of cellulose biosynthesis in some cyanobacterium.

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

[budgenator]

- 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.
[no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking] In the past productivity has gone through the roof when they went outside, even the article said a 17X increase was possible. in Arizona an algae CO2 capture plant had to be shut down because the bioreator's production increase overwhelmed the processing plant! Give them a chance and let's see what happens in the real world.

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

[torkus]

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.

Yeah, i know It is tough to read TFA

[someone1234]

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."

Compare!

Re:Microbes are the cows of the future!

[LaskoVortex]

They will produce gas, meat and plastic in bio-reactors.

If you frequent McDonald's, you already produce gas, meat, and plastic in a bio-reactor, so this isn't new technology.

Re:Why, oh why..

[Raptoer]

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.

Issues with PETA, I'm sure ...

[krygny]

... that is, Protozoa for the Ethical Treatment of Amoebae. Humans don't have the right to enslave bacteria.

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

[Hognoxious]

They're still workin on the linux drivers. But don't worry, this year really is *the* year.

Re:Why, oh why..

[maxume]

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.

Re:Balancing the account

[Anonymous Coward]

Back up. Where was "the carbon produced"? Hint: The carbon cycle using fuel from this process is closed.

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

[TapeCutter]

"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.

Not necessarily suicidal

[Moraelin]

It's not necessarily suicidal.

Cyanobacter are routinely part of lichens, which are a very weird mix of fungi and bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The fungi form a matrix in which the bacteria are trapped, and help collect minerals and moisture for the trapped bacteria.

The arrangement isn't entirely mutually beneficial, from the point of view of the individual bacteria, but from a propagating-the-genes point of view (which in evolution is the only one that matters at all) it does allow the bacteria to live and multiply in some places where it otherwise could not.

And the fungi aren't doing it as some kind of act of kindness, either: fungi can't do photosynthesis on their own, so those lichens growing on rocks and whatnot, well, would die if noone in that arrangement provided food for the fungi too. That's the bacteria's contribution there: those sugars.

At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.

From another point of view, fungi are nasty critters, which can only live on organic matter produced by someone else. It may be parasitic (they take other cells apart and eat them) or they can live on dead matter, but nevertheless they absolutely need someone else to manufacture those nutrients for them. Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite. They don't just live off the nutrients that the bacteria excrete, but actually poke the bacteria with tiny filaments and suck the nutrients right out of the living cell. The trapped bacteria are routinely killed in the process, but the colony survives by just allowing them to multiply faster than they're killed.

Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.

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.

Better options than biofuel from grain

[Lonewolf666]

TFA describes an approach with nice potential, but it seems to need a lot of work before it becomes commercially viable.
Another is oil from algae: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture#Algae_as_an_energy_source
and it seems to be closer to commercial use.

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.

I am Legend!!

[alta]

Didn't you guys see I am Legend? I just saw it last weekend. This is a terrible Idea, they're going to develope a mutant strain of bacteria that will turn all 'designated' corn into fuel. Then in a few years it will turn all the plants, not just the corn into human eating vegimonsters that will devower all people and force us to live in New Hampsher in a walled colony with just the few vegetables (asparagus, brussel sprouts) that are immune. That is until a super smart plant in manhattan develops are cure and is killed right after it's made. Luckily he attached it to a few dandylion seeds that floated to NH so the cure was not lost.

No Thanks, I'll just keep burning oil!

Closed Cycle

[Thelasko]

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.

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.