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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."
I imagine that what they'll get is a horse's head in their bed, courtesy of InterGlobalPetroCorp.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
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
If you frequent McDonald's, you already produce gas, meat, and plastic in a bio-reactor, so this isn't new technology.
Just callin' it like I see it.
The best idea is probably to diversify our energy sources instead of relying on just one or the other.
... that is, Protozoa for the Ethical Treatment of Amoebae. Humans don't have the right to enslave bacteria.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
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!
Gatorade factory?
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
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.
"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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
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.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
It's got what cyanobacteria crave!
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".
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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...
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.
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W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.