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GE Microbes Make Ersatz Crude Oil From Many Sources
polymath69 writes "According to The Times Online, genetically modified microbes have been developed capable of turning surplus material such as wood chips, sugarcane, or others, not into ethanol, but into a substance which could substitute directly for crude oil. They claim it could be sold for about $50/bbl, and the production process would be carbon negative."
True, but since when has rational debate held sway in the realm of reporting science stories?
Uh, the GE stands for Genetically Engineered, not General Electric....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Insightful, huh? TFA, and even TFS, clearly say they won't be using crops, but agricultural waste.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
{...} each time you go to the "throne", you will be literally sitting on a gold mine !
{...} some
{...} you will be the living final proof that a turd, given enough polishing, could indeed be a golden turd !
{...} some people pee on their car to unfreeze the keylock on cold morning, you would do it to fill the tank !
etc, ad nauseam.
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Ok. Scatological jokes aside : as E. Coli is a comensal bacteria, our body have evolved and got used to have it inside. We naturally have lots of means to control the important and diverse population of bacteria living in our guts - including having an immune system that keeps the bacteria on the "outside" side of the gut and not entering inside the body itself and including already having an amazing amount of bacteria already living there and leaving less free place for new comers.
The only exception if one of the newcomer specie that comes into the gut is producing some toxin (food poisoning is actually due to the toxin, not the bacteria themselves. Often the bacteria don't survive digestion or are already dead to begin with - that's why charcoal and yeast are more efficient than antibiotics to handle them).
This GE bacteria is simply fermenting garbage into something that looks like oil. You may develop a mild diarrhoea, but there aren't horrible self-digesting-into-a-small-pile-of-gunk short-term risks of having oil in your guts, and the usual defences will take care that it all stays in the gut.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Cell walls tend to make up between 15 and 30% of the dry mass of an organism.
The composition of it depends on what type of organism they use. Plant cells would result in cellulose waste, yeast cells, protein and chitinous material, bacteria would most likely be polysaccharides or lipids.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yeah, the old peak oil spectre. Ya know, in the 1920's people thought that we would run out of oil in 20 years. Then there was a glut. People thought we were going to run out of oil in the 1970s. Then there was a glut. The life-index of oil (reserves/production) in 1948 was 20.5 years. In 1973 it was 32.2 years. In 2005 it was 38 years. We are not anywhere near peak oil, nor are we going to begin running out of oil anytime soon, not in our lifetime not in our children's lifetime.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
lab E. coli strains != pathogenic E. coli
I work w/ lab E. coli every day and have never gotten sick from it and I'm sure I've ingested a few of them in my lifetime.
Well, except it's happened provably in two places and it's now happening to the world as a whole.
Starting in 1974, oil output from Texas oil fields began declining 4-ish percent per year. Despite the deployment of every available technology and minimal to almost no drilling restrictions, the decline continues. The same thing happened in the North Sea in 2000: Production peaked, and now production there has been falling about 4 to 5 percent per year for 8 years.
At this time, there is virtually no spare capacity in the middle east to pump more oil. Any that they can bring online will go more to covering rapid declines in North Sea output than increasing supply. The Saudis were hoping to increase production by about 1.2 million barrels/day this year, and it looks as if they'll be doing damn well to get another 500 thousand; We're looking at a loss next year.
The peak is real and most likely imminent.
Thanks for finding another reason to illegally clear the Amazon. (Cash crops already being a major driver.)
you had me at #!
That's not the point. Peak oil advocates don't take into account increases in reserves due to increase in knowledge and technological advances. Our estimates of oil reserves, in retrospect, have been terribly conservative. Here's one example:
The Kern River field in California was discovered in 1899. In 1942, its "remaining" reserves were 54 million barrels. By 1986, it had produced a total of 736 million barrels and still had 970 million barrels in reserves.
Our estimates today, though better, are still mostly guess-work and very conservative.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Yes it does. Hundreds of bags come from one pound of plastic. Dozens of pounds of plastic would go into a single hundred gallon container:
http://www.bascousa.com/store/index.aspx?DEPARTMENT_ID=73
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Solution to the current bubble: When the contract becomes due, pull up to the trader's office with a tanker truck and flood the building with the crude. That'll teach'em not to speculate.
Erm.... That's what happens.
Most of the time, the speculator closes out his contract before delivery, i.e. he finds someone else who wants delivery (or who is contracted to deliver but doesn't have any oil).
But occasionally the speculator gets caught with his pants down. On the third of October 2006, the spot price for Natural Gas in the UK went negative. There were people contracted to take delivery of the gas and they had to pay someone else to take it off their hands.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Assuming each tank therefore takes up, say 40 sq metres = 430 square feet (that gives you 50% space for access, control, supporting structure), you get 4.3 square feet per (barrel per week) required space. i.e around 22 square miles for total US oil production.
But, since this is obviously not going to supplant all production straight away, better to look at it as (at $50/barrel that is quoted in the article) $600 revenue per square foot per year. Given that industrial rent is probably less than $10/square foot/year the land isn't going to be an issue. Construction cost will but that depends on the technology.
Note all calculations are conservative but naive.
That's an appeal to magic. Replace "Gore" with "God" and you're a fundamentalist.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Global production of crude can't possibly exceed refinery capacity by the 2 million barrel per day. Where would the 2 billion barrels, each day, every day, be going? Or are you arguing that potential production exceeds refinery capacity?
While not many new refineries have been built in recent years, the capacity of existing refineries has been increased quite a bit. Refinery capacity is fine.
What's not fine is oil field capacity. It turns out the Saudis have been lying about how much more oil they can pump. Welcome to your future, Mad Max.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
(829,000,000 ft^2) / (5280 ft/mi)^2 = 29,74 mi^2
You forgot another factor of 1/5280 in your calculations.
The point is that the oil from the ground is not what is expensive right now. The cost of pumping and refining has not changed drastically in the past few years, it is just demand and speculators driving the prices up through the roof. It won't be until we're forced to start extracting oil from oil sands and shale oil that technologies like this will become cost competitive on the production front.
Most companies are wary about trying to commercialize technologies like this because they were burned in the 80s when they finally got started with alternative production and then the bottom fell out of the oil market. There are still ghost towns in the southwest that resulted from the local oil company closing its doors.
I read the internet for the articles.
By the time the contract is due the oil has already been sold to someone who does intend to use it. The trader has no incentive to retain the contract through fulfillment, even if the price has dropped; they buy expecting the price to increase, but either way the money from selling the contract is more useful to them than a tanker full of crude oil on their doorstep.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Erm ... holy false dichotomy, once again.
There's no law that says if we start this process, we need to feed 100% of our agricultural waste into it, thereby depriving out soil of nutrients. We can figure out how much we need to feed back into the soil, and how much we can turn into fuel.
It's a GE form of E.Coli. These are evolved to live in the gut and even after genetic tinkering have a fairly narrow set of conditions in which they can survive. If they find their way into the ocean, the most probably thing that will happen is that they will die. Alternatively, they will contaminate their environment with oil, and either die or kill off all of their potential food sources then die.
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I'm not sure what the current EROEI for oil is, but I've read estimates that it is in the area of 15ish. That would mean that the production cost of a barrel of oil is about 7% of the price of a barrel, at least in theory. This presumably includes all additional costs like oil exploration.
Well, the underlying reasons for the price rises must be in place. And STILL the futures market has NO actual pricing power. The last time I looked there were a few 100k contracts of open interest on the NYMEX, (Looking now, 172k open interest on the CLN8). That is 172k contracts at 1,000 bbl each, for July delivery. There are other contracts of course, but compared to the actual volume of imports, the futures market is tiny, so its pricing power is also pretty small.
Now, that being said, I'm not disputing that OPEC is USING the high prices of these contracts as the reason they raise their prices. They 'benchmark' their bulk deliveries based on futures. Still, it is a bit like the way your bank decides to raise your MasterCard rate because 'the prime rate went up'. In fact there is even less connection than that.
Truth is, if supply exceeds demand, then the futures will fall and the price will fall. It isn't and it hasn't. So far. All markets fluctuate between oversupply and overdemand. Just as all other control loops do. Basic engineering theory, you don't even need to know a bit of economics. The difference here is that OPEC can squeeze supply as they see fit. Which they seem to do so that in the long run oil is cheaper than the alternatives. Just plain good business sense.
No doubt oil prices will come down due to extinguished demand at some point. Hard to say how much or for how long, but it is like betting the ponies, usually the odds on favorites win, and usually history repeats itself too.
'Wild speculation' is not a problem at all. Anyone dumb enough to pay too much for a contract is going to loose money. The price of the underlying governs the price of the derivative, not the other way around. At least not in a market like the oil market. Other types of derivatives have different characteristics.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/06/no-new-oil-refineries-since-1976.html
Oil companies have not opened any new refinery since 1976. But they have continuously added small amounts of capacity to the existing refineries.
This is what you do when you are not finding any new oilfields, but you make minor discoveries in existing reserves / technological improvements or when some more of your oil becomes marketable because of price increase.
The formula for producing oil actually starts with microbes, in the form of algae. The process in a nutshell:
1) (optional) Runaway global warming and high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere produce a global anoxic event, similar to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico but spanning the entire globe. Algae reproduce in vast numbers, die, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Rather than decay, they form a thick black mud tens of meters deep.
2) Over millions of years, the mud is folded under other rock layers.
3) The mud gets deep enough so that it is under lots of pressure and correspondingly high heat (60 to 120 degrees C) which break down the molecular bonds of the organic compounds that make up the mud, producing straight-chain hydrocarbons (i.e. crude oil).
4) (optional) The oil seeps upwards to the surface and gets trapped in a pocket of impermeable rock underneath the Middle East.
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