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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."
If they are right then they are instant Billionaires, if the process really worked they would be commercializing it and completely destabilizing OPEC. I'll believe it when I see it and the world will be rejoicing.
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obviously, solar energy is the ultimate renewable energy source
the ideal though is not to store or transmit that eletrically, but chemically (storage density, thermodynamic efficiency, etc)
i'm looking for the guy who turns poor fishermen in the philippines and indonesia (or anywhere access to shallow seas is easy) into the next sultans of brunei:
1. give them a bunch of specailly shaped clear plastic jugs, mini floating stills
2. they put a little gm algae inside the jugs
3. they throw the jugs in the ocean with anchors
4. they come back a month later, pick up the jugs
5. they are processed dockside directly into octane, in a low-tech facility
the guy, or gal, who figures out how to get algae to directly produce octane saves the world from itself geopolitically, environmentally, developmentally. then we have enough breathing room to master fusion
right now, the world is in an energy crunch. we will have more wars, the environment will suffer, there will be more poverty, until we get our act together on a truly large scale renewable energy source. too much renewable energy sources look at so far have been boutique, things that can never scale up
the cheap dig-it-out-of-the-ground era is over. oh of course, there's still more of it to dig out. its just too damn deep, and getting deeper every day, to call it cheap anymore
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Indeed, wouldn't it be terrible if everyone stopped sending their wood chips and grass cuttings to the starving in the third world and started turning them into oil instead.
Buy this? The oil companies are too busy buying back their own stocks (preparing for solvency?). Wonder if their overstating of their supply has something to do with it...just one example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25717-2004Jul29.html
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Not likely. Oil companies need crude. International oil companies only hold about 8% of worls reserves; they are captial rich and resource poor, being limited mostly by poor host country infrastructure, quotas, and production capacities. If this new crude is available at $50/barrel, why wouldn't they buy it? They've been diversifying for years, getting into solar, natural gas, wind, and other industries.
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Well, this is a bit different. As the article says these organisms live in sealed vats, they are not out in the environment like GM crops. There is a chance of them escaping, but that's still different from deliberately releasing billions of GMOs into the wild.
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It's just so sad that this thing is not a solution at all either. The energy has to come from somewhere.
The second law of thermodynamics precludes this principle from working "sustainably". Oh sure it might increase our supply for a short while (- I doubt it will, but hey it *might*).
Plants are 2-3% efficient solar panels (at best, that is assuming 100% green cover, and every last square millimeter of green leaves perfectly illuminated and tracking the sun). Using their dead residue to power cars is about 10% efficient, which can be raised to about 30% efficiency full cycle. (which is a LOT better than using it to power humans btw, who are at best 3-5% efficient in using plant energy, it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car, not worse)
Knowing that we use about 3x the total energy present in the biosphere yearly, you know that we'd need 200-300% efficient conversion of plant matter to movement energy. We are, at best, at 0.2-0.3%.
Using plant matter to make biofuels can therefore not increase our energy supply (... for long).
The solution ?
-> short term : nuclear power
-> long term : efficient solar power
Although I'll readily admit that this could be useful for the petrochem industry (and by that I mean plastics, and *perhaps* fertilizer, not fuel).
Without an immediate serious increase in nuclear power, we're fucked. Badly fucked. Even the Saudi "allah will replace our oil" nutcases are building nuclear power plants, do you really want to be considered dumber than them ?
Sounds good, but it'll be bought up by a major oil company long before it's turned into a commercially viable business. Then it'll be placed on the shelf until oil production finally drops too low to remain commercially viable. Then, finally, we'll have an explosion of alternative energy spring up from nowhere, owned and operated by the same huge oil companies everyone loves to hate today.
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Sure. After all, if it doesn't happened in the past, it will never happens in the future, right?
Crude oil often has contaminants like sulphur, which this process can simply leave out.
-jcr
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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.
You can indeed keep cutting down trees or weeds for a while, but the same will happen to the topsoil as has happened just about everywhere where we do that: nutrients get depleted and without fertilizer nothing will grow anymore, not even trees or weeds. The result of that is that the soil will erode more and more and before you know it.... desert. The same goes for you lawn clippings and milkweed stalks: if you keep doing that, you're going to have to add nutrients eventually. Just leaving the garden waste somewhere in your garden would be a lot more efficient use of resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_degradation
There are places in Syria and Northern Africa where traces of very old villages were found in the middle of the desert. Why would they build a village in the desert? The answer is that they didn't, the desert formed around them as they consumed all nutrients in the topsoil.
Apart from that, if we want to keep the CO2 levels in our atmosphere in check, it's not such a good idea to keep cutting down photosynthesis capacity.
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I think your estimates for production are low - I doubt it would take 3 months for 100 gallons of bugs to excrete a gallon of oil. Even using your figures, my wife and I could easily put in a reactor large enough to generate that much fuel. Toss in the odd orange peel, and voila! Fuel for the family.
Doing the math:
1.3 gal/person/day = 2.6 gal/day for us. Using your figures that's approximately 9000 gal of bugs per gallon-day of fuel. That's 23400 gallons (or 3128 ft^3) of bugs. A pit 20x20x8 would comfortably hold them.
My concern with that many critters would be the disposal of the dead ones. That in itself is a lot of biomass - wait, maybe they can 'eat' their own dead! Soylent oil for real!
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It's not a matter of there being plenty of oil, it's a matter of there not being plenty of CHEAP oil. The remaining recoverable oil is progressively more and more expensive to extract, at a slower and slower rate. The issue that's going to be upon us is the CHEAP, easy to extract, easy to refine oil peaking.
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they call them "weeds" because they grow anywhere, uncontrollably, even sprouting out of cracks in sidewalks between 2 4 lane roads and in the shadow of skyscrapers on all sides.
"weeds" of one type or another will always grow. one uses up one kind of nutrient, another will use another and replace the one used by the previous species.
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This sounds great, but a note of caution is needed. If they have developed a microbe that basically can eat through any organic material, what they perhaps have invented is a new pathogenic superbug. Think about it, if this can eat through organic material as such, what would happen if it got loose somehow and got into a field of crops, could this start eating away and destroying crops? Have you engineered a new super agricultural pest? This could happen completely unintentionally, not to mention the potential for intentional weaponisation.
No it's just that I have no desire to have the world contaminated by tadioactive material for the next 'x' thousand thousand years. (I can't be bothered Googling the various half-lives).
No matter how good the safe guards. There is always human error to watch out for. And human stupidity, and malice. Then there are supposedly failsafe devices that aren't.
As for the waste, well, that hot radioactive rock has to be stored somewhere. American mid-west? Under NY? Outback Australia? Arctic/Antarctic? Even safe transport is massively complex undertaking. Try and predict what might be around in 1,000 years in those areas.
It's polluting, very, very polluting. It's just that it doesn't go up in the sky and turn it browny/orange.
And no, it's not cheap either. Whatever cost advantages per Kw/h, are more than outweighed by the massive storage costs, generally underwritten by the various governments.
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Did I mention something about downstream assets? Well that's the retailing and distribution networks. There's still a good profit to be made there. The mere existence of those chains is a barrier to entry and even if oil can be made in a vat, it'd probably make sense for the manufacturer to sell it via an existing company, rather than build their own duplicate distribution system.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thing is, we're running out of oil that's easy(IE cheap) to extract. If Exxon either developed or bought and commercialized a patented process that produced an analogue to light sweet crude* for $50/barrel, they'd clean up. They'd rather expand and exploit that process than risk billions in new deep off shore oil platforms, which wouldn't be able to pull up oil for less than $50/barrel anyways. Or dealing with other countries where they have to worry about the government of the country nationalizing the rigs.
*I know, it wouldn't be exact, but most of the artificialy generated stuff I've heard about is actually easier to refine into stuff. Heck, as I understand it the oil resulting from thermal depolymerization can pretty much be poured straight into a diesel engine.
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... How they produce energy. It is a matter of supply and demand and trade. If any fuel is a publicly traded commodity, in today's politics and turmoil, it will become expensive simply because of hedge funds and such.
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OK. It's another biomass to hydrocarbon conversion by fermentation with genetically engineered bacteria system. The company web site is all hype; it just mentions a "proprietary microbe", the only new part of the process. It's a lot like "cellulostic ethanol".
Vinod Khosla, a well-known venture capitalist, has been funding multiple startups in this space in hopes that someone will make a breakthrough.
There are many known ways to convert biomass to fuel, and most of them are expensive. You can't predict costs from lab-scale work. Until the process is working at pilot plant scale, cost predictions are hype.
In the lab, tests are typically run in batches, in glass containers, starting with fresh input materials. For commercialization of a low-cost product, the process has to work with a continuous flow. Continuous flow fermentation is hard to do; by-products may build up in the system, or contamination in the feedstock may mess up the process. They haven't dealt with those problems yet.
If the process has to be run in batches, like a brewery, with flushing and cleaning at the end of each cycle, the process is more tolerant of difficulties, but the operating cost goes up. It's possible to get the cost of a batch process down; beer production in bulk runs about $65/bbl. But beer is around 95% water, and for fuel applications, you don't get to count water as product.
Khosla has the right approach. He's placing little bets, in the tens of millions of dollars range, on many technologies. His experts check on how they're doing. The ones making progress get another round of funding, and the others don't. One or more of them will be a big win.
Isn't that what we do now?
Why bother with Nuclear in the short term when we can go Geothermal? That way we skip all the nasty fission byproducts and a proven track record of cost over-runs.
No, it doesn't. The reason they "not viable" is because it takes more energy to extract the oil than you get from the oil; no matter where the price of oil goes, it'll stay not viable.
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you have to understand how reserves are defined. they are a function of price. at $140/bbl, we have more reserves than at $20/bbl, because more is economical to extract.
the bigger issue is that the actual energy (ignoring economics because energy is more fundamental) ratio for oil has dropped from 100+:1 in the 70s to 10-18:1 now. cellulosic ethanol and this technology as well (because it uses the whole plant) are likely ~20:1!
very soon, it will be a better thermodynamic investment to use biofuels than to use dug up oil. digging and exploring take energy -- more and more as we use the easy energy. it's just a matter of the economy (subsidies, infrastructure) catching up to the physics.
Except they are estimating a production cost of $50.00 a barrel for this bio-petrol, several alternatives hit break-even around $70.00 and natural crude is running $140 a barrel. I expect the prices will equilibrate in the $60.00-80.00 range before long. These guys,the energy companies are very used to making a profit sell a commodity where the feed-stock comes from will not make much of a difference. With the volumes the petro-chemical industry is involved in, if they can make any money, they'll make a shit-pile of money
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