Slashdot Mirror
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."
The process is likely to work, though scaling up may be a problem, but they're very unlikely to have the field to themselves.
There are a lot of companies looking at similar ways of producing fuels. Sapphire Energy claims to be able to make 91 octane gasoline directly from sunlight, CO2 and algae.
Many fringe energy sources have become cost competitive with geological oil since it more than quadrupled in price. What will be interesting is how the oil giants respond to this competition.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
*Sigh* Another daily miracle oil-solving remedy. How long before this "solution" drifts into the background, never to be heard from again?
Expect this process, if viable, to be bought for billions by major oil companies, and stored away in a back room for the next 50 years.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I don't see anything in TFA about where the difference in input carbon and output carbon goes. I must be missing something. But if it really decreases the amount of carbon we put out, I'm all for it.
There's another problem I see though. More crude. The real problem behind high gas prices isn't a lack of crude, but the lack of refineries. Global production of crude excedes demand by about 2 million barrels per day, but refineries are unable to keep up with demand for gasoline and other by-products. Besides which, we aren't running out of crude anytime soon anyway. By the time we get more refineries online, gas prices will drop, and demand for this kind of alternative "fuel" will drop as well. Until then, they have to figure out a way to refine it using infrastructure that's already maxed out.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
This technology has been around for awhile although biofuels usually produce ethanol. Just a molecular side chain away from what these guys came up with. They get 1 barrel from 40sq feet of space. At our current rate of 143 million barrels a week it would take 205 sq miles of manufacturing plants to satisfy our current needs. About the size of Chicago. Probably about the same square footage it you total up all the Walmarts. Very doable.
They got us here in spite of all the government roadblocks. IMHO we would have got here a lot sooner if we hadn't laughed Gore off the stage and I suspect progress will increase exponentially when Obama takes over.
-[d]-
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
They're not scared. They just want to keep the oil price at a level where it doesn't negatively impact their investments (which, by now, probably exceed the income they have from selling oil by an order of magnitude). They've probably invested quite a bit of their money into alternative energy, too. It's not like they're lacking spending money.
And, heck
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
assume a 100 gallon specially designed plastic container filled with high efficiency gm algae (speculative) makes a gallon of oil ever 3 months. obviously there are a million factors here, i'm just pegging a random number
now look at a map of the philippines and indonesia
golly thats a lot of shallow seas
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...but when the real thing's $140 and you've all those development costs to recoup, why not charge $120 for the bug-crap variety?
I doubt we'd see this at $50 for a good while, not until it drags the price of real oil down to similar levels anyway.
If some of this bacteria finds its way into the ocean or any other body of water, would we have a perpetually expanding pool of oil that can't be stopped?
I didn't see anything in the article about whether or not this bacteria is capable of reproducing on its own. Hopefully it can be controlled in some way.
If it has the same market as crude oil, it will sell at crude oil price. With them being the sole producers, they will effectively become a de facto OPEC member, and will remain so until patents have expired, by which time the price of crude oil will possibly be far beyond $1000/bbl
Tangentially, you may be interested to know that when the post office was going to murder all of us with anthrax and the media was trumpeting on about how Cipro was our only hope, a quick look at a the literature revealed that doxycycline is both 1) equally effective and 2) no longer covered by patent and about a hundred times cheaper.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Does their microbe create a crude oil substitute or does it create gasoline/diesel substitute? Because there's a giant difference. A crude oil substitute would have to have an assay remotely compatible with "real" crude if you're not going to end up synthesizing everything else.
/huge/ amount of energy from one source or another.
Do the bacteria excrete asphalt (although this is less an issue with the heavy crude they're getting now being full of the stuff)? Or the lightweight components of crude? Or kerosene?
Now I'm not saying this wouldn't be an impressive move, and if it can help take up some of the vehicle fuel slack long enough to move to alternatives then great, but we have to be realistic. Take away crude oil and you have to slip another synthesis step in before almost every industrial process to replace the molecules that were nearly ready-made in oil. And since a lot of it will be synthesizing molecules from scratch, it'll suck a
During the dotcom boom my uncle developed an aseptic filling plant and had an order from Mars. In order to be able to fulfill the order in its entirety he needed additional funding in the region of £1m. He failed to secure the funding. This at a time when people where being given millions for just adding '...and its on the internet' to the end of any physical process.
The reason he failed to get funding. In his case despite having a customer lined up the possible investors saw a greater potential return from other means. A single dotcom success would far outweigh the return they would get from this physical process.
The point I'm trying to make is that until they've been able to prove the process on an industrial scale they are going to find it difficult to attract investment. Especially when speculation on the oil price is reaping such rich rewards at the moment.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
I don't think Shell et al are quite as evil as popularly supposed. Sure they're making virtually all their massive revenue from oil currently, but that's because it makes economic sense; they're not in denial about the bigger energy picture. See their scenarios document - I've only skim read it but it seems pretty fair and realistic. Amongst other things, they basically predict the start of peak oil around 2015.
Does the $50 include the land and equipment to build a commercial facility?
Does the $50 include the amortization of the start-up costs in developing an industrial scale process?
Does the $50 include the cost of gathering and delivering huge quantities of raw materials?
Does the $50 include the cost of environmentally safe disposal of waste materials?
The price of crude oil includes all of these costs.
So, whatever bad things happens to non-Wahhabi Muslims isn't of much concern to them. Rather, they most probably see this whole mess as a good opportunity to spread Wahhabism even more, since it fits much better with anti-US sentiments than the older, more reasonable branches do.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
There are a number of biomass-to-fuel technologies in the prototype to production stage, many of which have been featured on Slashdot in the past. Here's a sample:
Changing World Technologies (http://www.changingworldtech.com/) -- high-pressure non-catalytic conversion of biomass to Diesel fuel -- prototype online in Missouri
Range Fuels (http://www.rangefuels.com/) -- cellulose -> syngas -> blended alcohol -- proven, 20-million-gallon/year plant under construction in Soperton, GA
AlphaKat (http://www.alphakat.de/) -- biomass/plastics -> Diesel fuel via metal-catalyzed high-temp, high-pressure reaction. Plants under construction across Europe
MagneGas (http://www.magnegas.com/) -- sewage(!) -> natural gas + surplus heat via electrolytic conversion -- you can buy or rent a working production unit from their web site
I note that all of the above use a high-temperature, high-pressure reaction process to produce fuel. The GE process has the advantage over the first three in that it can handle water better than the first three processes above (IIRC, most Fischer-Tropsch type plants have a low tolerance for water in the reaction vessel, which is bad for biomass conversion unless you spend energy to dry it first. E.g. AlphaKat says their process doesn't work with more than 12% water by weight). The other major advantage is that fermentation typically occurs under more gentle and manageable conditions, i.e. near room temperature, near atmospheric pressure and aqueous rather than solvent/metal-catalyst based. However, the down side of their process is that it's not self-contained and not truly carbon-negative unless you use plant biomass as a feedstock, though if you grew algae in an adjacent tank you could probably use that as your feedstock and harvest CO2 from the air. Actually that would be an ideal solution because you could genetically tune your algae to have a specific composition and tune your fermenter bacteria/yeast to efficiently break down your algae. Hopefully that will be in the next phase of this project. Though we'll probably have to make do with catalyst- and pressure-converted biomass until these guys can perfect their process.
Great! Let's chip the Amazon!
Insightful?
Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Right. Because it's cheaper to burn a rainforest and ship it back to the United States than it is to take what farmers are throwing out for free. And, if the point is to turn the woodchips to oil, I doubt you'll make more fuel from your Amazonian rain forest than you consumed shipping it.
Nice try, though. Way to hate Western Civilization.
DATABASE WOW WOW
The problem with VC capital is that you some need to get it AND maintain control of your company/process. Most VC offers read like "well, we're putting up all the capital, and all you bring is a bit IP/knowledge. 80% of the shares for us sounds good." Your second problem is, if you don't go the VC route by try for classic loans, you might be first, but someone else might be willing to make the deal with the VCs. And suddenly that "second class operation down the road that's five years behind us" starts breaking ground on that crucial first commercial operation, and your fine superior technology becomes a /. anecdote.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
You're assuming that it costs a lot to get it out of the ground. Prices have to do with
demand -- meaning what the folks with oil think they can get)
supply -- meaning (in this situation, and this isn't the usual meaning) how much oil they've got underneath their country -- when it's gone they're destitute, so they price accordingly
And then there's speculation, which is pushing prices up. But honestly, I don't know where that is in the process.
My point is not "crude actually costs $32 per barrel to get out of the ground" it's "it is certainly possible that crude costs $0.27 per barrel to get out of the ground, though it might be $49.95 to get out of the ground." Most of us don't know what the margins are on oil after extraction.
A process like this MIGHT be cheaper than extraction. It certainly can be cheaper than our purchase price for extracted barrels from the sources we have today. That will drive such prices down.
I LOVE your #3 idea -- if we come up with a system which is carbon neutral and costs only a little more to acquire than drilling, hell yeah, let's make it illegal to drill for oil! If we could force than down the world's throat everyone would win except the people who currently have oil. They would lose big time. I'm ambivalent about that. (Canada's a big producer -- they'd probably go into the manufactured crude business in a big way and it'd be a wash for them. That is, unless it really does cost $0.27 to pump a barrel of crude out of a well.)
NB. I suspect that it DOES cost very little (a few bucks) to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground. It FINDING that oil that cost so much money.
With a new process, oil becomes a SURE THING. That would make the oil companies' profits PREDICTABLE FOREVER. Part of the financial world would love that.
Ironically this will turn agricultural waste into 'fuel' and thus give it a considerably higher economic value, have they factored this into their costs?
Also, there doesn't appear to be is no mention of exactly how much waste is required to produce 1 barrel of oil equivalent. How much usable agricultural waste is actually produced each year and how many barrels of oil could actually be produced from this waste.
If these microbes can produce stuff that is close to crude? Is it possible that nature has microbes that produce crude?
So tell me again what the formula is for buried dinos/plants turning into crude?
Lastly, the companies selling refined oil set the prices and determine the amount left? Obviously, no room for price fixing there then.
Mister false dichotomy, I salute you.
The only way they'd bury the competition is if they sold it below the current price, and could meet demand. But why do that when they're selling every drop they drill at current prices?
Oil companies are not interested in competition.
Your assumption that oil is scarce isn't correct. It might be scarce in a few decades, although there is debate around how long exactly, but the high prices we see today aren't because of scarcity of raw materials. What is scarce is refinery capacity.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Look, if you want a cheap(er) source of fuel, you better get off your butt and do it yourself. All these interesting little discoveries aren't going to do anything with the big oil companies still making record profits by raping the world's citizens. Period. End of story. The technology has been there since the 70's to do everythig we see in the news. That's why OPEC suddenly made gas cheap again - we were developing technologies to make their product worthless. If that happens, they disappear into the sands again as no country other than Dubai (look at Dubai from a space viewpoint if you're that out of touch) has anything to offer in trade. Anyone up for a tourism industry in Iran? LMFAO. Buy a dielsel and convert it to a grease car for $500. That's as close as you're going to get unless you invest a technology yourself and refuse to sell it to the oil companies who will bury it until the oil runs out.
So are these microbes genetically stable? They're not going to mutate in a few years into something dangerous? Can they properly contain said microbes, and have their finger on a sure-fire "killswitch" to annihilate the entire population of them if something goes wrong? Extremist questions I'm sure, but if you're in engineering and don't believe in Murphy, then you're a fool.
Thermal depolymerization
It's currently getting a $1/gallon subsidy, which works out to $42/barrel, 500 barrels a day oil production. $7.7 million a year.
In '06, that allowed them $4 profit per barrel. In '06 oil hadn't broken $70/barrel yet. Reportably they sell their oil for somewhat under market(probably a penalty for the type of oil or the fact that it's a small source). Regardless, they should be able to sell their oil for almost double now - $60/barrel more.
So, as long as the price of turkey guts and such doesn't go up again($20-30/ton), they should be able to make a profit even without subsidies.
Note-I'm mostly libertarian and therefor against subsidies, but I don't mind subsidizing test plants a bit. I say this because advancing technology is a very good thing. Right now I wouldn't be subsidizing traditional corn type ethanol plants, but I'd consider subsidizing a cellulostic plant, or one looking to commercialize this one.
I don't read AC A human right
"If they can make oil using an alternate technology for cheaper than they can get oil out of the ground..."
That's a pretty big "if" if you ask me. It seems to pre-suppose that the price of oil has something to do with the cost of production. It doesn't. It has to do with the demand for it, the weakness of the dollar, and the fact that any oil executive recognizes that it's more profitable to leave as much oil in the ground as possible to ensure that demand is as high as possible without being so high that it triggers development of things exactly like this. No conspiracy, just predictable human behavior.
Yes and no. It is in the best interests of any one oil company to be the first to switch over to an alternative energy source. But it is also in the best interests of all the oil companies (individually and collectively) for the status quo to continue as long as possible--they control a finite resource, which is destroyed by use and demand for which is increasing.
Essentially, they have two conflicting motives:
- Be the first mover.
- Don't move until absolutely necessary
To balance those two factors, the oil companies are playing chicken with each other. I suspect all the major players are in fact doing major R&D on renewable energy. When the price of oil increases to the point (I'm guessing $10-15/gallon) that the masses actually consider changing their habits--when the luxury SUV market is the entire SUV market, when the median distance from people's homes to their workplaces is three miles, when mass transit gets enough passengers to become financially self-sufficient--you'll see the big oil producers all roll out their replacement technologies at once.The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Wow, I know it's too late to get any mod points so people will read this, but for those who do drill down into replies:
The Saudi's aren't scared, as another poster pointed out. They are merely trying to poke a bit of a hole into the rampant commodity speculation (and likely price manipulation) that has driven the price of oil (and other commodities) to the point where 60% (according to some estimates) of the price is purely due to speculation.
Just like the
Normally prices are driven by the economics of supply and demand. The Saudi's are effectively calling "bullshit" on the current prices (and unprecedented oil reserves held by the US), by showing they can easily up the supply. Yes, they are looking out for their interests, but if the poke a hole in the price speculation and price manipulation that is going on, the average consumer is going to benefit greatly (at the expense of big oil). They want to sell oil to us, and they know the current price isn't reasonable nor good for business. More power to them. Hopefully the current prices will scare us into more research of alternative fuels. But the reality is that the consumers, businesses, and general economy relies upon oil today, and is being seriously hurt by the oil companies' price manipulation.
And the run-up of world food prices is supposedly due to a similar speculation in food futures (where greedy North American and European investors' commodity speculation is leading to starvation in some countries).
Good article on it, here. I think I originally came across that via Digg, which seems to be more useful lately than
Will the oil bubble burst soon? Hard to believe the OTC loophole and other issues will be addressed as long as a man with oil interests, and from a Texan oil family is in the Whitehouse. Talk about a conflict of interest.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, depending on exactly which compounds come out of this process there might still be a market for dino-petrol, there are some very unique and valuable things that come out of crude that have little to do with fuel production. That market is of course a fraction of the fuel market, but it exists and it is a reason that future generations will hate us for simply burning the stuff.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.