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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."
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."
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]-
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.