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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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<science scare story hat>
Two quotes FTA:
E.Coli, usually harmless etc, commonly found in the gut and able to survive brief periods outside it's normal (animal intestine) environment. So if this escaped into the wild, and you accidentally consumed a small amount, would it turn you into crude oil?
</science scare story hat>
No seriously, I can see tabloid newspapers having a field day with this: "Genetic Frankenstein Bugs Ate My Grandmother!"
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
These hippies are trying to destroy American oil companies!
Think of all those poor oil companies...their employees have children, think of the children!
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*Sigh* Another daily miracle oil-solving remedy. How long before this "solution" drifts into the background, never to be heard from again?
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.
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
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Personally I love the taste of wood chips, wheat chaff and corn husks but if they can help solve our fuel problem I am willing to tighten my belt and limit my diet to steak, peas and mashed potatoes.
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.
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]-
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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{...} 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.
-----
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 ]
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
Thanks for finding another reason to illegally clear the Amazon. (Cash crops already being a major driver.)
you had me at #!
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
Crude oil often has contaminants like sulphur, which this process can simply leave out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
0x or or snor perron?!
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the temperature. Water isn't really very wet at, say, 0 degrees Kelvin.
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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.
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.
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.
Started turning the starving third world into oil? Are you mad??
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.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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
Why?
I mean, really, Why would an oil company do that? Why would an oil company only produce oil by having someone suck it out of the ground? What possible benefit would sitting on it have, if this is cheaper? They would still sell their products.
Maybe you think they're just pissed off at the Earth?
The vast majority of oil companies aren't in the oil business and realize that. They're in the energy business and act accordingly. its just that, until recently, oil was pretty much the only way to get it.
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.
From TFA:
The company claims that this "Oil 2.0" will not only be renewable but also carbon negative - meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
OMG! Isn't anyone thinking about the ramifications? I'm talking about Global Cooling!
Won't someone please think of the children?!?
Seriously, though, I nearly spit out my coffee from reading the phrase "Oil 2.0". What a creative name. *rolls eyes*
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
... 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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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
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.
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
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.
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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