Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel

Fluffeh alerts us to a report of a fungus that naturally produces diesel fuel, or something very close to it. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth. ... [T]the paper's authors admit that the technique is far from any sort of industrial production. 'This report presents no information on the cost-effectiveness or other details to make G. roseum an alternative fuel source,' they write." NPR has an interview with the fungus's discoverer.

Comments

First Use

[MightyYar]

I think it would be really poetic if the first use of this fungus is to digest the entire Patagonian rain forest into sweet, greasy diesel.

Re:First Use

[betterunixthanunix]

Halfway through that process, the rest of the forest is cut down for paper by machines powered with the diesel from the first half...

Re:First Use

[Jabbrwokk]

That's funny, but it is exactly what happens in the Alberta oil sands.

Massive amounts of energy are used to extract oil from oil-saturated sand. The oil is then refined into gasoline, some of which inevitably ends up powering the extraction machinery.

You need a mod +1 ironic on top of the funny...

Re:First Use

[CodeBuster]

Where can I go to get a cheap rain forest diesel fill up, my SUV is thirsty!

Pretty spiffy

[Blinocac]

if you ask me. I hope we are smart and research more ways to provide energy, and don't just hop on another band wagon technology.

Re:Pretty spiffy

[StreetStealth]

This by itself may not be the breakthrough we're looking for. None of the other alternative energy stories on /. in the past few months may be either. But they keep coming, research continues in countless labs and studies across the globe, some things don't work, and others lead to more inquiry, and that's what is really important.

This will not be a puzzle solved by a single genius in a moment of discovery. It will be solved over time, by many talented people with many discoveries. But I think that's why it's safe to say it will be solved.

Re:Pretty spiffy

[Drakkenmensch]

Indeed - by studying HOW this fungus synthesizes diesel-like molecules, it may be a simple matter of gene-splicing the right DNA sequence into a new bacteria that will do the same. The process for mass-producing and harvesting bacteria for human insulin molecules is well-known and cost effective, so adapting the technology rather than reinventing it from scratch would skip yet another development stage and rush this wonder into commercial use within just a few years.

Re:Pretty spiffy

[Thundersnatch]

Yes, but let us hope that the best alternative fuel solution is implemented and not the most profitable.

Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.

If you're going to try to redefine "best" to be "the one that kills the fewest four-toed sloths" or something, dream on. This is the real world.

Re:Pretty spiffy

[DriedClexler]

Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.

I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets? In the real world, the most profitable investment may have a huge environmental cost canceling any benefit therefrom. Even restrcting to nominally "eco-friendly" fuels, you have to factor in their *relative*, *total* environmental harm, and weigh it against the utility to users, in order to find which is the best. And since "total life-cycle environmental harm" is not a parameter in the corporate profitability computation, we shouldn't be surprised if they don't factor it in.

Of course, environmental costs do, in a sense, show up in balance sheets ... but not in any efficient, sensible way. They manifest as stuff like:

- Bribe to regulator.
- Lobbyist salaries.
- $Environmenal_harm1 denial campaign.
- Compliance costs of $efficiency_standard1 which barely accomplishes anything.
- Goodwill (modulo the impact of advertising)

Please, please stop assuming "profitability within current system" is the same as "efficiency, discounting for meaningful environmental damage".

No, I'm not a greenie, just upset at how blind people can get to the other side's arguments.

Re:Pretty spiffy

[Thundersnatch]

I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets?

I never said they did. What I said is that the non-balance sheet environmental costs don't make a difference in decisionmaking, because everyone who matters ignores them. Do you really think China's Ministry of Transportation gives a shit about Braziallian rain forests? Or BP's stockholders? They don't, or at least not enough to matter when it comes down to money.

If the options are $X for this solution, and $1.5 * X for the eco-friendly solution, guess which one will be widely implemented, no matter what the Sierra Club has to say?

Re:Pretty spiffy

[freddy_dreddy]

1. Using algae for biofeuls isn't just throwing a bucket of them in a swimming pool in the sun and letting them multiply. This is what it looks like, but think square miles instead of square meters for something that produces a meaningful amount of biofeul.
2. With algae you're limited in energy: If you have 100 Watt of sunlight per sq meter you have output = efficiency*surface*Power_per_sq_meter of biofeul energy - on a sunny day. Biofeuls from algae are like solar energy, they waste as much space and are costly to setup and postprocess. You're very limited where you can start such a business, and most are near the equator - but we see that this leads to rediculous situations (cfr. chopping rainforests to plant biofeul mais)

With fungi the output depends on the size of your operation, which is determined by the size of your (underground) tanks. Visit your local brewery and look at the conveyor which pumps out gallon after gallon. It doesn't matter where the cellulose comes from: old newspapers, mountains of leaves in autumn, milkcartons, hippies, ... Output = efficiency*input
Important is that they're compact and can be constructed almost anywhere.

Joke of the Day!

[CorporateSuit]

What's the difference between G. Roseum and an oil baron?

One is a parasitic inhuman slime capable of producing copius amounts of fuel, and the other is a mushroom.

Wrong fuel

[Linker3000]

When we looked at the gas analysis, I was flabbergasted," said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University

So it's not producing diesel, but some fuel called "Flabbergas"

Re:Wrong fuel

[thewiz]

Don't you mean Fungas?

1. isolate the genes

[circletimessquare]

2. put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format
3. profit. MAJOR profit. and just financial profit
a. geopolitical: you don't fund wahabbi islam via saudi arabia, blowhards in venezuela, or neoimperialism in russia.
b. environmental: you don't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, you simply recycle it.
c. economic: a stable agricultral source of fuel is a lot better for a healthy economy than undependable one you need to mine

please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes. and then someone else: make your first trillion, turn this genetically engineered plant into a major company

Re:1. isolate the genes

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time someone did this, the biomass of the entire planet was dissolved into great big pools of oil that we are still using today.

Obvious Joke

[Relic of the Future]

What, 20 replies now, and not a single variation on "There is a real energy crisis, we have to focus on fixing it! Oil doesn't grow on trees! Wait, what now? Oh. ..."

There are lots of ways to make diesel fuel

[Iowan41]

Mr. Diesel designed his engine so that farmers could make their own fuel back in the day when there weren't filling stations in rural areas. It could still be done from farm crops, garbage, this new fungus, all sorts of things. What we need is government approval of the efficient turbo-diesel engines that they use in Europe, and then plants to make the stuff in numerous ways depending on what is most economical in a given region.

Re:but it's still only bio-diesel

[SydShamino]

Yeah, because we eat a lot of tree trunks, blades of grass, and stalks. Plus we eat things like scrub weeds that can grow in the harshest of conditions with no irrigation or pesticides.

Or we could convert them into biodiesel.

Next: Herds of mattresses found in the Sahara!

[Erelas]

Just one step closer to Douglas Adams' statement that, in such a large Universe, most things one could possibly imagine (and a lot one would rather not), grow somewhere.

Re:Who the hell modded parent Troll?

[philspear]

I marked him troll. I am a wahabbi living in venezuela, and I summer in Russia where I volunteer for the local young men's neoimperialism association (YMNA). I was upset by the "blowhard" comment, but what really stung was the implication that I didn't deserve all the billions I've been getting.

Not to mix a joke with a serious point, but his point number two of "put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format" seems a bit off. The genes take cellulose and break it down, wheras plants make the cellulose to make themselves. It would probably be rather inefficient to have the plants digest themselves. I think it would be easier to come up with a culture system to feed non-foodstock plant material into bacteria engineered to digest the cellulose.

What would be truly a shoe-in for a nobel would be if you could engineer a 2 microbe system, one to make cellulose from photosynthesis, the other to digest the cellulose, either in tandem to continuously produce fuel or after some harvesting. Naturally I have no idea as to the feasibility of any part of that, so don't blame me if you you're a venture capitalist and this idea goes nowhere. ;-)

can't wait for this

[OglinTatas]

yet I won't hold my breath. In the mean time, I will continue to burn B20 and SVO in my old diesel.

In addition to brewing diesel from cellulose, I would also like to see biofuels manufacturers brew butanol (with Clostridium acetobutylicum, or better) from cellulose. Seriously, it is a much better gasoline replacement than E85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol

In any case, foodstock based ethanol is the WORST FUEL SUBSTITUTE EVAR. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0512/p08s01-comv.html

If the chevy volt doesn't turn out to be a piece of shit, (yeah, good luck with that. Can GM manage NOT to make a piece of shit?) I would totally buy that for my daily commute and keep the diesel for my occasional interstate forays. Or maybe the Th!nk OX http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2008/03/think-ox-concep.html will be available in the US by then. Or maybe Toyota will get its head out of its ass and realize that not everyone thinks a hybrid is the future, and they will out-chevy-volt the chevy volt.

While I am enumerating my wish list, a 10 minute recharge battery, and start the infrastructure build-out by creating charging stations at toll-way rest areas, then add them to interstate rest areas (which tend to be 50 miles apart on most of the interstates I've traveled.) http://www.onelectriccars.com/lightning-gt-promises-10-minute-recharge/74/
That will "untether" electric cars, and is feasible with current battery technology. Then fueling stations can invest in charging devices if enough people have EVs in their area
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/fuels/electricity_locations.html

heh. I'm just rambling now...

Perfect example

[locallyunscene]

Anytime someone asks me what the point of protecting biodiversity/the rainforest/the environment I will point to this article. There are many other reasons IMO, but "tree hugger" is a derogatory term these days.

Score one for the tree huggers

[DoofusOfDeath]

I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.

If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.

Cellulose ? oh crap

[billcopc]

Too bad it doesn't run on cellulite, that would solve America's energy problems for millenia.

Your sig..

[nullchar]

I used to be your average Joe Sixpack. After 8 years of Bush, I'm now your average Joe 40-oz.

This seems funny at first, because comparing one 12 oz beer of a sixpack to a 40 oz of malt liquor yields more drinking. But, a sixpack of 12 oz beers is really 72 oz. So now I'm confused. Do you actually drink less beer now than you used to?

Re:Your sig..

[philspear]

AC is almost correct, it's an economy joke, not a "I have to drink more to forget" joke. It's more confusing to others than I anticipated. A 6 pack has more alchohol but also costs more. I'll get around to changing it eventually.

Re:Most fungi breathe oxygen, expel carbon dioxide

[Mawginty]

Except the fungus is getting its carbon from cellulose in the first place. That cellulose was made from a plant that did fix CO2 from the atmosphere. So really, any industrial application of the fungus would be only step 2 in a three step process. 1) grow cellulose 2) use fungus to turn cellulose into fuel 3) burn fuel. While steps 2 and 3 are not carbon neutral, that ignores step 1, which should make up for the deficit.

Those engines are already here....

[Hasai]

....Just look under the hood of one of DoD's tactical military vehicles. You'll find a turbocharged, multi-fuel Diesel, capable of burning anything from LH to bear grease.

....See; DoD ain't so dumb....

Re:Cellulose ? oh crap

[confused one]

Who needs fungus. Bodies burn just fine.

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!

I couldn't resist.

Systems of Plants and Fungi

[billstewart]

Well I'm lichen your idea... Technically a lichen has a fungus and something that photosynthesizes, usually algae or cyanobacterium (or sometimes both). And the nutrients that get passed back and forth usually aren't cellulose, but maybe it'd be possible to get that kind of fungus together with a plant.

Alternatively, you could combine the fungus's cellulose-to-diesel features with growing cellulose-stalked grains, so instead of using corn to produce ethanol competing with using corn for food, you'd grow the corn, keep the seeds for food, and feed the stalks and cobs to the fungus for fuel.

Re:Neat

[conspirator57]

and algae is the most abundant carbon-based vegetation, not trees and grass.

Not really that long a shot.

[RustinHWright]

If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.

The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surprised at this news.

I know that I seem like I'm exaggerating, but effective exploitation of fungus-based techniques and technology may eventually be looked upon as more important than the development of the microchip. Seriously. And unlike microchips, fungus-based systems are done every day of the year in the basements of homebrewers, many of the /.ers.

IOW, if you find this stuff interesting, you can probably join the race to develop this stuff by the end of November. Which makes me glad that I live in Portland, home of tons of biotech companies and more beermaking experts then you can shake a bottleopener at.

Hell. yeah.

Re:my head asplode

[philspear]

I guess it is partially stubborness, because we've dropped the many advantages my system has on yours, I guess I've already won ;-P

I am curious as to tissue or temporal specific promoters in plants. I'm guessing you don't know of any either. The lactose promoter would be good if you were going to make diesel from your small intestine, but of course that's not what you were suggesting, so you'd need a specific promoter, which may or may not be known. Like I said: another layer of complexity that's not an issue with microbial based methods.

So when they award the nobel for "Thinking up potential ways to make diesel fuel but not actually doing it" I'll be getting most of it, you'd get maybe an 8th. I WIN!

Re:Neat

[Bloodoflethe]

The humans are dead, already.

Re:Neat

[drwho]

Not all rain forests are 'tropical'. Sections of Chile, along with the Pacific Northwest of North America, Japan, New Zealand, and parts of China are 'temperate' rain forests.

Re:Neat

[drwho]

There is a rainforest in Patagonia. It's a temperate, as opposed to tropical, rainforest. Patagonia is a large area, and diverse, varying from near (ant)arctic to almost warm.