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Biotech Company Making Fossil Fuels With a 'Library' of Bacteria

Posted by Soulskill on from the micro-slaves dept.

Saysys sends an excerpt from a story at the Globe and Mail: "In September, a privately held and highly secretive US biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for 'a proprietary organism' – a genetically engineered cyanobacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (US) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, 'fossil fuels on demand.' ... Joule says it now has 'a library' of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has 'proven the process,' has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 US gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year."

4 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The government should pass a climate bill ASAP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    *rubs palms greedily*

  2. Re:Excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The CO2 released by burning this fuel would be CO2 that was taken from the atmosphere not from a hydrocarbon source that was naturally sequestered in the earth. Basically, it's neutral. If the bacteria eats some sort of plant then the CO2 released would be the CO2 the plant took out of the atmosphere. Example, a plant eats 5 CO2 units (sort of like a girth unit to you Brian Regan fans) to grow, the bacteria eats it and turns it into fuel, when burnt it will release 5 CO2 units. Unless you think CO2 magically appears from somewhere else.

  3. Not done yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Scaling to commercial production is the hardest part of any biotech reactor setup. Outside the lab these need to survive incidental biocontamination, survive in high waste product concentration and variable temperatures long enough to produce economical amounts of diesel. Fixing all these problems can take just as long as the initial research and grind away at investment.

  4. Re:Excellent by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The bacteria work for free, right?

    They do now, but pretty soon they'll unionise...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News