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Researchers Develop Biofuel Alternative To Ethanol
coondoggie writes "Researchers say they have developed a method of using bacteria to convert decaying grass directly into isobutanol, which can be burned in regular car engines with a heat value higher than ethanol but similar to gasoline. The research could mean great savings in processing costs and time, plus isobutanol is a higher grade of alcohol than ethanol, according to the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory"
Unfortunately that fuel, destroys in long run the car engine even faster that ethanol.
Their marketing department might need to think of a snappier name than 'Isobutanol'
Wasn't there an identical article a few weeks ago? Like Fusion power, this seems to come up all the time but until something is in production it's not really news...
Some grassoline that most of us can use. I've been intrigued by the biodiesel movement for some time now, but there are so few Diesel cars available for purchase in this country that it hasn't even been worth considering for me. If this will burn in a regular gas engine, though...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We need a remake of "Gasoline Alley Bred":
Isobutanol Alley Bred.
It'll be another hit. I can see it now.
"Step on the iso and let's get out of here!"
I am anarch of all I survey.
Just'a good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Yes, isobutanol provides many benefits over ethanol and petrol, but there's bound to be an IP issue pretty much any time these days, as Gevo is currently finding out. Of course at a time when solutions are needed fast.
Perhaps (un)surprisingly BP is the plaintiff here...
http://corporate.lexisnexis.com/news/corporate-counsel,intellectual-property/cat200003_doc1373404955.html
And it wasn't even a functioning goatse. Kids these days.
Program Intellivision!
To grow enough fuel to make New York drive on biofuel for a month, we will need to a full year of production
of a field twice the size [tinyurl.com] of Texas.
Its nice, yea, but really, the only way to save our butt from peak oil/global warming is to decrease energy consumption dramaticaly.
Like live next to work, use bicycles, etc...
Remember these Pentium 4D 150 W heaters?
Subsidies in jeopardy, kill the research!!!! kill the researchers!!!
Its a start, I suppose, but all energy is expensive, messy, and finite when implemented by civilization at large. Perhaps a calorie saved is a calorie earned and we should focus on the social engineering required to organize human lives in a way that does not require so much expenditure of resources, Biological, Green, or Toxic. We require very little as individual biological entities, and yet we consume a million times that much resource in order to drive and fly in circles all day long. Bacterial fuels won't solve the problems we cause by retarded urban planning and lifestyles. Neither will antibiotics, although it might be a deal breaker for the bacteria.
I don't want the octane level in my alcohol to be closer to gasoline. I want high octane numbers so I can either run a higher compression ratio or jack the boost.
Switched to different mirror - link works now - enjoy
Let me know when is in production. Until there, stop these news. Even myself made hydrogen from water once in the school - but I never selled it to a news site. ;)
OK it probably won't completely replace oil. Big whoop. It can still do some good.
We are currently throwing away a ton of green waste each year. From grass clippings to corn husks we already have bio mass that could be fuel. Lets use it.
are backing this process? Because they're going to be up against some huge opposition from the big agribusiness firms plus Big Oil.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Now, if they came up with GALT bacteria that would convert food into caffeine directly in your (my) gut it would be a real revolution on the global energy market!
this has been posted a number of times. don't spam us bro.
If IP battles are going to go on in such a raging manner it will be decades before we (as consumers) see anything useful come out of these technologies.
Hmm... The plaintiffs are BP and DuPont. Do you think that "decades" might be the whole point?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The real breakthrough we need isn't growing bacterial to produce fuel. We already know how to do that quite well. The trick is scaling it up to practical volumes. Generally speaking bacterial who waste energy on producing fuel for us humans tend to be pretty fragile and finicky.
This is not a substantial improvement over ethanol; the issue is not the fuel quality or energy density. The problem is in separating the alcohol from the water, be it a mixture of H2O/EtOH or H2O/iso-butanol. It is an unavoidable complication of using living organisms to produce a water-soluble fuel. Separation requires extraordinary amounts of energy via distillation. Moreover, alcohols have a tendency to attract water -- and keep it there. This is bad news for things like engines (RUST!) and fuel lines that can get gummed up. I fail to see any reason this is a noteworthy advancement of fuels.
Considering ethanol was pushed by Monsanto to give them a market for their genetically tainted corn (given that the EU won't touch it), how can they get their fingers into this new alternative biofuel?
I have nothing else useful to say about ethanol. Won't it be nice when the government runs out of funny money and the sheisters vanish back into the holes from whence they emerged?
How will this affect my Civic's mpg? Increase/decrease/ruin my engine?
Maybe i could use it to power my lawn mower.
Its nice, yea, but really, the only way to save our butt from peak oil/global warming is to decrease energy consumption dramaticaly.
Like live next to work, use bicycles, etc...
There are many who have no vision. I suggest that you read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The western world has a tendency to have entire industries disappear when new technology comes along.
There are a number of significant innovations under development that will make the oil industry (as we know it) obsolete.
I personally am expecting a Tesla-powered car:
This is light-years beyond what's offered by the pretenders to Tesla's legacy.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Generally speaking bacterial who waste energy on producing fuel for us humans tend to be pretty fragile and finicky.
I'd like to see you try to stay alive in high concentrations of any fuel capable of being produced by bacteria.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Can I drink it?
Google, "Klebsiella planticola alcohol". tl;dr this bacterium is important to everything we know and love, namely plants. Some engineers made a version that rapidly decomposed un-needed plant matter and created alcohol at the same time. win-win, or more correctly lose-lose as there was no negative feedback loop in place to stop it from attacking non-dead plant matter. Had it gotten out and infected a plant population it would have turned all plant matter, living or dead into a nice big booze swamp. It would be 40 proof as far as the eye could see, which wouldn't be too far because you would be dead.
Humans are accident prone and short sighted. Can you write code with no bugs the first time?
your automobile will be able to go far and high on grass.
Links to goatse.
So far they only have lab experiments. Nothing is in production yet. It is quite possible that they will have a similar issue as with hydrocarbons produced by algae. When they tried to scale up to production level contaminants cause the good algae to die. Promising; yes. Production; not yet and maybe never.
This is what makes me weep when I read these articles. Good ideas will be shut down. Its almost a totalitarian rule, if you will. The more prudent article would be "HOW an alternative energy can go fist to fist with big oil."
Like live next to work, use bicycles, etc.
People keep saying this like it is a practical alternative. Everybody just waves a magic wand and <poof> our energy use drops. Basically, that's an idea that is already OBE and isn't going to happen on any large scale in the next few decades. For example, Atlanta is a big example of urban sprawl, with close to six million people in the metro area. How many trillions of dollars would have to be spent to somehow redesign/rebuild/relocate the city and its populace?
There's some kind of world-saving bio-energy breakthru just about every day, and yet... no billions of gallons being produced to burn in our cars NOW. Ho... hum... believe it when I see it...
This stuff will make it out sooner than later. The oil age is going to fizzle quickly -- either through demand-driven depletion, inflationary undersupply or geopolitical instability. Replacements will be in demand and too economically competitive to get stashed away in Warehouse 13 by Big Oil, Inc.
Don't click the link.
You mean, don't copy that floppy
BS. People can only conserve so much before they will give you the middle finger. For every gallon I save of water, it just means one more gallon the golf course gets.
Want to know how to solve the energy problem? Nuclear reactors. Yes it drives the hippies batshit, but it is carbon neutral, breeder reactor technology means that there is very little high level toxic waste, and it runs constantly day in and day out. To boot, it is scalable.
I laugh when people talk about using bicycles. Good luck with that in most US cities. Of course, I'm sure the answer will be ordering people to sell their suburban homes and move into urban hellholes. There is a reason people GTFO out of city cores, and that is that most cities are unsafe, unless it is a part of town where only the millionaires can afford to live.
Nuclear power is the solution to our energy issues, and the people in the way of it are either oil company shills, or "enviro-whiners" who are brainwashed by the first group.
If plants are eating grass then I think we should probably look into that problem instead.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
In Soviet Russia, floppy copy you! /groan
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
If I understand correctly, one of the major problem with ethanol from corn is that corn requires fertilizer, and fertilizer these days comes from natural gas. Or to put it another way, ethanol is a fossil fuel! One of the other problems with ethanol is that it takes land that could be used for growing food and converts it to land used for growing fuel.
How is this grass-based fuel any different? To make it in large quantities won't we still need fossil fuel based fertilizers and large tracts of land?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Love to see the citation on this one. It'd be news to me.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
It's not just big oil though. As an analyst said on the radio the other day "if the first primary were held in idaho I guess we'd be burning ethanol made from potatoes". The corn lobby has a vested interest in burning food to drive up prices, and as sad as it is, they have been pandered to.
This is a Government-funded paper, but it's behind a paywall. The price is $20.
There are lots of biotech schemes for digesting cellulose into something more useful, but so far, none of them are cheap enough.
If I remember correctly, a couple of the proposed crops for making cellulosic ethanol are switchgrass and miscathus, and they both grow fine without human intervention. Switchgrass is native to North America. My understanding is that either crop could be used on land that isn't actively being farmed for food crops or that is "resting" for a few years as part of a normal crop rotation cycle.
Ever heard of compost?
If this grass or process can benefit from using arable land and irrigation, then please no.
The biofuel thing has always mystified me. If there are two things in the world that are more scarce and fundamental to life than oil, they've got to be arable land and irrigation water. The corn ethanol thing caused all sorts of havoc in farming and food pricing, particularly with international farmers destroying staple food crops to grow fuel plants and selling corn to oil producers instead of families. This is not the way of the future.
If this grass can grow in otherwise unusable land, and it can grow without diverting otherwise useful drinking or irrigation water, then fine. I'm very skeptical that even if that is technically possible that it will play out as such once the prices come in and farmers have to choose between taking money from poor hungry people or rich gas guzzlers.
Can we just abstract the whole fuel source thing and skip to all-electrics like the Tesla and power them with... nuclear? solar? hydroelectric? wind? geothermal? hamsters?
Cheers
Isobutanol is not very soluble in water (87 g/L) - I wonder if this process also avoids the need for distillation? Distillation is the most energy-intensive part of bio-ethanol production.
If it doesn't separate, distillation will really suck, since it's boiling point (107.89 C) is higher than water.
Or, you know, build some modern nuclear power plants.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Sorry, recombination happens all the time in bacteria. It's hardly news. At least, they were teaching us about it in introductory cell biology at Cambridge in 1969, and the textbook was already years old.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No matter how much is spent on cities, if they become uneconomic they will eventually be abandoned.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
LD50 for isobutanol is 2460 mg/kg.
The orally lethal dose in humans of pure ethylene glycol is approximately 1.4 mL/kg.
"Higher" alcohol usually means that it has more carbon atoms --- 4 in this case vs. 2 for ethanol.
I would say that isobutanol is a "better" alcohol for fueling cars than ethanol because it has a higher energy density, doesn't evaporate as much and doesn't suck water out of the air.
Engineering Corynebacterium glutamicum for isobutanol production
or pdf download:
doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2522-6
It's really quite simple. Just bomb it flat and impoverish the population so that the majority of people don't have cars, just bicycles.
Then, rebuild the city with this in mind.
It worked great for Munich, things were tough for 10 years or so, but once they got over it, they now have a modern city with full cycling infrastructure baked in...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The killer for ethanol is that you have to distill it from a water. bacteria produced Isobutanol is also in a water solution and will have to be distilled. Isobutanol has a long history of industrial use, it's a paint-thinner. It used to be produced from bacteria but inorganic production from methane was cheaper. Nothing has changed here.
I read "The Daemon" and "Freedom" ( http://thedaemon.com/ ) in one night each. They give me the same sinking feeling of doom I had back when I first realized how insecure computers were. And they're where I first heard about isobutanol being used as a biofuel.
Gas! Fuel! Gasoline! Thousands of gallons of it! ... miles from here! Pumping it, they are! Refining!
As much as you want!
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
AFAIK, all food-based ethanol is a net negative in terms of energy. It only makes any sense now because the fuel-input side of the equation is relatively cheap; Federal subsidies and mandatory ethanol at the pump are the only reason there's any profit at all for farmers and distillers.
Once the fuel-input side of the equation (farm equipment, fertilizer, pesticides) is high enough, there'll be no amount of subsidies to make ethanol work at any economic level.
Your shit is more appropriate for plants.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Biodiesel is essentially harvested solar energy, packaged in chemical form, with an efficiency that is probably comparable to solar panels. Worse, sunlight and resources devoted to growing grass is sunlight and resources not growing food. We can, and will, grow some of our fuel, but at nowhere near the scale, nor at the same energy return, as oil.
Biofuel is one answer, but it's a small one-word, vaguely apologetic answer lost in the din. You want to generate energy? Think "nuclear."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If it's more profitable, what do you think corn growers will do? If you said 'grow grass instead of corn' you are correct. Which means it's displacing food.
Now here is the kicker:
Even if they could get 10 times the biofuel, or even 100 times the biofuel per care then any other grown product, and converted every piece of arable land to grow it, it STILL wouldn't be enough to meet are needs.
Biofuels as we know it are not a realistic alternative.
When they create bacteria that gets fuel from the CO2 in the air, then we will have an alternative...but even THAT would be very temporary.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Either the grass could have been used as food for animals which could have been used as food for humans, or it was grown on land that could have been used to grow food for humans.
Usable land is the limiting factor in the end.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Tesla Power is a fascinating on-the-edge-of science topic to read about, related to Schumann resonances . Like a giant Tesla coil, the atmosphere acts as an electronmagnetic resonance cavity bounded by the surface and the ionosphere with resonance frequencies starting at 7.5Hz, and upwards.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
No, it won't because it DOESN"T MAKE ANY SENSE TO USE BIOFUELS. we can NOT get enough energy out of it and have land left for food.
And you, like may of these idiots, seem to think turning land agricultural uses into a MORE profitable plant would be stoped by Agriculture? WTF? do you even THINK about what you post?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I highly doubt any savings will be passed on to the consumer.
Reply to That ||
Yes, but can nuclear power plants power your car? Biodiesel is good for that, and is probably better than an electric car that you have to charge every 100 miles.
Not every restaurant. A lot of them are more than willing to negotiate with locals to avoid paying someone to take the oil away.
If I had mod points I would mod you down for you subject line on principle.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
In the US, huge chunks of farmland are devoted to growing food to feed to animals which we then eat. If we're making an efficiency argument, the vegetarians win. There's something on the order of a 10 or 20 to 1 energy loss in eating the animal instead of the plants directly.
Nuclear is a good idea, but here in the US we have way too many left-over fears of Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island to be rational any more. Also: every US power plant is custom-built, rather than in France where they've got a standard plan. The last nail for nuclear is that about 50% of the current supplies are from decommissioned Soviet era nukes - we're running out of those rapidly, so we'd need to open new mines in a hurry.
the ethanol industry wouldn't exist except 4 massive gummint subsidies:-( fucking waste of money, not 2 m2ntion fucking over people who eat corn:-(
Nope. Sugarcane ethanol gives you about 8x as much energy out as you put in (source). sugar beets are almost as good and can be grown anywhere in the US.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
with an efficiency that is probably comparable to solar panels.
The efficiency of biodiesel is at best 1/10 that of solar panels. Not that it matters, though.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It'd be nice if the article had actual sources, nowhere does it link to the research or say who the "researchers" actually are.
~Syberz
Even cheap ass generic soybean oil is way more than a dollar a gallon, to say nothing of the cost of the other ingredients. Some people may be able to get free used oil from their local greasy spoon (it's less available than you think), but that solution simply doesn't scale. There's not enough waste oil coming out of the restaurant business to fuel very many cars.
... how many Chinese restaurants are there in your town? And how many drivers?
There's just not enough used vegetable oil out there to even put a dent in our fuel consumption.
Being as how they're the ones who would now have a huge market for what's currently considered a waste product...
The A.B.E. process has been around for a while, producing acetone, butanol and ethanol via bacteria. I seem to recall some improvements on the process which create an end product which is entirely butanol. Why is isobutanol better than butanol?
Dyson Racing, in conjunction with BP (their sponsor), ran biobutanol in the experimental class 2 years ago at Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta. It has since been added to the list of approved fuels, and they won overall with a biobutanol powered car last year at Mid Ohio.
Efficiency only goes so far. We need more energy. If this won't scale and soler and wind don't scale, we are pretty much left with nuclear power. It will scale to the population's needs.
Got sources?
Normal gasoline / diesel is the same harvested solar energy, that has been digested by dead dinos and altered by heat / pressure. So even gasoline / diesel of the non-biofuel variety are still just energy carriers.
No, there's no scale to it but as someone has pointed out, most new cars can't use it anyway so no biggie. That said, I'm also doing algae oil production(using both Botryococcus braunii and Spirulina strains) and at least the oil from Botryococcus can be "cracked" into diesel(real diesel, not technically bio), kerosene and gasoline. I have a refinery about 70 miles from my house and they'll essentially take what I give them and give me the finished product for a small fee; 200 gallons minimum though.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Try clicking the link. the 8x figure is on page 2.
As for the sugar beets bit, they're currently grown mostly in Michigan and surrounding states.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
kudzu, and the entire South would nominate you for a Nobel Prize.
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