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Making Fuel With Newspapers and Bacteria
Debuting on the front page, Lifyre writes "Scientists at Tulane have found a natural bacteria (dubbed TU-103) that produces butanol. While butanol-producing bacteria aren't new, there are a few important points about this particular bacterium. It is the first natural bacteria that converts cellulose directly to butanol without the cellulose needing to be processed into sugar first, and it can do this in the presence of oxygen, which kills other butanol-producing bacteria. The simplification of the process could significantly decrease the production costs of butanol. This bacteria could allow virtually any plant product, such as newspaper or grass clippings, to be used to produce fuel for conventional vehicles."
Wouldn't it save more energy to not print so much useless paper in the first place?
in his novel "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", where a bacteria voraciously ate paper, causing paperalysis for the humans (no identity papers, no money, no books) and the death of the Earth's biosphere (because it ate all the trees).
Second, newspaper is already a fuel. It burns great. They even sell "portable grills" that are nothing more than big tin cans with some holes, into which you stuff some newspaper that you light afire and cook your hamburgers on top of.
I wonder if it's more resistant to the very butanol it produces? Some yeasts seem to have a higher tolerance for the stuff. It'll be interesting to see which, if any of these technologies take off, or if they all wind up becoming unintended vaportech.
So, we can turn old newspapers into fuel. This could create, I dunno, hundreds of gallons of fuel a year. Ok, let's say thousands. Ok ok ok, let's say a million gallons a year. This will surely make a dent in the 380 million gallons the US uses (www.eia.gov) every day.
I was going to say, this will be useful on an individual basis because it gives savvy people the opportunity to make their own fuel at home. I mean... wait a minute... I haven't bought a newspaper in probably six years. I guess I'll need to start stealing my neighbors' paper.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Using bacteria (or any other process) to rearrange the chemical bonds of a substance doesn't come free. It consumes energy.
From an environmental point of view, they should simply send the newspapers to coal power plants and burn them along with the coal. Those power plants have conversion rates of heat to electricity on the order of 40%, instead of about 25% that internal combustion engines of cars have. But of course, this is not about the environment, or even CO2.
Instead there seems to be some despair about the cheap oil reserves slipping out of US control, especially after the failure of the Iraq war to secure US supplies. Otherwise nobody would pursue such follies as butanol from paper scraps or ethanol from corn. All this is made worse by the inability of US politicians to comprehend that it is perfectly possible to have a standard of living superior to that of the US while using just about half the amount of energy per capita.
Sure, it would be the end of the American way of life as the world knew it - but that one is over anyway. These days resources have to be shared with the rest of the world. That is, the other 6 billion people outside of the OECD. And that rest of the world is growing with little signs of halting or even slowing down.
This is awesome. It means we can continue driving hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles forever.
And it's carbon-neutral!
-1 Defeatist.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Wrong.
So now here's a question: Are you yourself an American teeny-bopper making a fruitless and hypocritical effort to rebel, or are you living proof that non-Americans are every bit as capable of the stupidity for which they criticize Americans? Those are your ONLY possible choices. Any claim to the contrary is a lie.
aren't newspapers rarer than oil now?
Given that nature is, in rough approximation, a large mass of meat eating itself(with enough solar meat to save the system from heat death), I'm inclined to doubt it.
It would certainly try; but the world is already quite full indeed of vicious little organisms who want nothing more than to break the world down into its simple sugars, and the equally cunning countermeasures deployed against them by their intended victims. It is unlikely(though not 100%) impossible, that somebody's pampered little high-yield laboratory specialist would make much of a mark on the mean, mean, microbial streets...
Because not everyone wants to live in high rise apartments. Some people want a yard for their kids to play in.
Chicago's population is 2.7 million, but the metropolitan area is over 9.5 million. You can't just shove 3.5 times as many people into a city, it would be a nightmare to the infrastructure, not to mention the numerous rights violations that would be necessary to make that happen.
You've confused "sensible country" with "small country", or possibly with "country where the government routinely takes your land and tells you where to live". While there are situations in which the latter can happen in the US, it is exceedingly rare. The US is huge compared to all of Western Europe and vastly larger than any single country there.
It's one step closer to Mr. Fusion
Right? We powered locomotion by burning wood long before we powered it by burning oil.
It will use almost ANY plant matter. Farming waste such as corn stalks or grass clippings and fallen leaves from your lawn for example. Pretty much any place that can grow seasonal plants such as grasses can now be a source for fuel.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I'm picturing massive fires in landfills nationwide.
A larger component percentage of the fiber in newsprint is hemi-cellulose and lignin than cellulose. Newsprint is generally made in a mechanical process rather than a chemical process so you are going to be left with all the turpentine and tall oil in the pulp as well. Are you going to just burn the rest? It seems awfully wasteful given how expensive your process is going to be. It is generally accepted that when it comes to newsprint, it is better to burn it than to recycle it as the fuel expended in the collection of it and energy and chemicals expended to de-ink it outweigh the value of the crappy chewed up fiber you get from recovering it. I am a process engineer in a paper mill
Those were absolutely not the reasons people moved out of the cities. What you describe are nothing but the result of the wealthier people moving to the suburbs. You are confusing the result with the cause.
I was in my 20s in the 1950s when suburban American happened. I remember it very clearly. People moved to the suburbs not because they disliked the city for any of the reasons you gave, but merely because it was hyped as the thing to do.
It's really no different than Apple products today. They aren't actually any better than the alternatives. In many ways, they're actually quite inferior. But they are hyped constantly, especially in the media. People somehow think that they need to buy Apple devices, even when they don't need them, and even when they don't actually want them!
The high cost of living, crime rates, failing schools, and corruption we saw in the 1970s and 1980s was due to only the dregs of society being left behind in the cities.
Hey, there --
I recently moved into a modern (6-year-old construction) condo in Austin's urban core (actually the east side, traditionally the high-crime area), and couldn't be happier.
Cost of living - lower. Quality of living - better. Mortgage, insurance, and other expenses on my condo are quite a lot cheaper than on the house up north, I don't need to drive to get places (commuting to work and the store via train+bike is considerably cheaper), and the HOA fee includes a whole bunch of things which used to be separate bills (Internet, natural gas, trash/recycling, water, professional lawn care, etc). And I have a huge, gated courtyard (shared with the neighbors, granted) big enough for my large dog to run in -- I can lob the ball as hard as I want and not worry about it going over a fence. Moreover, things which used to be budget-busting homeownership expenses (such as tearing up and re-pouring a concrete driveway with a plumbing break under it) are not even a drop in the bucket when shared among 200 neighbors.
Crime rates? Meet gates. Ground-floor properties are commercial (or are residential units accessible only from inside the courtyard); access to the residential units means getting buzzed in. Also, having a well-lit and well-cared-for exterior means we avoid the broken window effect, such that more criminal activity takes case in places that look run-down. I had a lot more trouble in my old neighborhood in the suburban sprawl (mostly with stereo systems stolen from cars and the like) than I do here.
Failing schools? Guilty as charged, which is why my friends with kids send them to private schools or move out to the 'burbs. On the other hand, either set (both the private-school friends and the burb-school friends) are paying vastly more, via their choice of property taxes or tuition fees. The schools here are indeed not so good, but then, they're cheap; we get what we pay for.
Political corruption? Not more than anywhere else. We've got one council member who's a serious policy wonk, takes his job seriously and represents my interests almost perfectly; one who's a sock puppet for the lower-density neighborhood HOAs (and thus is my enemy, but represents someone else's interests perfectly); and several who have their faults (which, yes, sometimes do involve directing funds in popular programs in ways which might be seen as pandering to a constituency), but they're not worse as a whole than any I've seen elsewhere.
Anyhow, as for "why people moved out of the cities" -- the larger-scale answer is that massive infrastructure (such as the interstate highway system) was built subsidizing that decision, and the many of the knock-on effects acted as reinforcement. Some of the problems you discuss, such as the quality of schools, fall into the set of symptoms caused by the exodus into suburbia -- not a part of the historical underpinnings thereof.
Make it artificially inexpensive to live a long distance from work and it's little surprise that individuals react to such -- even though total costs increase when the number of miles of road, water, power, and other infrastructure needed to service a given population rises. As a result, it's us folks in the urban core subsidizing the more-expensive-per-capita infrastructure serving folks out in the sprawl! Providing economic encouragement for urban living (by way of zoning and tax incentives favoring high-density mixed-use development) is the sensible thing for cities to do if they want to decrease their long-run per-capita infrastructure expenses.
If you only looked at the prices on brand new high rises being advertised by their developers, you'd think living downtown was expensive too, though it's nothing of the sort if you buy with an eye towards affordability. Don't knock urban living until you've taken a closer look.
I don't believe this will ever actually get fuel to the pump in any reasonable quantity, but if someone ever invents a roomba powered by dog hair, I'm definitely in line for that.
But I suspect it'd weigh 800 pounds and you'd have to feed three medium-sized dogs to it to get your living room vacuumed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
and what about the cost? When I can get 5800000 Btu out of a barrel of it for 85 bucks or so, do let me know.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Wouldn't it turn all organic material on earth into fuel, if the bacteria escapes?
This is a naturally occurring bacteria. The scientists didn't make it, they found it.
That is a serious question.
No it isn't. If it was a serious question you would have at least read the summary before posting.
This probably doesn't account for all the energy, but I believe most modern paper mills are mostly self-powered from the waste products from the paper making process itself:
Black Liquor (no, not booze)
That is, they use energy extracted from the wood to run the pulp mills. Since the energy in plant matter comes from the Sun, I don't see a lot of compelling need to recycle paper. However, if it makes economic sense, sure, why not. Just in general terms, of all the products mankind creates, paper seems like the least important to recycle, in terms of energy and raw materials (can always grow more trees/hemp/whatever).
Why so mad bro?
He's walking.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Those things are the result of white flight from the suburbs, not the cause. Obviously the suburban education system isn't that great after all, it hasn't taught you anything about cause and effect, or demographic history.
IT also means that we take more time and develop a competitive an efficient alternative for them and phase these alternatives in over a period of time that wouldn't cause economic chaos and turmoil for the poor and lower end income people.
I thought of it first.
Except nobody reads newspapers anymore.
Hmmmm... I got it!
iPad-powered steam car.
I thought of it first.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The US is huge compared to all of Western Europe and vastly larger than any single country there.
If only the US was split into different regions which were governed separately...
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Why would we want to develop alternatives?
Right, that's what I was getting at. All of these 'alternative fuel' studies are for cars, but who cares about cars. 20-30 years worth of power grid and generation capacity upgrades, and some modest improvements in battery tech, and there is no reason why nearly everything on the ground wouldn't be electric. Meanwhile butanol seems to have the same desirable properties as kerosene for aviation fuel. Only slightly higher viscosity, only slightly lower energy density, great low temperature properties. The problem is the octane, which is considerably lower than kerosene, or even automobile gasoline. I assume that's why you were talking about leading it. Gas turbines, and direct injection reciprocating engines, can't knock, so low octane rating shouldn't be an issue.
The problem with suburbia is not that the people moved out of the cities - the problem is that the places they moved to are horrid mono cultures of McMansions, dropped onto the land without any regard for city planning. If the burbs were mixed neighborhoods with housing, stores, restaurants and a functioning public transit, there wouldn't be a problem at all.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Efficiency, profitability, convenience, and availability. WE can get way more efficient drive trains now if the energy delivery methods were more practical and cost effective. Gas and diesel is primarily used because of it's convenience but wastes a lot of energy. If we could come up with something that is just as portable and convenient but utilizes more efficient technology for about the same costs, then it's a win win.
One of the biggest problems with alternative energy is that it's trying to be shoehorned into a market that isn't ready for it while the technology isn't as capable or as cost effective as existing infrastructure. This can change over time, and we can have cheaper energy while also having cleaner energy and more efficient usage of it. We just need the right discoveries and and time to develop it.
We do not need to change, but we will because it will be better eventually. Something like this gives us time to wait for the better.
The difference is that nowhere else has the insane zoning system that seems popular in the USA. For some reason, suburbs in the USA end up being almost 100% residential. If you want to work or shop, you have to go out of them, and because of their size you typically need to drive. In most of the rest of the world, suburbs are a mixture of houses, small shops, and offices. They're places were were villages before the cities grew and absorbed them. You can do a lot of your shopping without having to get in a car, and a lot of people (although, of course, not everyone) can walk to work.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...anyone?
I think you're also forgetting another important factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Because it would be safe to say that in 20-30 years your ICE car is going to look like a sad old relic compared to an electric car. In addition to being less efficient and more maintenance-intensive as it is now, in the future it will also be slower. Possibly at some point it may even have a shorter range (would require several fillups while an electric car could do it all on one charge).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Did you even read the first 14 words of your link?
In many parts of the developed world, suburbs are different from the American suburb
Perhaps the first AC could have phrased it better and said "Only Americans could come up with an idea as backward and stupid as the the way Americans build suburbs."
Is 1563649 a prime number?
imagine your bacteria gets into the wild (it will eventually, of course), and mutates to the point where trees immune system cannot fight it. You have now melting forest and crops. Deadly starvation ensues.
It came from 'the wild'. RTFS.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
My thought too, but there might still be grass and trees, maybe, huh?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
No, like states.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.