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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."
Except that portable grills are not "conventional vehicles".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
Normal bacteria can do this right now. It is called a compost bin. Organic waste in, tasty garden food out. The difference is that in a compost bin, the output is stuff that your garden loves, but your car can't run on it. This new strain of bacteria that produces butanol directly. That's basically a huge step forward in the direction that is beneficial to us. It cuts out all the other bacteria steps that we would currently have to use (read: expensive and time consuming and did I say expensive?) if we want to try to convert organic waste materials into stuff that is easy for us to use as a power source.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
First off, if it is n-butanol that is being produced, the water solubility of n-butanol (at 25 C) would only allow a ~6% concentration, thus the rest would float to the surface and would be easily skimmed off in a moderately pure state. Now I don't know the temperature dependence of the solubility so perhaps this wouldn't be practical at fermentation temperatures.
Similar research is being done by Dr. Shota Atsumi et. al; they produced an organism with an engineered metabolic pathway which can produce isobutyraldehyde. This compound has a lower boiling point such that at the elevated temperatures of fermentation it is easily distilled from the culture without having to kill or filter the bacteria. Again, the issue of culture toxicity due to the metabolic product is avoided through in situ purification of the product.
That's a nice fantasy, but in other parts of the world like Canada, since we're voracious paper users. We long ago(90 odd years ago) figured out that using untreated pulp mixed with mulch, and compost is a good way to get rid of it.
Om, nomnomnom...
I can't wait to go the gas station and pump newspapers into my car!
aren't newspapers rarer than oil now?
Yes, cellulose is a polymer of simple sugars. However most organisms lack the enzymes to break the chain up into its individual units. Ruminants and termites have symbiotic bacteria that digest it for them, and some species of fungus can break down cellulose (think mushrooms on a fallen tree) but as it stands, using cellulosic feedstocks require breaking up the chain via enzymes (expensive) or acids (nasty) so that bacteria can utilize it. And yes, newspaper does burn quite well, but I'd like to see you stuff it in your gas tank.
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.
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
"First, cellulose is a sugar."
No. It's a polymer of simple sugars.
What you said is like saying starch is a sugar. It's also a polymer of simple sugars.
Take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar#Chemical
You might as well say protein is an amino acid since it's a polymer of amino acids. It's the same thinking and just as wrong.
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.
more to the point, we'd like to see him stuff rolls of newspapers into his "it's just sugar" face for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and see how much energy he gets.
This story has nothing in particular to do with newspaper. They just spun it that way because if you want to use cellulose for biofuel, the first question is where to get the cellulose? Slash and burn the rainforests to make farmland? Take over land that was producing food for hungry people? So, starting with examples of waste cellulose is a tactic to head off those questions. How much waste cellulose is actually available, I don't know.
Nobody seems to have mentioned what this fuel will give off when it is burned. If it still produces nasty greenhouse gases then it doesn't solve any problem that matters.
But if it uses organic matter from plants, those plants have already pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it "carbon-neutral".
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
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.
Actually, this would be very inefficient farming materials specifically for the cause. However, every existing food farm (that's right corn, wheat, and all) has a left over product called silage. This is the parts of the stalks and such that generally gets ground up and dumped back into the field. Some farmers will attempt to collect this and use it for animal bedding or feed. Not all of it is compatible with feed and most animals will snub it given the chance.
Anyways, an existing corn field in good growing conditions could yield as much as 16 tons of silage per acre. And that's while growing food crops (despite the majority of corn grown isn't meant for human consumption). Now don't confuse refuse silage as cover crop silage which is a bit different in strategy.
Either way, there is a lot of untapped cellulose wast that could be somewhat easily moved into a program like this.
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.
Too messy? Too expensive? Too slow to grow?
Yes, that's pretty much it. Lots of soot-producing compounds (that's why they make charcoal; it burns cleanly as a result of all the non-carbon stuff having been cooked off), the transport is expensive, and trees take too long to grow. Some kind of cane is probably the best bet, but then you've got to dehydrate it.
That used to happen in the U.S. until some "genius" had the bright idea of making recycling mandatory. Now we pay someone to collect recycling and recycling has started to consume more energy and resources than it saves.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison