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Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed Into Ethanol
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel. Researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have now taken the first step to exploit the natural advantages of seaweed. They have built a microbe capable of digesting it and converting it into ethanol or other chemicals. Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel."
so thats the fuel problem solved then
Errrrrrrrrrr well i seem to recall an article right here on slashdot not more that a couple of weeks ago saying that what was it E39 or whatever they cal ethanol in the US was bieng done away with as it was not a good fuel ..
That article was about making biofuel from corn. The bottom line there is that growing the corn and fermenting it to create ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
This is about using a genetically engineered stomach organism to convert seaweed. Truly the parallels are astounding.
Try whatever tabletop approach catches your fancy but in the real world lignin just doesn't scale up to anything approaching meaningful commercial volumes
From the summary:
Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel.
Not long ago I watched a TV program that presented the work of Japanese scientist Izuru Senaha . He have found that seaweed grows optimally at 2% CO2 concentration (72 times the normal concentration in sea water). They use method (developed by Masanori Hiraoka) where the seaweeds are in constant motion to boost their growth.
He is making experiments by collecting CO2 from local power plants and using it to grow seaweed.
It would make a lot more sense to have farms for rapid growth than having to collect seaweed from the ocean.
This method alone could be great for collecting the carbon from the air and making it into solid form (thus reversing the greenhouse effect). But that would not be profitable on its own.
Even if it was a sea dwelling organism lab strains can not usually compete with wild ones they are bread to survive best under much more friendly conditions and so get out-competed and eaten promptly. This is a problem for some projects, there was one where they had to keep on re-adding the G.M. microbes to the area to make it work (soil leaching heavy metals to "reclaim" ground).
NB. The situation is even more extreme for "nano-machines" witch in nature would be defenseless and eaten too quickly to measure. The gray goo horror story with nano-machines which cover and eat nearly everything has already happened, bacteria got their first and once they coved everything they then adapted to try and kill each other off to get more space. Any larger organism merely temporally hods them back and the moment you die they come to re-claim you.