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Producing Gasoline With Metabolically-Engineered Microorganisms
An anonymous reader writes "For many decades, we have been relying on fossil resources to produce liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and many industrial and consumer chemicals for daily use. However, increasing strains on natural resources as well as environmental issues including global warming have triggered a strong interest in developing sustainable ways to obtain fuels and chemicals. A Korean research team led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) reported, for the first time, the development of a novel strategy for microbial gasoline production through metabolic engineering of E. coli."
My poop already comes out black and tarry. Turning it into crude oil is the next logical step.
No sig today...
The carbon released by burning this gasoline would have been pulled out of the atmosphere by the bacteria- making the process carbon neutral. The problem with fossil fuels is that you're taking carbon that sitting quietly underground and putting it into the atmosphere.
Can you imagine if an invasive form of e.coli that produces large amounts of alkanes displaced e.coli normally occupying the lower bowels? Farts would become much more entertaining!
Bucket seats could take on a new meaning as well...
We can already make Butanol, a 1:1 replacement for gasoline, via the ABE process. The feedstock is any organic material. But we can't actually buy any, because Gevo and Butamax (a holding company owned by BP and Dupont) are fighting over the patents — which should have failed the test for obviousness.
Why would this process wind up any different?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Obviously it helps the greenhouse problem by killing off the dirty masses of the poors. Without them exhaling CO2, the air will be clean and pure for his fellow plutocrats.
The article mentions that people have created hydrocarbons like this before. The problem is always scaling up from lab scale to industrial scale. If the price of oil doubles, this kind of technology might be cost competitive. If oil stays anywhere close to where it is now, I seriously doubt we'll see this make any impact.
you're taking carbon that [was] sitting quietly underground
A fact that has always given me mild amusement. Our current trend of releasing the CO2 from fossil fuels is just repairing the damage caused by prehistoric vegetation, which absorbed the natural CO2 from the atmosphere and replaced it with harmful oxygen.
Surely, our ethical duty is to return the Earth to its former glory!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It does solve the problem. Atoms are not create or destroyed thru normal chemical means, biology as we know it is pretty much all chemical. All the carbon in the gasoline has to come from somehwere; if you make the somewhere the same atmosphere you dump it into when the gasoline is burned than you don't net out any new carbon in the atmosphere. This is what people mean when they say "carbon neutral" not that carbon isn't part of the process, just that the overall process takes out as much as it puts in.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If gasoline can be used in a carbon neutral way why get off it at all? It would be essentially rendered harmless.
What you want to use ecologically horrific batteries everywhere?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
We could use only plants that are relatively unchanged over millions of years and whose only close relatives are fossils. We could call it living fossil fuel!
The bacteria, or the material they consume will ultimately have extracted carbon from the air... If production and consumption are roughly equal then you end up with a closed loop. The only problem with fossil fuels is that production is much slower than consumption.
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yeah, another ignorant green reaction.
First, Fossil Fuel is what comes from the ground after millions of years of biological decay. Nothing today will create "fossil" fuel.
Second, taking CO2 that we have released into the atmosphere and turning it back into hydrocarbon fuel will close the loop so that things will at least not get worse. It might not do a lot to remove 100+ years of excessive burning of fossil fuels, but at least will help to reach a balance where we might be able to remove as much CO2 as we put into the air from burning fuels moving forward. If we reach a balance like that, then nature can do the rest to remove the excessive CO2.
Abandoning hydrocarbons is not a solution. Hydrocarbons are a highly concentrated and relatively easy to transport and store form of energy and ALL other forms of energy production are a lot less efficient in the long run to create the energy we need. That isn't going to change, ever. I would even suggest that being able to hook in solar or wind energy and having them produce hydrocarbons using some process is better than simply abandoning burning "fuel" and relying solely on something that only makes energy when the sun shines or the wind blows.
A system to create a closed cycle where CO2 is released but then pulled back to create fuel is what our civilization needs, not an ignorant reactionary myopic solution like "fossil fuel is bad" so ride a bike bullshit.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Does that include the eradication of H. Sapiens?
No sig today...
Not true. The problem isn't that we're pumping co2 into the atmosphere, it's that we're pumping co2 into the atmosphere that was sequestered millions of years ago. If we had a process to remove carbon from the atmosphere today only to put it back a week from now, that's effectively a zero impact.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
Isn't that just going to delay the production of more oil? We need bodies in the ground to get the process started.
Why? Seriously, why? I get it that hippies hate cars, and by extension hate gasoline, but lets ignore them.
Here's the perfect ideal: a desert gourd that slowly fills with gasoline over the season. Every year the farmer harvests the crop. It's the perfect solar battery for transportation. What downside would you imagine for this plan?
Also, here's a free clue: Central Committees with Five Year Plans are always the worst approach to anything. Let researchers work on each idea that seems promising (there's certainly no shortage of battery research!), and shed the whole idea of some Central Decider.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I wouldn't go so far as to say competent, but a petri dish loaded with e. coli would be an improvement over many of our current politicians. At least the petri dish can only harm you if you ingest some of it.
Look, organically produced hydrocarbons, whether from poop, algae or [insert plant of your choice], are still either directly or indirectly dependent on the sun as an energy collector. As such, they are simply inefficient solar energy collection devices that produce a chemical as their output.
All still require infrastructure, water, sunlight and land, which would otherwise be used for human cropland or to support a natural ecology.
So, this might be great for something about the scale of a farm where the outputs weren't being put to any use, but don't expect to significantly add to civilization's energy budget.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
'cept that you only need to pay car insurance if you choose to own a car, and then only if you drive on regulated roads...
You need to pay this other insurance if you choose to continue to exist...
Stop being a dipwad pretending that PelosiCare is just like car insurance. It makes you look pathetic.
"His name was James Damore."
Soil quality is extremely easy to solve. Everyone wants to use pesticides and herbicides out the ass, mostly petrol-based shit and chemical shit and dangerous plant derived shit etc. There are other ways.
Every time I open this argument, somebody comes along with the "Green Revolution" that started all of this heavily-scienced lab bullshit that apparently saved the world from starvation. That's all well and good, but that doesn't mean that's the only direction we can take science; it doesn't all have to happen in a beaker, and we've made great strides in natural science research since then. We know more about the biosphere, and thus can leverage various attributes in new ways.
Bad soil. Let's attack bad soil first.
Farmers have access to a lot of manure. Cow manure, sheep manure, goat shit, chicken shit, the like. They also have access to non-useful plant matter, although some of that goes to ethanol. Farmers will tend to plow manure into the land; good. Do that. Skip the petrol, do this more. We have a lot of regulations here about plowing "natural fertilizer" into the land: it all needs to be used at once in the beginning of the season; this is unsustainable because farmers will add more manure to the top of the land throughout the season, and don't know how much to use in the beginning. This is a real thing. We've had legislative arguments on it. The legislature wants to prevent run-off of cow-shit-based nitrogen sources into the bay here, because algae growth from fertilizer run-off is a real problem; unfortunately, they're encouraging farmers to use chemical nitrogen sources, which doesn't help.
So, drop the chemical fertilizers. Use more cow shit.
Step two: Worms. European Night Crawlers will dig deep into the soil. We bin them as an invasive species, but I don't believe the damage is as bad as people think. There's talk about how worms accelerate the nitrogen cycle in forests and will cause biosphere changes; but I believe that the research is too young to produce anything intelligent and that everything here is conjecture and knee-jerk reaction. I'll add mine to the pile: the forests aren't collapsing overnight and they won't. New seedlings that can handle the new nitrogen cycle better will out-compete new seedlings that can't; over time, the forests will shift toward plants that can better handle living with earthworms, and no major crisis will occur.
European Night Crawlers move through deeper soil, consuming soil and killing bacteria on the soil. They consume the bacteria as food and leave behind processed, crushed soil containing remaining bits of destroyed bacteria and crushed matter. The soil is better aerated, has a high nutrient availability, holds water better, drains better, and is easier for plant roots to take hold in. The soil is effectively cultivated (turned, tilled, etc.) and fertilized continuously. This means ENC greatly improve soil quality.
Red Wigglers are another type of worm. These feed on bacteria present in rotting matter--plant matter that's rotted and softened, or manure. Essentially, Red Wigglers process rotting (i.e. composting) matter into high-quality soil; ENC process soil into high-quality soil, and will further enrich the soil that Red Wigglers produce. Thus manure and hummus tilled into the top layer of soil provides a high-quality basis for a long-running enrichment process that produces and maintains extremely high-quality soil during the growing season.
Our industry is such that we can do this at home and get better quality farm land than farmers have. We have tiny little plots of land in our back yard gardens. There is not a massive, ginormous scale worm farming industry in our country; we can't supply the worms for this (although, given a big stacked worm bed and enough input feed, we could breed enough worms in under a year to support the whole farming industry; they breed fucking fast). Our farming industry also relies largely on petrol and chemical fertilizers; however w
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It depends on what the feedstock is. A good example of a bad feedstock is corn for ethanol, it takes a lot of land, water and fertilizer. The fertilizer itself takes a good deal of fuel to make and transport and really cuts into the effectiveness of reducing fuel consumption. But it's still economically viable because of the corn subsidies, so we still have it.
Some examples of better feedstock might be switch grass or algae, though I'm sure there are major concerns with those as well, or we'd be seeing more of them.
Well even if it's carbon neutral, it's still not healthy to breathe. We can get better use and collection of harmful exhaust if it's in a centralized location rather than lots of little ones. It also reduces our flexibility for energy, so we don't get the advantages of power plant improvements.
What you want to use ecologically horrific batteries everywhere?
Because batteries are recyclable? Look at lead-acid batteries and lead content in the environment. We solved that problem by recycling them and now the bulk of the material used in new lead-acid batteries comes from the old ones.
Every job has different requirements and we'll need to use multiple fuels for the different jobs. Gasoline has many good qualities and we should use it (if we can make it like this) for those. But I highly doubt we can make enough to completely replace the current demand.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You do know that Social Security is completely paid for, has always been, through the soc sec trust fund (simplifying here)? The government borrows from social security! Not is it not " financially unfeasible" as you seem to think, but is't been (very) solvent for over 60 years, and with some relatively small adjustments, will be that way for ever.
But I read the rest of your nonsense, and it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't know this.
Actually, this will end up as a carbon sink:
1) Plants are grown for their sugars to feed into this process (carbon sequestered from atmosphere into the roots left in the soil after harvesting, and into animals that the resulting cellulose will be fed to after sugar extraction).
2) Sugar (carbon) from step (1) is fed to the modified E. Coli to make gasoline. "Dead" E. Coli sludge could be used in animal feed, or processed into fertilizer for (1).
3) Gasoline from step (2) is then used for cars/trucks.
The problem is not "gasoline as a fuel", but the "extract carbon from natural sequestration to GET gasoline" that is the issue.
As an energy storage system, gasoline is REALLY hard to beat.
For its energy density, it is one of the safest energy storage systems we have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Everybody dies once. It's always expensive.
The cost to society is that those that die early don't keep paying taxes for their lost days.
So what we want it to encourage smoking, drug taking and obesity among the net takers (bottom 75% and already retired) and discourage it among the net payers (top 25%, still working).
Perverse economic incentives are everywhere. Careful what you wish for.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Reagan's ERs must take everyone already did that.
Smokers are actually cheap, so are the obese. Those healthy bastards live forever and cost a fortune in care when they get old.
Hey now, /. exists entirely to argue about things there's no point in arguing about.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is exactly how Joules Energy is doing this, only with blue-green algae (cyanobacteria). The advantage of using cyanobacteria is that it uses the sun and our sewage for feed stock. OTOH, by doing e-coli, they will have to feed it corn and other energy expensive feedstock.
My guess is that since Joules Energy made the announcement 2 years ago about what they had worked towards for the previous 8 years, that South Korea is simply playing catch up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
obviously. H. Sapiens is a parasitic species
Well few parasitic species recognize their nature and actively try to change it....sort of like this article describes?
That's not entirely true. While few species actively recognize themselves as parasitic, there are many examples of parasitic species that adapt to their new environment in ways that are beneficial to the host species/environment. Not only are you currently crawling with species that were originally purely parasitic, you could not survive without them.
That's some pretty good delusion there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials
Let us know when batteries get a 60x improvement in energy density.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Or mine rare earth minerals required in modern batteries?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Bad soil. Let's attack bad soil first.
Farmers have access to a lot of manure. Cow manure, sheep manure, goat shit, chicken shit, the like. They also have access to non-useful plant matter, although some of that goes to ethanol. Farmers will tend to plow manure into the land; good. Do that. Skip the petrol, do this more. We have a lot of regulations here about plowing "natural fertilizer" into the land: it all needs to be used at once in the beginning of the season; this is unsustainable because farmers will add more manure to the top of the land throughout the season, and don't know how much to use in the beginning. This is a real thing. We've had legislative arguments on it. The legislature wants to prevent run-off of cow-shit-based nitrogen sources into the bay here, because algae growth from fertilizer run-off is a real problem; unfortunately, they're encouraging farmers to use chemical nitrogen sources, which doesn't help.
So, drop the chemical fertilizers. Use more cow shit.
That sounds just great in a hippy-dippy communish sort of way... There are a lot of practical issues with it, however. The largest being specialization in the areas of farming. The farmers that grow a thousand acres of corn/soybeans are not the same farmers that have heards of cows/pigs. The cow/pig farms generally are not the farmers that have thousands of acres of crops. So, unlike Slashdot, there is just not enough shit to go around.. at least with the farmers that need it.
Much to the mods discredit, you're more ignorant than the GP.
Hydrocarbons are a highly concentrated and relatively easy to transport and store form of energy and ALL other forms of energy production are a lot less efficient in the long run to create the energy we need.
You seem to have driving range confused with efficiency. I should also note that what comes out of the tailpipe is polluting in ways other than CO2 emissions.
And "TheSkepticalOptimist" doth protest too much about CO2. Here is a sample of your concern over global warming:
OMG, Ice is 6th lowest since we decided to give a rat's ass about it. But hey, it was lower 5 more times than now but the green alarmists won't consider that an upward trend.
Recorded history is only 0.00000000625% total of actual history, give or take a few zillionths of a percentage.
GP's confusion at least seems honest compared with the way you keep taking cheap shots at "greens"... even if they're peer-reviewed scientists.
What is not natural is supernatural.
What is supernatural is magic.
Per Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Therefore, any of our technology that is insufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from being natural. To a sufficiently-advanced alien civilization, our adorable little skyscrapers are simply the natural result of our natural building instinct.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's not so much that as soil viability. We already manage soil by round-up treating the field, tilling everything over, planting seeds, repeated round-up treatment from time to time if the crop is round-up ready, etc. We also till organic fertilizer (cow shit) into the soil at the first run, and later add chemical fertilizer as needed. We also apply pesticides by air spraying.
We do this for crop density, but it's not a great practice to keep the soil viable. Too much chemical herbicide treatment and soil depletion. The soil is kept viable by the addition of chemical fertilizers and a lesser addition of organic matter. My suggestion is merely that we could greatly improve soil viability by using more organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.) between crops and applying worms for continuous enrichment; this has the advantage of improving soil quality continuously in many ways beyond simple nutrient content, but the caveat that use of chemical herbicides and pesticides could harm the worms to a point that compromises their viability for this use. That means we would also need to grow food with worm-safe weed and pest control practice--either alternate practices or restriction to chemicals which do not harm worm viability.
It appears Round-Up may be toxic to red worms. From this paper the author conjectures that it may only kill smaller red worms; I conjecture that it could be killing a random subset (variation in tolerance), sterilizing (breeding problems), killing eggs, or killing young worms. A random subset would be the best possible outcome here, as a 20% higher mortality rate at random would still retain viability. Propagation problems (breeding, egg destruction, or death of juveniles) would be the worst, as this would cause a steady population decline.
Pesticides will likely kill worms. Pyrethrin will, for example.
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The idea of "nature" was given that name to describe the portion of the world which is outside of the works of man. Using the term Nature presupposes a separation between what man controls and influences and what we do not. The idea that man is an outsider to nature is very old and entwined with many other ideas and ideals. At it's core is the idea that our sentience allows us a measure of control over the universe to shape as we will.
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A few days ago I saw an interesting comment about alternative fuels that re-cast the issue for me.
Namely: they're a distraction. By focusing on the "greenness" of the fuel for cars, be it gas, ethanol, hydrogen, CNG, electricity...we ignore the problem of operation space and storage space (not to mention, the inefficiency, energy-wise, of moving 2 tons of metal just to move one person.) As population grows, we don't have space for everyone to bop around by themselves in their car, nor do we have the space to put them when they're not in use. Bloomberg figured this out a couple of years ago, for example, and hence his strong push of cycle infrastructure in NYC, to great result.
Sure, more cars = not a problem in the middle of Nebraska. But in any metropolitan area, traffic is an enormous burden, and we cannot just throw more pavement at the problem. It's well known that adding lanes doesn't add capacity. We also don't have room for all these cars to park, at least not without paving every square inch in sight.
We need to get people out of their cars. That means higher gas taxes (which haven't been adjusted in decades), car-sharing systems, legal protection for pedestrians and cyclists, and infrastructure spending on pedestrian walkways, cycleways, usable long distance/regional/local public transit (and ending the insistence that public transit pay for itself, something "private" road/infrastructure users aren't expected to do). For example: it is *idiotic* that you cannot take luggage or a bicycle with you on the entire Amtrak northeast corridor.
Funding alternative fuels is fine, but don't do it if you won't fund alternative transportation infrastructure as well. Imagine what $2BN (what Obama wants to spend on "alternative fuels") can buy in terms of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
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