Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.'"
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
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'
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.
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
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.