Slashdot Mirror
Cheaper Fuel From Self-Destructing Trees
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Wood is great for building and heating homes, but it's the bane of biofuels. When converting plants to fuels, engineers must remove a key component of wood, known as lignin, to get to the sugary cellulose that's fermented into alcohols and other energy-rich compounds. That's costly because it normally requires high temperatures and caustic chemicals. Now, researchers in the United States and Canada have modified the lignin in poplar trees to self-destruct under mild processing conditions—a trick that could slash the cost of turning plant biomass into biofuels."
Got wood, eh?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Wood is biofuel. There is a device http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/20/0549231/carbon-negative-energy-machines-catching-on which when paired with a dense wood like Robinia pseudoacacia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinia_pseudoacacia which has as much energy as anthacite coal and when harvested dumps nitrogen into the soil so that other plants grow faster and it grows back faster than it did the first time. So why can't all our power sources be food producing, fertilzer producing, erosion stopping, medicine producing, ecology improving, and sustainable?
Apply heat and O2 to complete fire triangle.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
combine gasification generators with a nitrogen fixing energy rich wood like Robina pseudoacacia,which grows back faster and makes surrounding plants grow better after it is cut, planted around fruit trees and other useful species and then the act of harvesting wood makes plants grow and the act of generating electricity makes fertilizer. With the right generator http://www.cnet.com/news/carbo... there is only a positive environmental impact to the harvesting and generating of energy which when used in conjunction with a food/medicine forest http://www.beaconfoodforest.or... you have good hunting beautiful landscape and no reason to leave home. There are food forests around which are over 2000 years old still going and no one knows who planted them.
banned this, why bother talking about it?
people will now just complain that their doesn't have a GMO label. :-p
If all you want is the cellulose and fiber, hemp produces paper-quality fiber at nearly 4 times the rate per acre/year as even poplar trees do.
Oh, right. Gotta keep all those woodchippers employed. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
http://libgen.org:8080/scimag/...
The article isn't really about making biofuel from self-destructing trees. It's about introducing the mechanism through which the lignin (in the trees) destructs to other crops that grow much faster and leave a lot of waste, like corn.
Personally, I think that sourcing energy from biofuel will never really scale, anyway...
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?
Either way it does sounds pretty cool.
I stole this Sig
I suspect that bacteria will adapt to take advantage of these "new mild processing conditions", because to them it might mean that it's suddenly easier to get the good stuff.
But I think these researchers should just design the trees to grow a shiny self-destruct button when they're of age - would make for some great youtube vids in a decade or so :P
Trees in America and Europe are dying in large number due to infestation from foreign bugs / diseases / viruses
Examples of the diseases / bugs / viruses are Chestnut Bright, Emerald Ash Borer, Asian long-horned beetle, Spruce Needle Cast Disease, and so on.
And those boffins are tinkering with even more American trees so that they become self-destructive more easily??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dead wood left to rot gets a light and sort-of rubbery and spongy consistence and falls apart rather easily. Now I can't vouch for whether it's the cellulose or the lignin that's gone, but it's clear that some core component is being removed in that process.
So you either harvest the remaining component or the biomass or its degradables that are doing the decomposing.
Ralph says his team is already working to insert zip-lignins into corn plants.
I know we grow a lot of corn, but why not insert the gene into kudzu or some other fast growing weed that thrives on marginal land with low fertilizer inputs?
It's not like we don't already have a use for every part of the corn plant.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This tree will self destruct in 5 seconds.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Does this mean I can buy a exploding baseball bat to make home run hits Stephen Chow style?
Wow, you have no understanding of science.
Oh wait, it's Taco Cowboy. no news there.
A giant saquioa can sequester over 2000 tons of carbon from the air and live for 2500 years.
If you planted 1 million of these trees you could sequester 2,000,000,000 tons of carbon for 2500 years! If you plant enough of these sequoias you could literally sequester all the United States's excess CO2 for 2500 years.
2500 years is a hell of a long time for us to design and perfect new technologies that can better solve are carbon crisis.
So, once this genetic defect - I mean modification - crosses the line and goes wild (although Monsanto tells us it never happens), how fast and hot will those forests burn?
That would be going against currently valid ideology that all alternative energy sources have to be inefficient and requirepaying the indystry heavy fees while keeping control safely in their hands. I think you are a terrorist.
Which is exactly why the US need 'Splodin trees.
2nd Amendment Rights
Well armed forest, take that treehuggers.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Those trees are liable to self-destruct some summer!
Funny sir, funny. A Deviant?
More 'carbon carbon carbon' 'climate climate climate' bullshit.
'Bio'fuels are the most inefficient use of vegetation there is. THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET. That is all there is to it. Billions of worthless, selfish, unhappy human beings - not all of us, but a large proportion, living miserable, shitty lives, killing and torturing animals (presumably you aren't vegan, so yes, that means you, and you couldn't care less). You should look up what 'dysgenics' is...
what have trees got to do with computers? I need to find a real tech site about computers and stuff.
Use pot/weed marajuana, the reason the feds have a cry baby fit over moonshine and pot, they are also a Damn good fuel.
Using wood to create BioFuels is extremely wasteful of both time and material.
Use hemp instead. You'll get two huge crops per year. And it's a crop made of easy-to-process plant material. No lignin involved. Just process the green matter.
Why use sun & wind when we can find another excuse to cut more trees? :/
Their "solution" is to genetically alter trees. It seems nobody here read the article close enough to catch that. A problem with this solution is that plants tend to spread their genes in unpredictable ways. Those "round-up"-ready genes the inventors of Agent Oragne (Monsanto) put into their seeds has already spread into the wild. If your farm is next to a farm using Monsanto sees then it's very likely that your natural seeds will be invested with these genes. The same is true here. Those "super" new trees will eventually end up spreading their fancy modified genes into natural trees. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Erm, wasn't there something the greenies used to say? Like save the trees? Protect the forests? Leave room for nature?
Well, obviously I must have been hallucinating all the ways through the 90ies. And don't worry, I'll see a psychiatrist about this decade-long delusion at once. But let's pretend there had been an environmental movement in the second half of the last century, when people said that there is some inherent value in nature itself. Wouldn't you think that people in this movement would have been somewhat upset about the prospect of converting huge tracts of land that used be called "forests" into industrial fuel plantations? Well, I for one would imagine they'd be, but they are not.
Hence my suspicion that I was merely hallucinating. If I don't respond, I guess I stuck in comfy happy white room.
Interesting that a majority of species of trees in the US are also of foreign origin.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The toughest part is to make sure they don't scream as they destruct; the licensing fees would be too expensive.
You get biochar, oil and producer gas out.
Plenty of examples of this on Youtube.
The biochar gets dug into the soil, improving the properties and locking up carbon nearly permanently. The oil and gas are sold.
It is energy positive - essentially solar power.
It locks up carbon, if that's really the problem the weather forecasters think it is.
It produces usable fuels - oils and gases.
It improves soil properties which have been damaged by over intensive farming methods.
It's really cheap and simple to do, anyone with an oil drum can do it.
Stage Trees
It would be great to do this to fish. Would eliminate all those problems with putting a lump of bony fish in my mouth :-)
They hoped that by introducing paired building blocks throughout the lignin, they could later “unzip” the lignin’s structure during pretreatment.
You unzipped me, it's all coming BACK!
Instead of all this creation of new Frankenplants, why not just use termites. They seem to have no problem breaking down lignin at lower temperatures, and it doesn't required monkeying around with plant genes.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Wow, you have no understanding of science.
Sounds more like you're the one who has no understanding of science.
Taco Cowboy is expressing skepticism about this, a core tenant of science.
Meanwhile, you're making an assertion without providing any evidence to back up your reasoning, a core tenant not of science, but of religion.
Personally, I'm a little skeptical too. How does it work? How bad would it be if it got out into the wild? Can it even get out into the wild? If it can, and if it would be bad, what could we do to contain the problem?
What happens to other trees when the pollen from these get into the forest?
If some of YOUR trees get this pollen, will you still own the seedlings?
Monsanto has sued farmers whose crops where polluted with unwanted pollen.
The farmer had to destroy his crops because Monsanto had better lawyers.
Lord knows there are tons of those buggers in this god-forsaken neighbourhood !! If only they were useful for something more than wine.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
MOD UP PARENT!
Exactly the right question: why frikkin' trees? It's not like there's an overabundance of poplar (or any other tree). If you have to use a challenging material, why not bamboo ?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Taco Cowboy is expressing skepticism about this, a core tenant of science.
Meanwhile, you're making an assertion without providing any evidence to back up your reasoning, a core tenant not of science, but of religion.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
I'll give a pass on voila/viola, and rogue/rouge, since those might just be typos, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. It really detaches from your argument when you use the wrong word.
-- A tenant of a tenement who knows the difference between "tenant" and "tenet".
Only morons say that. Anything out of your mouth is moronic.
Whether science or not science, who cares. The Taco Cowboy's comment is just stupid. What is it exactly what he is worried about? First of all they will self destruct under processing conditions. Will the modified poplars take over the world and then mutate to self destruct without assistance or will these self-destruction genes drift to other subspecies of poplars? The self destruction, if it happened without any processing, would not be a feature that made a tree fit for survival, common sense says - so these genes wouldn't prevail anyway then.
"Wood is great for building and heating homes..."
Wood is TERRIBLE for heating homes. It is the absolute most inefficient way to heat.
It's well understood that America's power and glory rests on her freedoms.
And by that I mean the restriction and (when possible) elimination of all things free of cost. We FAIL as a NATION when citizens don't have to pay for things, because when citizens don't have to work, they become morally corrupt, and very likely to stop attending church or vote Socialist. If people don't have to work hard every day of their lives, we'll be no better than the filthy, Godless Europeans. Why do you think Roger Ailes pays dozens of astroturfers to post to so-called "free" software forums? Free of cost is the opposite of freedom - and we all know that freedom is obedience to the law.
When clean air and clean water are freely available, it subverts the American way. It's our patriotic duty it pollute as much as possible - sure, mountain top removal and fracking are more expensive and difficult than carbon-neutral biofuel production or wind farm construction, but neither of those helps get bums off the street and into the cancer wards; wind and wood just don't pollute enough to be desirable. We need more coal, more fracking, and more tar sands to keep America great, we need to get to the point where every family has to purchase air and water on the free market from one of the many large corporations that make America the finest nation in the world.
Centralia is the great shrine of American economic philosophy; a permanent, self-sustaining source of pollution for the future! We should all thank Saints Rand and Reagan that God has given us the blessing of Centralia.
America! Freedom! Pollution! Fight for the filthy skies, it's your birthright!
FFS, why do we have this ethanol fetish? Just make methanol instead, so you don't have to worry about lignin in the first place.
I know, I know... Monsanto gets massive gubmint kickbacks for growing corn, not trees. But the rest of us can run our cars on methanol just as easily as ethanol (assuming you've got a fully flex-fuel vehicle). Last time I checked, methanol was selling for about $1.50/gal. Granted, it's only 80% as energy dense as gasoline, but that's still a pretty good bargain at current prices.
There was talk a few years ago about an "Open Fuel Standard Act" in Congress, but it didn't pass. This really ought to be resurrected. It would simply require that all (or most) cars sold in the USA would be fully flex-fuel capable. (If done at the factory, this only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle... several times more if you do a conversion later.) The point would be to put real competition into the market for transportation fuels. This would drive down the price of petroleum and break the current monopoly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
We could put a pod on top and shoot it into space.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Didn't the US EPA recently place a total ban on heating homes with wood?
Related: http://news.slashdot.org/story...
So what exactly do the US researchers hope to achieve here?
So I'm probably being paranoid, but what happens if this modification escapes the lab and is picked up by existing poplar forests? Would it mutate and affect other trees as well? Would it destroy natural poplar forests?
Poplar trees are basicaly weeds, they grow fast, are invasive, die quickly and are easily pushed out by more stable trees; don't worry about them.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Except for hoping for God to give us a burning bush that doesn't get consumed in flames, we genetically make our own!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They also 'like' to destroy foundations. Kill them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.
If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.
1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is inevitable. If you only have 1.3 children, someone else will have 4.3, if you conserve, they won't. Enforcement leads to conflict, escalation and war, the biggest energy waster of them all. So Big Problems must be eliminated, not achieved by legislation and (imagined) compliance.
2. The most cherished notions of sustainability and conservation involve taking a snapshot -- preserving Gaia as it exists today. In other words we are not obsessed with creating new forms of life because we are bored with the old ones. Though fluorescing pigs are really cool. Every little push for biofuels, even given 4x improvement in process efficiency, directly feeds the monster and his appetite is increasing too quickly.
(Such as the ongoing advance of the great Human Palm Oil Desert across Asia. This phenomenon permits Europeans to obtain diesel fuel and maintain their small tracts of land in pristine state, while the devastation wrought by Palm Oil monoculture remains comfortably distant.)
There is NO such thing as a sustainable biological source of energy on the scales we do and will consume it. Period. Advocates of biofuels imagine happy farmers that would be glad to drop what they are doing and make fuel inefficiently. And unused tracts of land, such as Brooklyn, in which these massive bio-chemical endeavors would reside. This is fantasy. There are only large scale Unintended Consequences down this path. And every corner of the Earth is now claimed and defended by people who would rather keep it as it is -- biologically.
3. There is only ONE source of energy that could scale quickly to power the grid, leaving hydrocarbons for fuel and chemical precursors (plastic, fertilizer) until their clean replacements arise. And eventually through separation of hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, those too.
It's nuclear, and more specifically liquid fuel reactors.
4. Instead of BADLY transforming our biosphere with yet more engineered plant monocultures -- and if you thought food was intrusive wait 'till you run the numbers on energy -- energy production needs to become limitless, small, efficient, self contained, safe and clean.
Wouldn't you rather plant roses?
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Monsanto doesn't grow corn and I'm sure they would be perfectly capable of creating GMO trees if they so desired.