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."

Comments

Wood fuel

[ArcadeMan]

Got wood, eh?

bio fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Wood IS fuel

[Lodlaiden]

Apply heat and O2 to complete fire triangle.

Re:Wood IS fuel

[Chris Mattern]

But not a very good one. The energy to weight ratio sucks, it leaves large amounts of ash, and, being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel. The problems with energy to weight and ash are large enough that as soon as coal mining was developed, coal almost completely replaced wood in people's fireplaces and stoves (until coal itself was replaced by gas and electricty and fireplaces by central heating). It's also quite polluting, as a matter of fact.

Re:Wood IS fuel

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Apply heat and O2 to complete fire triangle.

Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course. When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.

Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?

If you're so clever, you tell us what color fire should be.

Gasification

[do_be_jack]

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.

Evolving parasites.

[quantaman]

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.

Why corn?

[TubeSteak]

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.

Your mission Jim, should you choose to accept it.

[mjwx]

This tree will self destruct in 5 seconds.

Re:So why use trees?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually read TFA you will find that they have succeeded in a trial using poplar trees, but they are now working on corn that has the modified lignin.

And while you wonder about hemp, I wonder about algae. Algae doesn't bother to produce support structures and you can grow a "crop" in ten days rather than a year. We need to improve our technologies for "bioreactors" (I think they tend to get plugged up) and we need to improve the process for converting algae to fuel (algae is wet and it has a high energy cost to remove the water as part of making a fuel).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

I wonder if thermal depolymerization can be used to convert algae to fuel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Alas, TDP doesn't seem to have worked out as well as hoped. I remember reading excited news stories about offal being turned into clean diesel, but the company that tried it lost money and shut down.

Re:So why use trees?

[goombah99]

algae has many great aspect. It's achilles heels are 1) separation is very expensive 2) it's hard to get enough C02 into the water to do this at scale 3) it can get infected easily 3) inhomgenous growth requires active stiring or other tricks to bring a pond to harvest all at the same time 4) it's not that fast to grow-- poplars and switch grass are more efficient bio mass producers. Ethanol can be made from waste products too.

The upside of algae is that were starting to learn how to use some of it's byproducts and this offsets the costs. and incremental progress is being made on all these aspects. We haven't been growing algae as long as plants so there's potential headroom to grow. It can grow in seawater. lipids are better fuel than alchohol. And finally it's potentially less energetically expensive to sperarate lipids from water than alchohol from water. That step accounts for something like 1/3 of the cost of ethanol.

Re:Just when the American trees are under attack .

[mjwx]

Which is exactly why the US need 'Splodin trees.

2nd Amendment Rights

Well armed forest, take that treehuggers.

Wood for biofuels? Slow and wasteful.

[TrentTheThief]

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.

Re:So why use trees?

[Neil Boekend]

Storage is a problem with sunlight. Burnable fuels do not have that problem.

Re:Tough part

[Snard]

The toughest part is to make sure they don't scream as they destruct; the licensing fees would be too expensive.

Not to worry, there will probably be no one there to hear it, so it won't make any noise.

Re:Just when the American trees are under attack .

[h5inz]

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.