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Researchers Harness E. Coli To Produce Propane
Rambo Tribble writes A team of British and Finnish scientists have used the common bacteria Escherichia coli to produce the environmentally-friendly fuel propane. By introducing enzymes to modify the bacteria's process for producing cell membranes, they were able directly produce fuel-grade propane. While commercial application is some years off, the process is being hailed as a cheap, sustainable alternative to deriving the gas from fossil fuel production. As researcher Patrik Jones is quoted as saying, "Fossil fuels are a finite resource and...we are going to have to come up with new ways to meet increasing energy demands."
Hank Hill wants to know, because he sells propane and propane accessories.
I will have to claim prior art. My family has been manufacturing methane the same way for generations.
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Unless you use plant biomass which takes that carbon from the air. That is why I was trying to find what they used as a feedstock.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
"The environmentally-friendly fuel propane" doesn't refer to the method of production. Propane is easier to burn cleanly than gasoline or kerosene, and it's not as significant a greenhouse gas as methane. It still produces CO2 when burned, of course, but it's carbon-neutral (assuming you aren't using a fossil feedstock, which would seem kind of pointless).
Gasoline produced through fermentation would be carbon-neutral as well, but it would still burn dirtier.
A environment-friendly way of producing something does not mean that the product is suddenly environmentelly-friendly to begin with.
Not in general, but it does if the production is the main reason why the product isn't environmentally-friendly to begin with. If you have - just as an example - grass which captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make cellulose, which then gets fed to bacteria to create propane, which gets burnt to produce carbon dioxide (and short-lived carbon monoxide) then you have a cycle with no significant net effect on the atmosphere. This is more environmentally-friendly than digging up fossil fuels, shipping them across the world, and burning them, which pumps into the air carbon which had until then been sequestered underground since before recorded history.
At the end of the day octane is octane and propane is propane, but what matters is whether it can be produced/consumed in a carbon-neutral manner or if we're just digging up more crude oil.
Here's the abstract: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140902/ncomms5731/full/ncomms5731.html
From one of the diagrams it seems that they are taking glucose as the primary source, i.e., pretty normal (for a laboratory model) E. coli food. I would also have preferred them to come out and say it explicitly.
Interesting quote from another writeup at http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/03/3478373/propane-from-e-coli/ : “At the moment, we don’t have a full grasp of exactly how the fuel molecules are made, so we are now trying to find out exactly how this process unfolds,” he said. “I hope that over the next 5 to 10 years we will be able to achieve commercially viable processes that will sustainably fuel our energy demands.”
If the propane is made from CO2 that is absorbed from the air, like plants are able to, then it is carbon neutral.
An intestinal bacteria, you say.
I will have to claim prior art. My family has been manufacturing methane the same way for generations.
If you knew the slightest thing about chemistry you'd know that Propane and Methane are not the same gas.
Nothing kills an embarrassingly obvious joke more than a TBU (true-but-useless) tidbit.
Here, read this to celebrate your technically correct moment of glory :) http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html