Biotech Company Making Fossil Fuels With a 'Library' of Bacteria 386
Saysys sends an excerpt from a story at the Globe and Mail:
"In September, a privately held and highly secretive US biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for 'a proprietary organism' – a genetically engineered cyanobacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (US) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, 'fossil fuels on demand.' ... Joule says it now has 'a library' of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has 'proven the process,' has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 US gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year."
Excellent (Score:2, Insightful)
Now we just need a bacterial fuel additive to eliminate CO2 emissions :)
Re:The government should pass a climate bill ASAP (Score:5, Insightful)
*rubs palms greedily*
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
The CO2 released by burning this fuel would be CO2 that was taken from the atmosphere not from a hydrocarbon source that was naturally sequestered in the earth. Basically, it's neutral. If the bacteria eats some sort of plant then the CO2 released would be the CO2 the plant took out of the atmosphere. Example, a plant eats 5 CO2 units (sort of like a girth unit to you Brian Regan fans) to grow, the bacteria eats it and turns it into fuel, when burnt it will release 5 CO2 units. Unless you think CO2 magically appears from somewhere else.
Not done yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Scaling to commercial production is the hardest part of any biotech reactor setup. Outside the lab these need to survive incidental biocontamination, survive in high waste product concentration and variable temperatures long enough to produce economical amounts of diesel. Fixing all these problems can take just as long as the initial research and grind away at investment.
Too good to be true (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it.
Gee, never heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this right... (Score:2, Insightful)
My Daddy done tol' me (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't eat a promised sandwich.
I mean, it's *possible*... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Joule technology requires no "feedstock," no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt.
How can anyone with a high school chemistry education take this bullshit seriously?
Water is H2O. Add to that mixture CO2 and a bunch of energy (in this case, sunshine), and I believe that you could make pretty much any hydrocarbon you desire (with some amount of leftover O2).
So based on my understanding of organic chemistry, it sounds possible. Whether it's plausible is another question entirely...
Re:Great :| (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me guess. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're looking for investors, right?
Doesn't sound that good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Their web site [jouleunlimited.com] just screams "scam" Also, that $30 per barrel figure is bogus: "We estimate our costs for diesel to be as low as $30 per barrel equivalent. This is based on an industrial-scale plant of at least 1,000 acres, producing our commercial target of 15,000 gallons diesel/acre/year, and taking into account our total expected costs and existing, applicable credits.". In other words, even if it works, it's a scheme to exploit subsidies.
Also, they announced this before, 18 months ago [nerdmodo.com], and still don't have a demo. They should at least be showing a panel or two by now.
It's not a fundamentally hopeless idea. It's basically a scheme for photosynthesis inside what look like hot-water solar heating panels. Photosynthesis is neither fast nor efficient. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar powered photosynthesis is 11%. [wikipedia.org] That's an upper limit, and the Joule people don't give the actual number for their process, which has to be lower. Photovoltaic panels are already above 11%.
It's not clear that their system would be much cheaper than photovoltaics per unit area. Half the cost of solar panel installations is in the installation job itself. Solar hot water heating panels that last for a decade or two aren't cheap. (The low-end ones tend to rot, be torn up in storms, or crack as the plasticizers are cooked out.) These guys aren't just heating; they have a chemical reaction going inside the things. They'll probably have to flush their system occasionally, and they'll need more pumps, plumbing, and controls than simple hot water panels.
Ethanol from cellulose (not corn) is probably more promising. That works now, but it's marginal on cost. It runs off agricultural waste like straw or cheap crops grown in open fields; you don't have to build giant farms of panels.
Re:Running the numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
800 barrels per acre per year. Hmmm. US oil imports run 15 million barrels per day, or about 5.5 billion barrels per year. Assuming that the 800 barrels per acre per year is accurate (such estimates are generally a optimistic) replacement would require 6.8 million acres, or about 11,000 square miles. With water, of course -- maybe Louisiana and Mississippi have a future after all; that would be about 20% of the land area of either state.
Lets round that up to 50,000 square miles to account for support infrastructure. That's still not a bad investment for producing the fuel needed to power the USA. Additionally, consider the wealth redistribution from producing fuel domestically instead of importing it. Assuming the technology actually works and is sufficiently scalable, even the multi-decade build out required would be worthwhile.
Re:Ha ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Be smug when Middle Eastern oil is irrelevant to world prosperity, not now when the technology could well be snake oil.
Re:Great :| (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the article this process uses C02 as an input. If you burn say ethanol ( a possible output of this ) you get C02+H2O there are no pollutants there. Neither is toxic and it can be argued we need more fresh water. C02 is only a problem if you don't like larger fruits and vegetables or are concerned that we might be pushing the atmospheric concentration to a point where it *could* cause climate change or something. In that case you should still like this technology because the easiest place to get large amounts of C02 is going to be from the air.
So if you produce ethanol this way put it in your tank and drive you car down the street with it you have been entirely carbon neutral. The worst thing you have done is released that dangerous solvent we call water.
Re:If what I'm reading is true... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have often thought of that just as I have often wondered what happens to those economies when their recoverable supply of oil dries up. Let me tell you the answer. I DON"T CARE! we will have no use for THEM any more. We can keep ourselves safe from them by simple keeping them out. There really will be no reason not to treat them the way we have treated Cuba for the past 50 years, total embargo.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
The bacteria work for free, right?
They do now, but pretty soon they'll unionise...
Re:No way (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but not necessarily enough to qualify as "feedstock". E.g., compare the bulk sugar feedstock required to power small children compared to the trace elements in the Wonder bread and Flintstones vitamins which supply them with all other nutritional requirements.
Plus, the bacterial soup may be pretty good at recycling that stuff in a closed system.
Re:No way (Score:3, Insightful)
A 50 fold improvement in efficiency is less extraordinary than you think; bioethanol, which I assume is what they're comparing to, is very inefficient. Crop plants typically store on the order of 1% of the sunlight they absorb as chemical energy, with the rest being wasted or used to maintain the plant. Most of that stored energy is in stems, roots, leaves, and other parts of the plant that aren't used for ethanol production, with only a small fraction winding up in the seeds that are used. (This is why celulosic ethanol has been such a big target; it would massively increase the fraction of the plant that's usable for fuel production.) Finally, the conversion from starch to fuel isn't very efficient, either. There's enough room for efficiency gains that a 50 fold improvement seems perfectly possible.
Ya right! Give me a break! (Score:2, Insightful)
Lets see. There are 4046.8726 square meters in an acre.
Since we know the MAXIMUM solar energy is about 1 kilowatt per square meter and the ratio of the surface area of a disc verses a sphere is 1:4 we get 250 watts per square meter average over a day. We also have an idea of how many hours in a year which most would agree is 24*365 = 8760
So at MOST the energy falling on an acre is 4046 * 250 * 8760 (watt.hours) = 8,860,740 kilowatt.hours (note the units conversion from watt.hours to kilowatt.hours).
Gasoline has about 34.8 MJ per liter. There are 3.78 liters/ US.gallon so 34.8 * 3.78 / 3600 / 1000 = 36.54 kilowatt.hours per us.gallon.
But they claim they can get 10,000 us.gallons of gas per acre so this is 36.54E5 = 3,654,000 kilowatt.hours of product with an energy input of 8,860,740 kilowatt.hours max. This is better than 41%.
BUT! For about 1/2 the year it might be below freezing!
Now does anyone want to calculate the total land area on earth and translate this into barrels of oil equivalent per year? The world currently uses about 86 million barrels per day.