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."
The government should pass a climate bill ASAP (Score:4, Interesting)
And invest 50 billion dollars into emerging technologies.
Re:If what I'm reading is true... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yemen is a good example of what the entire middle east might look like if this happened. And, as the Joker famously said, Dynamite and Gasoline are cheap. The violent extremeists would still find ways to buy bullets and ammunition. But they'd have much more freedom to operate, and a much larger base of disenchanted population to recruit from.
Re:Too good to be true (Score:3, Interesting)
No it's not. The price may be too good to be true, but the method is valid. It's been known since the days of the oil crisis that you can use cyano bacteria (aka algae) to produce hydrocarbons at a cost equivalent to less than $100 per barrel. With inflation the limit where it becomes profitable is probably higher and not cheap enough to sustain the American middle class lifestyle, but it's definitely possible to get loads of fuel at non-astronomic costs.
Without having read TFA (hey it's /.) I'd guess that these guys claiming $30 per barrel are probably assuming that they have an infinite supply of warm and CO2-rich exhaust gases from coal and natural gas plants to work with. I doubt that they can make hydrocarbons at $30 per barrel with a CO2 concentration of 350 ppm, and a mean temperature of 14 C which is what you have in atmospheric air.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, this is the biggest problem in this area.
Saudi Arabia can still pump for under $20 per barrel.
Alternative technologies require a $90 price to get going.
Every time they get started, oil prices drop long enough to kill them.
Could be intentional-- could just be the way the cycles work.
But they need oil to be $90 a barrel for a dozen years, then the new stuff will have taken hold and start dropping in price. Then when oil drops, it won't be a no-brainer to just return to oil.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Interesting)
ok something seems really really odd with this math.
reading the article I assumed the 800 barrels per acre wasn't running off incomming solar energy because the numbers seem crazy.
800 barrels per acre....
US consumption: 20680000 barrels per day....
20680000/800 =25850
25850 acres = 40.390625 square miles
Area needed for a years worth of americas consumption:14742 square miles
America, land area:3794101 square miles
So less than half a percent of the land area of the US would have to be covered for this.
Frankly this seems far too good to be true given how crap bioethanol et al have turned out to be in the past.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
Electrical engines degrade in function MUCH, MUCH faster than IC engines -- when you're talking about vehicles -- because the batteries, no matter how advanced, still degrade. The motors themselves are fine, but it's the batteries that are the weak point.
They need to be replaced, frequently, are expensive both monetarily and looking at energy-to-produce. compared to just hunks of metal and plastic for an IC engine? Very pricey..
now into that "aw, really?" equation, throw in that the batteries are much slower to recharge than a gas tank is to fill up -- I can fill my tank up once a week, I get ~350 miles out of that. 5 minutes per week.
Rechargeable batteries in a car? It'd take hours to get that much charge, and even then I'm still restricted to a certain, VERY LOW range between recharges. It's not even that it takes 1 day to charge for a week of use.. it's more frequent than that. Electric car is not feasible for anyone who would want to travel 100 miles in one direction. Ever. Unless it's a second vehicle, but let's be honest. There are NOT that many people looking for a second vehicle with such limited uses. Not right now especially.
hydrocarbon fuels are an *extremely* convenient way to transport energy, and IC engines have a significantly lower lifetime maintenance cost than a hybrid / pure electric vehicle.
Re:We also need to refine the process. (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever you think of global warming, pollution is nasty, and giving us such delightful things as asthma.
Most "pollution" today (excepting CO2) is emphatically not from modern cars. The air in most major cities is dirtier than the exhaust from a modern car with modern emissions controls.
Today's pollution comes from coal plants built a half century ago, virtually unregulated marine diesel engines in harbors, petrochemical industry plants, etc. It's not cars. And if we would shut down or retrofit the old plants and prohibit highly sulfur-contaminated fuels, most of it would go away.
Of course, that would slightly raise energy costs, so why bother?
Re:We also need to refine the process. (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever you think of global warming, pollution is nasty, and giving us such delightful things as asthma.
Ok... well.. mining operations aren't too environmentally friendly either. Something interesting about this bacteria... consider, cyanobacteria produces its energy through photosynthesis.
That means, if this bacteria is used over massive acres to produce oil, using sunlight and air, it will fix CO2, releasing O2 and the hydrocarbons.
This is overall more favorable for the environment than extracting from the ground and burning it, because extracting from the ground and burning it results in a net release of CO2.
But if the petro is produced by cyanobacteria, some CO2 molecules had to be fixed for every hydrocarbon molecules released, so this could actually be beneficial (even if there is still some pollution).