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 :)
We also need to refine the process. (Score:2)
It's a good start but the costs need to be brought down to as cheap as possible.
Lets get China and India involved ASAP. :)
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?
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Of course, that would slightly raise energy costs, so why bother?
I hate us.
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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
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.
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Sounds great, but doesn't really address the problem of internal combustion engines having only 30% efficiency. Why jump through all those hoops if we could gather electricity with photovoltaic panels and then use much more efficient electrical engines? Does anyone here know how much energy that'd generate per acre versus the bacteria? I mean as long as we're looking for long-term solutions, why not focus on better plans? We're only short of light, infinitely rechargeable batteries or power lines along the
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
because photovoltaic are only 10% efficient?
while I agree electric motors would be far better for personal transports, the problem is storage. You can't store electricity in great enough quantities for it to work well. Until you can get 400 miles fully loaded with less than 1 hour recharge time, on electric motors, they will just not work in the USA. Right now the Tesla roadster has the best range of ~350 miles . driving 25mph with only one very light person on board with no baggage.
The USA doesn't have the bus, or train infrastructure to support moving lots of people well. Trains roughly take 2-3 times the time it takes a car to go the same distance.
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The USA doesn't have the bus, or train infrastructure to support moving lots of people well. Trains roughly take 2-3 times the time it takes a car to go the same distance.
The Acela Express from Boston to NYC takes about the same time as driving, despite the fact that it makes a detour to Providence. But yeah, on the regular routes trains are slow as hell.
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The Acela Express from Boston to NYC takes about the same time as driving, despite the fact that it makes a detour to Providence. But yeah, on the regular routes trains are slow as hell.
... if you live next to the train station on either side.
For just about everyone else, driving is quicker. For me, by about an hour.
I do take that train for work every time I have to go to NYC. But it's not because of time, I prefer riding instead of driving that far. Plus "I have a train to catch" is a great way of getting out of the remote office if stuff is running late.
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The Acela Express from Boston to NYC takes about the same time as driving, despite the fact that it makes a detour to Providence.
The trip by car is about 225 miles. Figure gas costs $4/gallon. If you've got one of those fuel sucking SUVs that only gets 25 MPG highway, you're paying $36. If you've got a hybrid it's half that much.
So your family of five is taking a trip to NYC from Boston. SUV: ~$40, Hybrid: ~$20, AmTrak: ~$400. The train would be great if it didn't cost 10 to 20 times as much money.
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The investopedia numbers are trying to account for sunk costs like the purchase price of the car, the cost of buying insurance, tax, title and license, etc. If the question is how much it costs to put an extra 225 miles on the vehicle once you already own it, those numbers are overinflated, because you pay the sunk costs whether you drive the extra miles or not.
As I already explained, the linear costs are largely reflected in the depreciation already accounted for -- the blue book value goes down because th
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because photovoltaic are only 10% efficient?
Actually now most are about 20% efficient, if I recall correctly. There are panels that achieve more than 40% efficiency. Probably too costly to mass produce, though, but they exist. Now, given that the sun irradiates one acre with about 5,526,836kW and that the 800 barrels produced every year per acre with that bacteria would amount to 1,360,000kWh, we're looking at even 10% efficient photovoltaic cells producing in less than three hours what the bacteria would in 365 days. How's that for efficiency?
As for
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.
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Sounds great, but doesn't really address the problem of internal combustion engines having only 30% efficiency.
Who cares? If the whole thing is carbon-neutral, it seems to me that the net result of 30% vs 60% efficienty on an engine is zero. The bacteria work for free, right?
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
The bacteria work for free, right?
They do now, but pretty soon they'll unionise...
Ah! (Score:3)
That's what they mean by micropayments!
Its "artificial photosynthesis", no new CO2 ... (Score:3)
Sounds great, but doesn't really address the problem of internal combustion engines having only 30% efficiency. Why jump through all those hoops if we could gather electricity with photovoltaic panels and then use much more efficient electrical engines? Does anyone here know how much energy that'd generate per acre versus the bacteria? I mean as long as we're looking for long-term solutions, why not focus on better plans? We're only short of light, infinitely rechargeable batteries or power lines along the roads by now.
You are sort of answering your own question. The "hoops" for bacteria generated fuel are smaller and fewer than the "hoops" for creating an entirely new infrastructure. In addition to the improvements in battery technology and massive new power generation and transmission requirements that you allude to there is also the environmental effects of the mining and transportation of the resources (ex lithium) necessary for all those new batteries and the recycling and waste handling of all the batteries that wil
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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 sl
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While you do have to worry about the batteries in an electric vehicle, I anticipate a lot lower maintenance costs overall. Internal combustion engines are complicated devices, with lots of moving parts and various fluids that have to be pumped around, monitored, and changed when they get dirty. You have valves and timing belts/chains. You have a complex transmission to transfer the power to the wheels, and has to be able to change directions to reverse because the IC motor can't. You have an exhaust sys
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Typically, Cyanobacteria utilize sunlight, water, and CO2, and then "exhale" oxygen, under aerobic conditions. The source of the CO2 is of interest here. According to Joule Unlimited, the source is "waste CO2", whatever that means. References to their super secret plans are linked to from Wikipedia (#19) from when it was first patented (sorry, can't seem to paste link here).
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Unless of course they've engineered the bacteria to eat fossil fuels. Wouldn't that be ripe!
Yeah. Then they'd be like fuel cell engines!
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.
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If I got it correctly, the bacteria can actually use CO2 from the air. Which is actually pretty nice, as we can finally have closed carbon cycle, if this _somehow_ _replaces_ fossil fuels.
The government should pass a climate bill ASAP (Score:4, Interesting)
And invest 50 billion dollars into emerging technologies.
Re:The government should pass a climate bill ASAP (Score:5, Insightful)
*rubs palms greedily*
Basically renewable energy (Score:2)
Agreed. Just as corn/sugar can be converted into ethanol, or soybeans into biodiesel, this too can be considered a renewable fuel.
what they didn't mention (Score:5, Funny)
a genetically engineered cyanobacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline
did they didn't mention the bacteria only eats human flesh?
Not human flesh exactly... (Score:3)
Just human fetal stem cells suspended in an aqueous solution of war-orphan's tears and finely shredded mortgage backed securities.
NCIS (Score:2)
There was just an NCIS episode [cbs.com] about this!
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.
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Water has a pretty high thermal mass so I don't think variable temperatures are anything to worry about. Biocontamination can be dealt with fairly easily, by sequestration and redundancy. Waste product removal is a halfway interesting problem, but I'd bet Kevin Costner is working on it as we speak.
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Sure water has a high thermal mass, but solar power irradiates the earth to the tune of ~1kW/m^2. That's why you can use a solar pool cover (essentially heavy duty bubble wrap - allows radiation in, limits convection out) to heat an 8 foot deep pool to over 105F on a hot summer day (in my experience). Most bio-reactors must have actively controlled temperatures to optimize production. The reality is it h
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Too good to be true (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it.
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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
Re:Too good to be true (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They never stated they were using chlorophyll (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, never heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
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So let me get this right... (Score:2, Insightful)
So how do they power their own facility? (Score:2)
So how do they power their own facility? Do they have a filling station for employee use?
Humans are next in line.... (Score:2)
...to be allowed to be patented.
Just imagine: Every couple would have to pay a licensing fee..
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...and swingers will pay for CALs [wikipedia.org] to swap!
Won't that be funny (Score:2)
If it turns out that's how real "fossil" fuel is created underground... Now there's a secret worth keeping..
Re:Won't that be funny (Score:5, Informative)
Pessimistic thought (Score:2)
I'm kindof afraid that current oil producers will want this project disappeared&forgotten..
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If there's a profit in this, the oil companies would just buy the technology and use it themselves.
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Running the numbers (Score:3)
On the other hand, if we could just convert kudzu to oil they'd be all set right now.
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Let's also hope that the energy it takes to maintain and harvest an acre of bacteria byproduct is not a significant fraction of the output.
Presuming that this works over a fairly narrow range of temperatures, that means heating/cooling/shading for periods where solar flux isn't perfect. It also means you have 11,000 square miles of oil slick you have to keep from getting into the ground water. And, at a certain point, will we worry about evaporation and smell of the plants?
This would be exceptionally aweso
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:Running the numbers (Score:5, Informative)
If you consider total consumption, not just imports, it would require around 15,000 square miles. However, the US has over half a million square miles of active cropland, and about 135,000 square miles just corn.
In other words, if you replaced ~3% of America's farming, or 12% of America's corn production with this type of hydrocarbon farming, you could replace all of America's oil consumption. Stick that in your corn pipe and smoke it, corn-based-ethanol producers.
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And you really think that harvesting kudzu, and then processing them WITH BACTERIA is going to be more efficient than siphoning off an essentially finished product from a slightly glorified lake? That does nothing but add extra labor intensive steps. Further, there will be waste left, which has to be cleaned up
Not very fossil fuels... (Score:2)
If these claim are correct, the resulting products might resemble current 'fossil' fuels but of course they are anything but fossil...
Let me guess. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're looking for investors, right?
Certainly this wouldn't be a pennystock scam... (Score:2)
of the pump and dump variety. Would it? :) Ahem.
Sadly, no progress since last year? (Score:2)
They were saying, in July 2009, http://gigaom.com/cleantech/the-solar-biofuel-hybrid-joule-biotechnologies-launches/ that they were going to build a pilot plant in 2010, and have the initial commercial-scale plant up in 2012.
All through 2010, their press releases talk about awards and management, funding and P.R. I would have expected "Pilot plant ground broken", "Pilot plant going online", "Pilot plant now giving free diesel to all plant employees, outside customers can pay $1.00 per gallon at plant fill
So just one question. (Score:2)
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.
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I'm with you. It is definitely more "scam" than anything else. Everything I've read about using genetically modified organisms to produce fuel inevitably run into how to get the fuel out before the concentration kills the organism that produced it.
Technology like the Fischer-Tropsch [wikipedia.org] method was proven viable using coal years ago. It isn't that big a step to use biomass. I'm watching companies like Range Fuels [rangefuels.com] and research on plants like Miscanthus Giganteus [illinois.edu]. They have much more believable claims.
Inevita
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In my last two cars, when I ran gasoline (google "pure gas" to find the stations still selling gasoline in your state), my mileage improved from 265 miles per 12.5 gallons to 300 miles per 12.5 gallons. Yup.. that's over 10% (about 12%). So I burned more gasoline when using 10% ethanol gasoline.
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That 10% ethanol mix, was probably 12%. Common scam gas producers pull.
Now we can give the finger to the Saudis (Score:2)
However i do wonder if those same places will remain valuable simply because of what lies above their heads, ie. the sun.
The machines will be happy (Score:2)
It seems a little like the Matrix, where people are just biofuel for the machines. Since we have IBM Watson , bot nets, robots that kill, and drones that can operate independently, the Terminators need a continuous fuel supply to eradicate the last of those pests that infect their energy chain.
-- John Connor
By my crude calculation (Score:3)
World crude oil consumption = 86,000,000 Barrels/day = 31,390,000,000 Barrels/year
divided by 800 Barrels / Acre = 39,237,500 Acres
= 157,788 square kilometres
= 1/4 the size of Texas
= 29,274,211 American Football Fields
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So you're saying that we should hold back progress because some people in the middle east might become terrorists if we don't?
That doesn't sound to me like a good idea.
If they start a war over this, it's THEY'RE fault, not ours. To be honest I'm looking forward to the day when we can tell the middle eastern oil barons to pound sand, and become less dependent on them for our economy's survival.
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Damnit, I can't edit the post. I accidentally used "they're" instead of their. Fail!
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So you're saying that we should hold back progress because some people in the middle east might become terrorists if we don't?
I'm not saying that at all. Overall, it would be a good thing. Right now, we're effectively subsidizing these governments because we can't or won't reduce our dependence on oil, which they have, and we need. Right now we go to them, largely on their terms, or they threaten to shut off the spigot (a largely empty threat, as it is also self-destructive to them). A change to energy-self sufficiency would mean that we would stop subsidizing their governments. All I'm saying is that we'd have to consider th
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.
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You're worried that Saudi Arabia BECOMES extremist?
Actually, they mostly live in abject poverty (Score:3)
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At best, this would bring about a gradual change. In order to displace current US imports, at 800 bbl/ac, they would need about 4,411,000 ac (assuming I've not made a mistake) to fully displace US oil imports. Of course, the US is not the only importer of oil, either, so displacing all of that, while energy demand is only forecast to increase, won't be fast or cheap. Securing 4,411,000 acres will take quite some time, if we're not to displace food crops.
$20/bbl is optimistic. Even the $60/bbl that you m
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Re:No way (Score:5, Informative)
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Umm, because bacteria, algae and plants make hydrocarbons in exactly this method?
The problem is the steps involved to make these kinds of chemicals (gasoline) are generally waste products (from other reactions) which poison the algae, making it difficult to get high concentrations/ lots of production.
It isn't *that* hard. JC Venter's venture (cosponsored 49% by exxon mobil) uses algae that produce the fuels and secrete.
The secreted fuel then floats to the top of the bioreactor where it is readily skimmed/siphoned.
Re:No way (Score:4, Informative)
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?
People with a high school biology education know that CO2 + H20 + Sunlight = Sugar, thanks to the magic of photosynthesis and the Calvin Cycle. Sugar + anaerobic respiration = Ethanol, thanks to the magic of anaerobic ethanol fermentation. You can argue that their bioreactors will need nutrient supplementation to maintain viability, and you'd be right. Those are not feedstocks however, as you only need small amounts relative to product. It's not bullshit, it's science.
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It's not bullshit, it's science.
You forgot the dammit, dammit!
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Your pot plants also need nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Unless you take measures to add those things (and a few more), they'll slowly deplete the soil and die.
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...
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Responding to myself, since all the replies above are saying pretty much the same thing, so I'd like to answer them in bulk.
Yeah, you can produce hydrocarbons using H2O, CO2 and photosynthesizing organisms. But those organisms do need other nutrients, so the "no feedstock" bit can't be true.
Also, these guys make pretty extraordinary claims (quote: "50 times as efficient as conventional biofuel production"), and they won't tell anyone how they do it, because it's a trade secret. I wish this was true, but it
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.
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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
My Daddy done tol' me (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't eat a promised sandwich.
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Promised peak oil (Score:3)
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.
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Re:Great :| (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great :| (Score:4, Informative)
How exactly would there be waste heat? The process magically circumvents the laws of energy preservation? No, the energy stored in the fuel is the energy taken from sunlight, just like the CO2 stored in it is the one taken from the atmosphere. The whole process is just a way to store solar energy in high concentration and have it usable at a convenient time.
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.