*IF* this pans out… neato!
A brave new world of fossil fuels on demand
In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes 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 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”
This would be one of those inventions that should merit the sponsor some serious goodies… *if* it works out. This would be worth it even if the only benefit it brought was the ability of the US to tell the leaders of the Middle East and Venezuela that they will receive no more money from us, and that single-celled *scum* is worth more to use than they are.
It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. 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.
By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels.
I have about 4 acres that’s currently not doing much. So theoretically, this could be making 100,000 gallons of ethanol per year, or (apparently) 3200 barrels of crude. At the $30/barrel price, that’d be $96,000 worth of crude per year. I can’t imagine that any crops short of marijuana or coca or opium poppies would be able to rake in that much money per acre. Adn it would have a few advantages over wind turbines… quieter (almost certainly), while probably low to the ground (thus not messing up the view), and without the strobing effect of the shadows of the blades that apparently can really bug some people.
16 Responses to “Bugs That Pass Gas”
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If it’s real the Al Gore’s of the world will tax it into oblivion or come up with some convoluted reason it can’t be used. Can’t let that carbon credit scam evaporate.
There’s research going on into diesel producing algae as well. It concerns me that the environmental impacts could be very high from any of these processes though. If (when) the diesel producing bacteria or algae get into the wild they will poison lakes and streams.
All it would take in either case would be a duck landing on the production pond and flying to a nearby lake.
Reminds me of the background setting of Hal Clement’s ‘Needle’ (1950) and ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ (1978) where during WWII the US set up a Syntagas system that used plant derived biostocks for feed into simple refineries.
I think I’ve heard this before. Somehow it sounds familiar, and from the 70s. Perhaps there was a paper I read about the theory of this.
My preferred message to Chavez, Saud, et. al, should this pan out, would be a three-word imperative clause beginning with “go” and ending with “yourself”. But I mean that with all due respect.
Somewhat less neato but perhaps more plausible is the ever-growing potential of geothermal energy. The EIA estimates that hot dry rock resources, if they could be fully utilized (there’s the catch, natch), could provide up to 5000 years worth of our electricity needs. Of course there is the not trivial problem that most of these resources are in the West and massive quantities of water, which are not in the West, have to be injected into the rocks to make steam to drive turbines. And a large extraction project might set off earthquakes. Other than that . . .
Plus we seem to be finding natural gas deposits faster than ever, which is a nice change from the pattern of the last few decades.
> All it would take in either case would be a duck landing on the production pond and flying to a nearby lake.
The obvious solution to that problem would be to engineer the algae or bacteria so that they cannot survive in the wild. Some form of “lysine contingency.” And I’d suspect that the “production pond” wouldn’t be a standard pool of open water, but very likely a really long series of transparent tubes. If it was a regualr pond open to the air, the fuel produced by the bacteria/algae would evaporate away.
Yeah, we saw how well the Lysine cotingency worked. I suspect this sort of hydrocarbon production is the future and am all for it. I’m also for going into it with open eyes and an eye on containing any potential down side.
Wow, uses only CO2 and Produces a stored form of energy.
Neato, no hydrogen input for the hydrocarbons, and free energy !
Okay, so maybe the average reporter/spin doctor doesn’t have it quite right,
but I bet this is taking grass and digesting it.
-G.
> so maybe the average reporter/spin doctor doesn’t have it quite right…
Ya think?
Here’s a new drinking game: whenever there’s a piece of news on the Arizona shooting, drink a shot of Everclear every time the reporter mentions the thirty round “clip” used in the Glock. You’ll very quickly get dumped into a coma. Then when you finally come to, undoubtedly with severe dain bramage, you can sue the reporter for damages.
> we saw how well the Lysine cotingency worked.
It only failed due to magic. Hollywood magic.
Hacking through the press release jargon and the reporter’s misunderstandings, this is what I get from the linked article:
They’ve modified a photosynthetic organism (probably algae) to produce hydrocarbons.
The claimed output isn’t implausible — assuming ideal conditions. You might get these yields with algae farms in the tropics, but no place in the frost belt is likely to be suitable.
The article glosses over it, but this is likely to require a LOT of water. Making, say, propane would require 4 water molecules per 3 molecules of carbon dioxide.
I wouldn’t worry about these bugs getting loose and running wild in the ecosystem. In the wild they’d be outcompeted (and probably eaten) by organisms which don’t waste their energy making hydrocarbons they can’t use.
I pass gas maybe I could help them out for a price. May be you should contact these people and tell them you have the four acres that they can use for a price.
Dad
The irony is, all the bugs and algea, they all have to be fed somehow. Otherwise they can’t produce anything.
It’s the old issue with energy. You can produce energy from existing energy source, store it, transform it, send it to users and use it, but you can’t re-new it, cause that would be a perpetuum mobile, which isn’t possible.
If only we could clone Al Gore and use his hot air to power everything.
> all the bugs and algea, they all have to be fed somehow
Sure. But view that as an *opportunity.* Set up a number of these gas-plants in the southeast… and give farmers the opportunity to grow, say, kudzu as a feedstock. Not corn, not soybeans, not cowflop… a fast-growing annoying damned weed. It might become so profitable that teams of people will roam around the south with tractor trailers and cutting equipment, scraping up all the wild kudzu. Put a big enough bounty on the stuff, and it might become extinct in the region.
Yep, silly lefty journalist don’t know that a “clip” is something that holds rounds together for convenient loading into a magazine (whether internal or external). A M1 Garand uses an 8 round en bloc clip to load rounds into it’s internal magazine. A Glock OTOH has an external magazine which can be preloaded before insertion into the gun. Try to explain this to them and watch their eyes roll back inside their head.
Michael Scott:
Or my personal favorite:
Q:
“Do you even know what a barrel shroud is?”
A:
“It’s the part that goes up.”