Biology Could Be Used To Turn Sugar Into Diesel 355
ABCTech has an interesting article about an Emeryville-based tech startup, Amyris Biotechnologies, that is planning to use microbes to turn sugar into diesel. Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline. The company was initially given a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attempt to research the applications of Synthetic Biology for making a cost-effective malaria drug. Jack Newman, the Vice-President of Amyris said, "Why are we making ethanol if we're trying to make a fuel? We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel. And if you wanted to design, you name it, a jet fuel? We can make that too."
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Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc. (Score:5, Funny)
The trees. Man, the trees hate us too.
Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc. (Score:5, Funny)
+2 Concept for next Mel Gibson Movie
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+1 Net points
Please mod accordingly.
Abiogenic and microbiotic origin theories. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's probably just so much bunk, but that's a product of my education under the conventional theory. It may also be wishful thinking that has kept me from ever forming an interest into looking into the theory. I can think of few ideas more horrific for the future survival of humanity than that it may continue to be cheap to burn off hydrocarbons for cen
the magical fruit (Score:5, Funny)
They should add suger to beans. They're great for making gas.
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Re:the magical fruit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the magical fruit (Score:5, Informative)
Sugar cane.
Europe has zero tropical areas and still produces plenty of sugar - from sugar beets.
Re:the magical fruit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the magical fruit (Score:5, Funny)
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Sugar cane rum is actually quite good, while rum made from sugar beets is just about the nastiest form of alcohol known to man (it's only plus side, is that raisins soaked in it are good in baked goods)
Re:the magical fruit (Score:5, Informative)
I think they produce a beet or two here in the US:
"U.S. farmers produced 33 million tons of sugar beets on 1.6 million acres in 2000, versus 28 million tons of sugar beets on 1.4 million acres in 1990"
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February05/Fin
Isn't this a little late? (Score:2, Funny)
-E
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I hope this isn't snake oil, we need an alternative to oil as it wont last forever. If you look at the current crop of alternative energy offerings, none of them offer the same energy density or ease of
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Also, slightly pedantic, but the fuel component of diesel #1 and JetA are the same damn thing, so the article (summary) is kinda mis-leading.
-nB
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Hydrogen simply dosn't make a good replacement for existing fuels. Where as biodiesel, even regular vegetable oil, can go straight into the tank of an unmodified vehicle. Especially a modern one which comes complete with a computerised eng
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IIRC Both Rudolf Diesel and Frank Whittle ran their prototypes on vegetable oil. So that covers two of the three commonly used internal combustion engines.
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What you want us to get to higher technologies, then go back to using diesel? OH you meant technologies with a higher state of greatness than this technology. Why didn't you say so?
Note from Africa (Score:5, Funny)
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Who are "they" and what "$43M"?
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Re:Note from Africa (Score:5, Funny)
Quiet, if you tell the whole world you have cheap fuel, someone is likely to liberate you and/or the fuel.
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Cheney got a gun... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cheney got a gun... (Score:4, Funny)
Considering his current popularity the line "Run away, run-run-awayeyeyey, from the vice, pressss-ident" turned out to be quite prophetic
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Thanks for the link.
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Relax, I'm not trying to steal your jokes. Many people in my country wouldn't know who Cheney was, even if he shot them!
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That sounds very anti-american. May I see you Freedom License please?
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You don't want it from sugar (Score:5, Interesting)
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Waste cellulose is easy. (Score:5, Informative)
That's easy: Add xylene. (Either in a batch, or by incubating it with the sort of bacteria that hang out in the guts of termites.)
This cracks the cellulose back into starch.
Cracking starch to sugar is similarly trival. (Either add acid or feed it to certain microbes.)
Once you've got sugar, getting to ethanol is a previously-solved problem (as is getting it to "something more like gasoline or diesel fuel" if the other bioprocesses work out on an industrial scale.)
Of course if you are willing to go with METHanol, just heat the cellulose, in a centuries-old industrial process. (That's why they call it "wood alcohol", after all.)
If it really was so easy we wouldn't use sugarcane (Score:2)
Perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gasoline will be a bit harder as you don't want long chain parafins, you want branch chained C7 / C8s (seven and eight carbon hydrocarbons) as a straight chain C8 hase an octane number of zero (by definition) while the fully branched C7 has an octance number of 100 (again by definition). Getting octane numbers >90 is difficult without using aromatic compounds (benzene & toluene which have octane numbers in the 120 to 150s).
The original source for the octane 100 reference was from the cones of a particular pine tree.
So in theory there is a biological precendence but it could take 10 years to get there, once we do then the scale up will be very quick.
ZombieEngineer
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Alternatives vs. peak oil (Score:4, Interesting)
Most alternatives require drastic infrastructure changes—converting hundreds of millions of cars to hydrogen or batteries isn't going to be easy or cheap. Adding ethanol to the mix could help, but the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) isn't all that great, and it will force food prices up as well. This company seems to have something rather novel up its sleeve—it'll be interesting to see how effecient their process is. If it's good, it'll be much more than a $10 billion company before too long.
Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Insightful)
Peak Oil and Plastics (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah I heard that urban legend too. Luckily not everybody bases their decisions on urban legends, and many countries recycle bottles very efficiently, without problems.
A Tad Repugnant (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I mistaken, or did this company start with a $43 million gimme with the explicit goal of saving people from malaria?
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That's what I was thinking too (Score:2)
Now I realize that a donation isn't always a "you have to deliver X in Y days for Z million dollars" contract, but at the very least certain promises have been made. It's basically like saying "donate some money to help the latest tsunami/tornado/whatever victims" and then going "wtf, now I'm supposed to just give them that money? That's a stup
absurd land use madness (Score:5, Insightful)
We could feed 10 billion today. We mostly do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Our food production on a *per acre* basis beats the hell out of any reasonable expectation of human population growth. Human population going to be 100 billion by 2100? Thats a big *yawn* from the perspective of our untapped agricultural capacity -- yields per acre in the US from 1900 to 2000 increased by over a factor of about 6 to 8 (depends on crop), due to improved agricultural practices, improved agricultural business models (sorry, family farm, agribusiness grinds you into dust on the efficiency scale), the Green revolution, etc etc. The best farmers in Iowa get over 20 times more yield per acre than the average farmers in Africa, and its not inherently due to the Iowa dirt just being superior dirt. Take modern technology plus modern societal organization, mix in some cruddy desert land that had been impoverished for millenia, and you get Israel (which is an agricultural powerhouse, especially compared to anybody in the neighborhood).
Over the same 1900 to 2000 time period, Japan had an even better relative increase in productivity, mostly because (like much of present-day Africa) they were starting from pretty darn close to the bottom of the curve.
Even assuming that technological progress in agriculture stops today (unlikely -- we're just getting the party started when it comes to GMO crops, and "640k should be enough for everybody"-type "All progress has already been accomplished" thinking is always a loser), all we'd have to do to feed 10, 15, 20 billion people is take the technological and organizational know-how of the leading edge of First World farmers and get that know-how to land which is already used for agricultural purposes. Sure, we could claim extra land too, but its hardly necessary.
So why, with this abundance of technology, do people still starve? Bad government, in every single case in the modern world. Governments practically evolved to combat famine and some countries in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands) haven't seen a non-war one in a couple hundred years. Many nations in Africa, North Korea, the Ukraine under the Soviet Union, on the other hand, have a government which either uses famine as a weapon to commit democide against their opponents (Sudan), or is just maliciously incompetent (North Korea, "Hey I've got an idea lets take all the land from the white farmers and give it to our black powerbase who have no experience managing farms, no possible downside there" in Africa).
Give your stock poor African nation 20 years of stable economic growth (i.e. capitalism and democracy, pretty much) and I'll guarantee you their main food-related health problem will be obesity, like it is for "poor" people in the United States. (Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)
Now, as it regards bio-anything for a power source, I'm skeptical that we can increase agricultural efficiency faster than our energy needs, so I agree with you. Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes. (Solar, geothermal, and hydropower are all heavily dependent on you living somewhere they actually work, but you can split the atom pretty much anywhere.)
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Of course it's immediat
This is GREAT! (Score:5, Funny)
The sugar Biology Defense (Score:2)
Defendant: Yes your Honor. I mistook it for a diesel.
Judge: A Diesel? What does that have to do with anything?
Defendant: I was just trying to use Biology to fill her tank.
Judge: Of course. Bailiff! Take him away. fsckn slashdotters...
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Defendant: Yes your Honor. I mistook it for a diesel.
Or even Defendant: It won't do anything to harm the engine. I call up on my expert witnesses Savage and Hyneman.
yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
(That has to be the longest sentence I've written on
B.
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Diesel from sugar (Score:2)
And now
had to be said (Score:3, Funny)
... from the Marketing Department (Score:2, Redundant)
Obviously whoever came up with this scheme has no understanding of either biology or chemistry.
Hey! wouldn't it be great if we could make bacteria ferment diesel! Yeah man! Cool!
I like alternative energy schemes, but I just get the "ain't gonna work" feeling from this one. For one thing the products would have to be water soluble to be fermentation products, so you're looking at some kind of carboxylic acid or long chain alcohol probably. These would then have to be dehydrated in an industrial process by
Jet Fuel (Score:2)
The US DoD recently [janes.com] had a successful trial of synfuel on a B52 but it was synthesised from natural gas, which is also finite. Successful production of kerosene from sugar would be a great achievement.
Why diesel? (Score:2, Interesting)
Research should focus on an efficient way to turn energy from a portable source into movement, and an efficient and clean way to produce portable energy sources.
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Why convert? (Score:2)
Sugar is fuel. In fact, any food with any number of calories is fuel. If it's so cheap and easy to make large volumes of sugar to convert to other fuels, and run vehicles on, then it would be easier, more efficient, and more profitable to just start designing cars/engines that run on pure sugar, instead of
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I think I have a few suggestions for that design. Here [wikimedia.org] is an example of a one-person vehicle running (mostly) on sugar. Here's another [wikimedia.org].
The main issue with both of these is efficiency. It could be measured in terms of "miles per bushell of oatmeal", I guess...
So...How's the malaria reseach going? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack Newman, PhD, Amyris Biotechnologies VP: "This was technology that was really great for the current application of making an anti-malarial drug and we said, great, pharmaceuticals, that's a wonderful model and then we realized, our market is in Africa and they make less than a dollar a day."
So they decided to aim for a more lucrative market as well -- bio-fuels -- a clean alternative to petroleum products.
Within months they had $20 million dollars in venture capital funding and a new CEO.
Well, well, well, isn't that nice...
So, whadup with that malaria thing?
Man...Damn chumps make less than a dollar a DAY! How we gonna make a livin' on that?
Oh yeah, right.
An now we need to clear cut a billion acres for our sugar plantation. Gonna get us some giant ants to run the place.
Cowabunga.
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Will this make... (Score:2)
Bah... that's nothing (Score:2)
Why are we NOT making ethanol? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ethanol is actually an excellent fuel. I'd say it's actually _better_ than gasoline. While the mileage you get from either is about the same (provided you tune the engine for the fuel), ethanol burns cleaner, which is better for the environment and for the engine.
So, as far as I am concerned, the question is why we are _not_ making ethanol. And I think the answer to that is that some powerful entities don't want us to. For example, governments don't want you to produce ethanol - which is, after all, alcohol, and bad for your health, etc. Besides, many governments get a cut from all alcohol sales. And of gasoline sales, too. Which are also the lifeline of the powerful oil industry. I am not saying there is a conspiracy here, but it's undeniable that there are powerful parties who have much to lose from cars switching to gasoline for fuel.
By the way, all the above applies to gasoline engines. Diesel engines are a different story. They don't run on gasoline, and they don't run on ethanol (or at least, not well). However, they do run on biodiesel, and even straight vegetable oil (will need pre-heating in cold weather, though). Vegetable oil is much less problematic, and, if I ever get a car, I will make sure it's a diesel, fit it with the necessary fuel heating system, and run it on sunflower oil (or whatever vegetable oil is cheapest).
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To get petroleum and natural gas, you drill a hole and suck out your product. You spend resources to construct drills, transportation, and refining equipment.
To get biofuels, you stop producing food or other cash crops, spend fertilizer, clean water, pesticides, etc. to produce the crop. Now you have to harvest it all, transport it to a production faci
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While that can be fixed by using regenerative zeolite molecular sieves it requires still more engineering and cost (zeolites are pretty cheap in the 55 gallon drum, from what I remember- we designed a separation plant to use them).
As you say, everything can be overcome with engineering there. I just
What?!?! Isn't ethanol a fuel? (Score:3, Interesting)
My car runs with ethanol (it runs with gasoline too). Isn't it a fuel? (According to the dictionary, yes, it is.) More than that, my car does 11.8 kilometers per liter (27.75 miles per gallon for americans, 8.478 liters per 100 km for europeans) with ethanol and it costs only 65% of the price of gasoline.
It would have to run 18.15 km per liter with gasoline (42.69 mpg, 5.51 l/100km) to have the same cost per kilometer, but it doesn't go further than 15 km/l.
Gasoline? Not for me, thanks!
one ton of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil (Score:5, Informative)
Starches are fine to start with, but only a small amount of the plant ends up as starch. An even smaller amount ends up as oils. Celulose, pentosans and lignins compose the majority of plant tissues. There are many fungi which digest these and some can be harnessed to produce alcohols. The issue is we are still stuck with one ton of dry plant matter equals about 2 barrels of oil.
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. From a plant source this is 40 million tonnes per day.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. Note that Alberta Tar Sands operations are essentually bitumin->liquids. Bitumin is a little closer chemically to what we need than coal is... IE both are hydrogen poor in that liquid fuels in the Alkane series (most of what we use) have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon.
Coal depending on the type is about 0.6:1 and bitumin is closer to 1:1.
Methane is 4:1. This means that methane is a good chemical feedstock from which to obtain the hydrogen needed.
This also means it is stupid to be burning methane... it is far more valuable as a chemical feedstock than a fuel.
Plant matter does fit into the equation, it is not as hydrogen poor. Plant matter is basically (CH2O)n and from this we can see that it is a partially oxidized hydrocarbon. This means that plant matter is hydrogen poor unless we can break the H2O bonds and this is the same problem we face with coal and bitumin. Ie... in the case of coal and bitumin, we can break H2O bonds in river water or lake water or ocean water to obtain our hydrogen.
Note that alcohols are also partially oxidized hydrocarbons. Ethanol for instance is C2H5OH. This means it is easier to obtain ethanol from sugar because both the sugar and the ethanol contains Oxygen. The flip side of this is that since the molecule is already partially oxidized, it doesn't contain as much energy as an un-oxydized Alkane such as the ethane (C2H6) parent molecule. Also note that ethane for instance has an atomic weight of 30 while ethanol has an atomic weight of 46. So you have less energy with about 1.5 times the weight.
(BTW - this is the short of why the oil industry is building LNG tankers. Methanol (CH3OH) is safer and easier to transport than CH4 (liquid), but 1/2 the weight of methanol is oxygen).
All this means is there isn't a free lunch. Production of any fuel from a sugar polymer source (dry plant matter) is going to require energy and the only biological source of this energy comes from oxidizing carbon to obtain the energy required to salvage the hydrogen. This results in massive releases of CO2 (of course - its the raw material plants use to create dry matter - hense it is not polution and is in fact fertilizer). Next you lose a significant amount of the total mass of the dry matter we start with. We eventually are left with one ton of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil - if we can convert it for free.
We are back to needing 40 tonnes of dry plant matter per day and massive factories which don't exist.
Already in pilot? (Score:2)
"The algae oil can also be refined into other liquid fuels, including ethanol and jet fuel."
In this case they can leave out the intermediate step of making sugar and take advantage of the higher photosynthetic productivity of algae over rooted plants. I wonder if the two groups should get together to try to further process the algae biologically to get i
Ethanol is Better (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, gasoline goes right into existing cars. But so does high-concentration ethanol/gasoline mixtures. By the time gasoline is too scarce to add, even if in a decade or two, we can have upgraded engines to fuelcells to use ethanol. And the greenhouse gas pollution we'll pump into the atmosphere will be much less: solving our two biggest "carbon economy" problems at once, instead of perpetuating one while taking pressure off by solving the other.
If anything, we should be looking at lower-energy/impact production techniques for methanol, which has 1/2 the carbon of every ethanol molecule to pump into the atmosphere as pollution.
Re:Fast Track Global Warming? (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of us will get on with finding usable solutions to the problems we face. Gasoline happens to be a quite ideal energy storage mechanism for applications where weight, size, stability and reliability are important.
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I am not counting if the land would have been used for planting some other kind of plants, that absorbe more CO2 than the plants that produce
Re:Fast Track Global Warming? (Score:5, Insightful)
As an aside:
I think this mentality is also what allowed much of Europe to convert to fission power. One of the problems -- in my humble opinion -- is that the factions in the US that wrangle over environmental policy (unfettered business freedom, ecological scaremongers and nuts) don't leave any room for incremental improvement. Everyone is looking for the silver bullet instead of going with what we have to try and make that 1%, 5%, 10%, or even 20% difference in the meantime, thinking (I think maliciously) that an incremental solution is going to somehow fundamentally prevent us from finding or using that silver bullet should we find one.
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason Oil is so bad is because instead of pulling the excess carbon out of the air we are pulling it out of the ground and pumping it into the air. net impact is closer to 100%
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A negative return would be needed to actually save the
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Carbon neutral is a huge improvement over the current carbon positive situation we're in right now.
Actually, it is perfectly fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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last I heard we don't have a water shortage here on earth.
'particulates from combustion' you have to completely elminate the things that the greens have declared public enemies. They are only bad for the earth if they rise above what the earth can naturally clean up. Remember, combustion is a natural process and ozone is pretty good at nuking most of these things.
'the loss of native landscape cleared for agriculture'
There isn't really a shortage of native landscape in the w
Re:Actually, it is perfectly fine (Score:4, Interesting)
last I heard we don't have a water shortage here on earth.
Actually there IS a huge water shortage in many parts of America, especially in midwest farm areas. Where do they get their water? They divert it from rivers and streams, and in the process affect habitats and ecosystems over a HUGE area downriver.
Unless you are making those fertilizers from biopetro...
Or unless those chemical fertilizers are destroying the soil, increasing erosion. Erosion is another huge problem. There are organic methods to combat erosion, but you can bet that a company like Monsanto isn't going to employ them on their 10,000,000 acre corn-for-diesel fields.
Until someone produces an economical biofuel grown in salt water in the desert, biofuel production is about the worst thing we could do to our environment.
I'm not green or crunchy or a tree-hugger or anything, but I agree with the grandparent. This would be HORRIBLE, not because biodiesel is particularly horrible in itself (despite its particulate emissions), but because the people who would be operating the agriculture side of it are HORRIBLE corporations.
ADM (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're confusing your evil agricultural giants. You're thinking of Archer Daniels Midland. Monsanto is the company that makes the seeds that can't be replanted and the crops that can withstand having gobs and gobs of pesticide dumped on them.
ADM is the company that owns the soul of the Midwest.
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You talk about harming the environment on one hand, and then talk about covering a desert with plants and salt water as if it is a good and harmless thing? Deserts are a part of the environment too, and are a lot more delicately balanced than prairie grasslands or deciduous forests. Leave the salt water in the oceans where it belongs.
Renewable ressources = ecological (Score:5, Insightful)
Any renewable energy, by being *renewable* must therefore be part of a cycle.
Not a resource that just must be mined for (like coal. There is a net positive release of CO2 and other pollution into the atmosphere), but a resource that is progressively rebuilt as part of the cycle :
Where at one end of the cycle, people are burning bio-diesel into CO2, at the other end, algae/corn/other plants are converting CO2 and light back into sugar which will be fed back to the diesel-producing bacteria (basically : they produce fat*).
Same with wood : if your burning down great tropical forest there's a net negtive bilan. But if you use wood from specially grown tree for that purpose, the net bilan is neutral : you destroy as much as you grow new tree whitch will fix back that CO2. (And therefore, heating with wood pellets happen to be more ecological)
In fact, if some scientist discovered a way to produce renewable gasoline (I mean, a faster way than the natural "just stand around a few million years and all that coal will finaly turn into oil"), it will be much more environment friendly because at one end of the process you'll be fixing back most of the pollution that was released on the other end.
BUT...
Although the problem of CO2 is corrected with renewable energy sources, there's still other pollution that is produced by burning diesel, whose problem isn't it's increase, but it's mere presence.
Namely : the finer particles that are emitted by burning diesel. All this micro-dust, at the moment of release, is bad for your health (even if in the long term, it's going to be degraded and then assimiled back into the diesel).
But that is a separate problem that is currently already being tackled in current diesel/bio-diesel engines.
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* : Given the fact that bio-diesel is just refined fat, another solution beside the bio-diesel producing bacterias, would be adding bio-diesel facilities next to liposuction clinics. It is renewable (CO2 fixed back into fat through the food chain). Given the fact that the societies burning the most gaz are also the fattest (due to the lack of exercising related to the car usage), this could (...almost...) makes sense.
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Re:Next they'll work on snakeoil (Score:5, Funny)
Which means instead of dino juice fueling air travel, we may have snakes on a plane. I'm not sure of the source now but something I saw recently makes me think this may not be such a great idea, to have snakes on a plane. (Maybe it's just me, as I don't trust reptiles in any form, since that one pretty good book, anyway.)
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liposuction fat = biodiesel (Score:2)