Biology Could Be Used To Turn Sugar Into Diesel

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."

I can't wait...

[CRCulver (715279)]

I'm sure this will be on the market just in time for me to fill up my flying car.

Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc.

[s4m7 (519684)]

Yeah man, and the government, it's the government that's keeping us down, man: who do you think killed the perpetual motion machine, man? The government that's who, and they won't tell us about aliens or the mind control chemicals and rays and oh, I'm sure there's at least one more I can work in here.

The trees. Man, the trees hate us too.

Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc.

[OldManAndTheC++ (723450)]

-1 Troll
+2 Concept for next Mel Gibson Movie
--
+1 Net points

Please mod accordingly.

the magical fruit

[macadamia_harold (947445)]

Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline.

They should add suger to beans. They're great for making gas.

Re:the magical fruit

[HUADPE (903765)]

Sugar is artificially more expensive. The US government uses tarriffs and subsidies to prop up Florida sugar farmers. In real production costs, sugar is very cheap. Corn syrup is a bit more expensive to make, but the US has huge amounts of corn, but relatively small tropical areas to grow sugar.

Re:the magical fruit

[Ihlosi (895663)]

but relatively small tropical areas to grow sugar.

Sugar cane.

Europe has zero tropical areas and still produces plenty of sugar - from sugar beets.

Re:the magical fruit

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

And on top of it, they've just found massive sugar fields beneath the arctic wilderness. Man, those caribou can NOT catch a break.

Re:the magical fruit

[tssm0n0 (200200)]

In my country in Europe we make sugar out of beets and we even export it and make money off of it. If a 3rd world country like mine can do it, U.S. sure can, so why is it fixated on sugar cane when beets are easy to grow?


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/Find ings/Sugarbeets.htm [usda.gov]

Note from Africa

[Propaganda13 (312548)]

We're still dying from Malaria, but thanks for the cheap fuel.

Re:Note from Africa

[TapeCutter (624760)]

"thanks for the cheap fuel"

Quiet, if you tell the whole world you have cheap fuel, someone is likely to liberate you and/or the fuel.

You don't want it from sugar

[hpa (7948)]

If you're making it from sugar, it's going to suck from an energy-balance point of view no matter what. The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.

Waste cellulose is easy.

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

The real challenge is to turn waste cellulose into motor fuel -- be it ethanol or biodiesel.

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.)

Perhaps...

[ZombieEngineer (738752)]

Biology already have the means to make long chain parafins in the form of triglyerides.

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

A Tad Repugnant

[jomama717 (779243)]

From TFA:

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."

Dr. Newman went on to say "not only do they make a dollar a day, but they all have malaria for god's sake!!"

Am I mistaken, or did this company start with a $43 million gimme with the explicit goal of saving people from malaria?

absurd land use madness

[bananaendian (928499)]

This will not work. Sure, you can make almost anything but as anyone who's worked with bioreactors or bacterial colonies will know they do not scale well. Also comparared to good-old sythetic chemistry, bio-processes are inherently inefficient energywise. If you want to take energy from the sun don't mess around with stupid stuff like this. Instead improve upon the COTS solutions available and help them grow in scale for mass-market. Most energy production should be local and thermal (solar-thermal, geo-thermal etc.) with the main net running on nuclear power. Vehicles should be plug-in EV. The reason for this is that we're gonna need our ever diminishing arable land for food production to feed the almost 10 billion people we'll soon have here...

We could feed 10 billion today. We mostly do.

[patio11 (857072)]

Malthusians have been wrong for several hundred years now on the relationship between arable land, population, and well-fed people. The key conceit is that food production is directly proportional to arable land and that arable land increases linearly while population increases geometrically. There are a couple of problems here, and the most salient one is that food production also increases with technological and social progress.

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.)

This is GREAT!

[kmhebert (586931)]

I'm going to go pour sugar into my gas tank! Wait here!

one ton of dry biomass = 2 barrels of oil

[cdn-programmer (468978)]

It doesn't really matter all that much what the end product is... ethanol is perfectly fine. The point is one ton of dry woody biomass is about the same as 2 barrels of oil and this if you can convert for free.

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.

Re:Fast Track Global Warming?

[zippthorne (748122)]

Um.. because biodiesel is carbon neutral. If your solution to "CO2 is causing climate change" is, "Shut down industry and transportation," you can just leave the conversation right now. No one wants to hear about how great it will be when there's 5.8 billion fewer people in the world and everyone that's left lives like the Pennsylvania dutch.

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.

Re:Fast Track Global Warming?

[Dan Farina (711066)]

Also, even current/production-ish processes for "making" biodiesel require a lot less energy than ethanol, as well as being simpler. The main problem with diesel is the higher particulate emissions (among a few others) as a result of the high compression used in the engines. These (non-CO2) emissions is why the US uses gasoline. The Europeans -- unlike the US -- were willing to compromise (as well as weigh CO2 as an emission) and invested a lot in diesel engines and high-purity diesel fuel, which have about 20%-30% better mileage and better torque than gasoline...in use all over Europe, today.

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.

Re:hmm

[ArsonSmith (13997)]

Actually it would be. Due to the fact that you, or more precisely the sugarcane plants have to pull carbon out of the air for them to make this you end up with a close to net 0 impact.

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%

Actually, it is perfectly fine

[WindBourne (631190)]

The problem is taking carbon based oil out of the ground and then putting it in the air. Instead, with this approach, the CO2 is taken out of the air to form carbohydrates and/or deasil fuel. This is burned, but the CO2 simply recycles back. IOW, this is more of a close loop system. It will be environmental friendly. In fact, it is more likely, that they will use algae and have that clean up waste water. Make more sense than doing corn, switch grass, or stalks => ethanol.

Renewable ressources = ecological

[DrYak (748999)]

As other /.ers hve pointed, this *will* be an environment saver, because it is *renewable* energy. (But there's a *BUT...*)

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.

------

* : 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.

Re:Next they'll work on snakeoil

[uvajed_ekil (914487)]

No, really, they'll use snakes to make oil. Get it? Got it? Good.

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.)

Mod Parent Up

[SeaFox (739806)]

People don't like to talk about peak oil as something that could really rock the way we live, but it's got that potential. Modern economies are based on growth, which means that more and more energy must be consumed. Eventually, however, we're going to have to figure out a new way to satisfy that growing demand, because oil isn't going to cut it.

Agreed. Bit it isn't Peak Oil affecting out transportation that worries me, it's our products. How much of our modern products are made of plastics? Practically everything. Plastics are made of petroleum, and many products we make today may not be possible without the moldability of plastics available compared to glass and wood. I can see us finding a substitute fuel in the form of ethanol and hydrogen, but a replacement bag and case material? Not at the same relative cost.