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."
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?
Re:Note from Africa (Score:2, Insightful)
absurd land use madness (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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%
Actually, it is perfectly fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Note from Africa (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.)
Re:Diesel tree, hydrogen, ethanol etc. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:the magical fruit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biology (Score:3, Insightful)
However, you can beat the system a little by specifying, instead of a simple heating boiler, a water-cooled engine (which must run on the same fuel as your heating) and produces as much waste heat as you would require of a boiler; plumbing in the cooling system to your central heating; and attaching an alternator to the spindle. The engine costs a bit more to run than a simple heating boiler would, but you're getting electricity for no more than the difference. If you put in 4 units of fuel to get 3 units of heat and 1 unit of electricity (not an unreasonable expectation), you're effectively getting 1 unit of electricity for the price of 1 unit of heating fuel. Electricity is usually more expensive than oil or gas, so it's a win all around. If you can't use it all on-site, you can sell any surplus back to the electric company at the going rate. If you can run your equipment on a fuel costing less than one-quarter of the price of electricity, then your heating costs actually go negative!
You may even be able to get a tax break! Sell all your heating and generating equipment to a specially-formed spin-off company. Continue buying fuel in the name of your own company. Declare it to be waste, so you can write it off against tax, and pay your heating company to "recycle" it for you (by heating your buildings, flogging the excess juice and claiming a subsidy for proper disposal of the hazardous waste).
Re:Isn't this a little late? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 engine managment system. Of course the best vehicle to run on used cooking oil would be a garbage truck.
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.
This sounds like you could fill up a 747 with "diesel" and have nothing look unusual up on the flight deck...
Re:the magical fruit (Score:2, Insightful)
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:I can't wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:skeleton in a bottle (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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 centuries to come.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Carbon neutral is a huge improvement over the current carbon positive situation we're in right now.