Generating Alcohol Fuels From Electrical Current and CO2 82
New submitter AcMNPV writes "A news release from UCLA describes a new process for producing biofuels using microorganisms, electrical current and carbon dioxide (abstract). Quoting: 'Liao and his team genetically engineered a lithoautotrophic microorganism known as Ralstonia eutropha H16 to produce isobutanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol in an electro-bioreactor using carbon dioxide as the sole carbon source and electricity as the sole energy input. Photosynthesis is the process of converting light energy to chemical energy and storing it in the bonds of sugar. There are two parts to photosynthesis — a light reaction and a dark reaction. The light reaction converts light energy to chemical energy and must take place in the light. The dark reaction, which converts CO2 to sugar, doesn't directly need light to occur. "We've been able to separate the light reaction from the dark reaction and instead of using biological photosynthesis, we are using solar panels to convert the sunlight to electrical energy, then to a chemical intermediate, and using that to power carbon dioxide fixation to produce the fuel," Liao said.'"
Re:Sure like to see some info about efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to cut them some slack. This is a proof-of-concept, er, give-me-more-money demonstration. Of course, most of these sorts of things don't scale, don't work outside the bottle and won't end up commercialized, but it is an interesting way to go about doing things.
In general, I'm leery of using bioreactors as a production tool. They're expensive, cranky of maintenance and tend to smell bad.
But you've got to start somewhere.
Synthetic Fossil Fuels? (Score:0, Insightful)
Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.
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Re:Now this could be potentially game changing.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but gasoline is one of the highest methods of storing energy we have (as in, both from a scientific and economical perspective). To have something that is similar to gasoline in energy density, can use existing infrastructure (which has had what, 100 odd years of investment and process refining?), fast transfer of said energy, and is compatible with all existing gasoline engines, I think it quite outstanding.
There may be better methods of energy storage, but a pragmatic balance needs to be found, I believe Butanol has potential.
And yet, despite it being of no surprise to anyone of normal education level, it has proved to be very hard to do it in a cost effective way, specifically in a way that does not need light/growing on land (like other algae-based methods of butanol production).
The idea that you could for example, bury the entire butanol production facility underground, and pipe CO2/electricity to it and get fuel, and leave the land above for conventional farming/life/etc... would be quite a cool feature.
Re:Sure like to see some info about efficiency... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they can synthesize gasoline out of e.g. coal now -- I recall perhaps the Nazis doing this in WW II? -- but I think the process is still uneconomical compared to pumping and refining oil. I'd really like a rooftop collector that takes a gallon or two of water, atmospheric CO_2, and spits out a couple of gallons of pure gasoline in an normal day of sunshine. At 37 kW-hours per gallon, this wouldn't be terribly easy, actually (or rather, it would require a pretty big roof:-) but that's precisely why it is hard to beat gasoline as a fuel. A 5 kW rooftop collector, an 8 hour day, nearly perfect efficiency would make just one lousy gallon of gasoline. But that's more than I USE in a typical day, and at $4/gallon it would be $1200+ return per year...
Re:Now this could be potentially game changing.... (Score:4, Insightful)
For mass production it's likely they would just connect to the power grid and use whatever was available. I'd imagine they demonstrated it at this stage with solar to show that the output of that panel was sufficient to drive the reaction, thereby making it a standalone system.
I suspect they chose solar because virtually any other source of power creates more CO2 than this process would use.
Solar or Wind, which become available on their own schedule, and not always in sync with mankind's needs could use a good sink, and that makes them the logical choice for this type of project.
We don't have enough power on anybody's national grid to accommodate all the recharging of electric vehicles planned for the market as it is. So in my mind its doubtful this process would EVER make economic sense, because its a pretty inefficient storage mechanism, and merely a short term sequestration of Carbon.