Researchers Harness E. Coli To Produce Propane

Rambo Tribble writes A team of British and Finnish scientists have used the common bacteria Escherichia coli to produce the environmentally-friendly fuel propane. By introducing enzymes to modify the bacteria's process for producing cell membranes, they were able directly produce fuel-grade propane. While commercial application is some years off, the process is being hailed as a cheap, sustainable alternative to deriving the gas from fossil fuel production. As researcher Patrik Jones is quoted as saying, "Fossil fuels are a finite resource and...we are going to have to come up with new ways to meet increasing energy demands."

Re:The 'evironmentally-friendly' fuel propane

[tomhath]

Well, if you had RTFA you would know that propane contains less carbon than most commonly used fuels (e.g gasoline). So recycling carbon and hydrogen into propane is environmentally friendly. You can learn all kinds of interesting stuff by taking a few seconds to actually read the citations...

Re:Environmentally-friendly? Hello?!

[trout007]

Unless you use plant biomass which takes that carbon from the air. That is why I was trying to find what they used as a feedstock.

Re:The 'evironmentally-friendly' fuel propane

[jeffb (2.718)]

"The environmentally-friendly fuel propane" doesn't refer to the method of production. Propane is easier to burn cleanly than gasoline or kerosene, and it's not as significant a greenhouse gas as methane. It still produces CO2 when burned, of course, but it's carbon-neutral (assuming you aren't using a fossil feedstock, which would seem kind of pointless).

Gasoline produced through fermentation would be carbon-neutral as well, but it would still burn dirtier.

Re:The 'evironmentally-friendly' fuel propane

[Barefoot Monkey]

A environment-friendly way of producing something does not mean that the product is suddenly environmentelly-friendly to begin with.

Not in general, but it does if the production is the main reason why the product isn't environmentally-friendly to begin with. If you have - just as an example - grass which captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make cellulose, which then gets fed to bacteria to create propane, which gets burnt to produce carbon dioxide (and short-lived carbon monoxide) then you have a cycle with no significant net effect on the atmosphere. This is more environmentally-friendly than digging up fossil fuels, shipping them across the world, and burning them, which pumps into the air carbon which had until then been sequestered underground since before recorded history.

At the end of the day octane is octane and propane is propane, but what matters is whether it can be produced/consumed in a carbon-neutral manner or if we're just digging up more crude oil.