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Biotech Earth Science

Solar Powered Microbes Manufacture Biofuels 230

Posted by Soulskill from the hope-they-don't-unionize dept.
esocid alerts us to news that scientists from the University of Texas at Austin have created a microbe capable of making cellulose, which can then be turned into ethanol. The bacteria use sunlight as an energy source, and the cellulose can be harvested without destroying them. Quoting: "The new cyanobacteria produce a relatively pure, gel-like form of cellulose that can be broken down easily into glucose. 'The problem with cellulose harvested from plants is that it's difficult to break down because it's highly crystalline and mixed with lignins [for structure] and other compounds,' Nobles says. He was surprised to discover that the cyanobacteria also secrete large amounts of glucose or sucrose, sugars that can be directly harvested from the organisms."
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Solar Powered Microbes Manufacture Biofuels More

Solar Powered Microbes Manufacture Biofuels

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  • According to the article, the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.
    • It's a good thing that we can't use corn for all our transportation needs then.

      But it would seem that with this bacteria, we wouldn't need the area the size of the entire Midwest to produce fuels. Even if we stayed with using corn, we can now use parts of the plants that weren't possible/practical before. Parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground. We could use the grass clipping from your front or back yard, the grass clipping from public offices, we could grow co

      • Re:Very large surface area needed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by camperdave ( 969942 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @07:13AM (#23196248) Journal
        The "parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground" get broken down by microbes thus returning nutrients to the soil. It's the decaying plant matter that makes soil soil instead of a bunch of microscopic rocks. If we start using the whole plant instead of just the ear, we're going to wind up turning the midwest into a giant dust bowl.
        • Heh. Waste cellulosic material isn't always waste. The cyanobacteria idea is the first I've heard that starts to make sense. As I understand it, all you basically have to do is put some of the soup out in the sun and it produces cellulose gel. Cellulose is a carbohydrate chain; does this mean that it sucks CO2 out of the air in the process? Although this would be a net zero gain/loss on CO2, at least it could reduce the whole sucking carbon out of the ground and spewing it into the air problem we have n
          • Indeed it would pull CO2 from the air in the process. Burning it as fuel would release it again.

            This would be considered a renewable fuel. This seems to be a variation on the proposals I've seen for vast farms of algae/plankton etc... You set up the systems out in the desert somewhere, draw off the growth and process it into fuel, whether that be ethanol or biodiesel.

            The quirk here is that you can apparently harvest without taking/killing the bacteria, which is an interesting twist. I wonder how you fil

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Hatta ( 162192 )
              I'd expect some sort of centrifuge. At least, that's how bacteria are usually separated from liquid medium in the lab.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by theophilosophilus ( 606876 )

          The "parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground" get broken down by microbes thus returning nutrients to the soil. It's the decaying plant matter that makes soil soil instead of a bunch of microscopic rocks. If we start using the whole plant instead of just the ear, we're going to wind up turning the midwest into a giant dust bowl.

          Not really. If we start planting corn on corn to cash in on high prices we will. Crop rotation [wikipedia.org] accomplishes the replenishment of the soil you are referring to. Corn is followed by soybeans, a legume [wikipedia.org]. Legumes are responsible for the phenomenon you are referring to. Crop rotation was started in response to the problems of the dirty thirties [wikipedia.org].

          The biomass technologies currently being pioneered by companies such as Poet [poetenergy.com] simply use the chaff, leaving the corn's root system to provide cover over the winter.

        • the article did say their is a possibility of a 17 fold increase, reducing the size to 3.5% of the projected area for corn.
          So a good crop rotation of all corn land, only taking every 4th years production dedicated to petrol, other years rotate in beans (builds up the soil for grass/corn crops nicely.) Sounds like in theory this could become workable. (of course what I mean is 1/4 of the land every year goes to producing the cellulose plant, and you rotate that to different lands every year maintaining 1/4
        • No, it all depends on the cost of replacing it by other means. If it costs $1 per acre to to apply these same nutrients artificially where $3-$5 and acre could be made from selling the stocks too, then the choice if to add it back later.

          But this chopping and disposing of the plant stocks is really a new trait to farming. we used to collect the stocks when harvesting and either burn them, or compost them in a separate type of a process. The most common is to bundle them together and place them in a field ov

        • we're going to wind up turning the midwest into a giant dust bowl.
          Yeah, like that could ever happen.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cayenne8 ( 626475 )
        "But it would seem that with this bacteria, we wouldn't need the area the size of the entire Midwest to produce fuels. Even if we stayed with using corn, we can now use parts of the plants that weren't possible/practical before. Parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground. We could use the grass clipping from your front or back yard, the grass clipping from public offices, we could grow commercial forests of trees to extend the hight of the plants and maximize the a
        • I agree with about everything but the farm subsidies. I think they need to be adjusted, of course higher prices is supposed to create the incentive to plant instead of not planting which the mechanisms appear to be broken by the current ethanol craze.

          But I look at the far subsidies as a strategic reserve. as long as we have farm land in reserve creating the ability to have a stable and profitable market for the lands cultivates, we won't see a sell off of lands which means a drought in one area can be compe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Raptoer ( 984438 )
      Good thing that this idea doesn't use corn then.
      This is really amazing, since corn ethanol is a terrible idea, switchgrass isn't much better, and we can't grow sugarcane in large quantities in the US (although you can use sugar beets).
      Even better is that it is not a seasonal crop. With corn ethanol I can see one year we just run out of ethanol and well... have to wait for the next crop!


      I just hope that it isn't going to be forgotten or swept under the rug.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 )
      Ethanol is only really useful for powering petrol engines. Far better to use grain to produce oil and run diesel engines.

      I know the American automotive industry is a bit behind the curve with technology, but most manufacturers are getting rid of their wheezy underpowered petrols. In a few years you won't see new petrol cars at all.

    • Re:Very large surface area needed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by theophilosophilus ( 606876 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @09:10AM (#23197342) Homepage Journal

      According to the article, the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.
      This is why the debate over energy alternatives is so skewed. I don't think any proponent of ethanol claims its the magic solution to all energy needs. The debate is about how we can use our surplus corn to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

      If there is a better source of ethanol that comes around, then so be it. Corn ethanol has stimulated development of the next generation of technology.

      Implicit in the parent's argument is the idea that ethanol competes for food crop acres and thus raises prices. That is correct. However, the sensationalist media and proponents of other energy alternatives neglect several components of the equation. One component is the argument that high food prices is bad for the third world. The argument seems confusing when you discover that these are usually the same people that argue farm subsidies are causing food prices to be too low . Recent Wall Street Journal articles indicate that high crop prices are finally stimulating investment in third world agriculture. Another component is the argument that today's high food prices are because of ethanol. This is also confusing because similar price increases have been witnessed in products that have nothing to do with corn production. Rice for example, has shown the same percentage jump and yet does not compete with corn acres. My last point is that fuel prices are a major cost of corn production. If we eliminated ethanol production today, the increase in fuel prices due to reduced dilution from ethanol would mean that food prices would hardly change (if at all). [Note this is a little too simplistic because eliminating ethanol would distribute increased fuel costs over a market broader than agriculture - the net effect is the same].

      I am not arguing that tying energy and food production together can't be dangerous. I am arguing that we haven't reached that point. Further, in a sense, energy and food production have always been tied together.

  • Precision in Reporting ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the bluebrain ( 443451 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @05:08AM (#23195618)
    Starts out well ...

    AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]

    OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.

    So ...
    - Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
    - More likely it was newly discovered.
    - Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.

    OK, so not created.

    Then, going on, it all sounds rather silver bullety. So just some sane basics:

    - It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing ... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.

    - It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work ... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.

    Anyhow. Good news, good job, my car is still running on refined crude until further notice. Wake me up when this stuff is at the pumps at two bucks a gallon.

    [no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]
    • [no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]

      Maybe not, but grumpy reflexes are a good thing to have when evaluating stories like this.

      These guys have been touting the same cyanobacteria [bbc.co.uk] for years, first as a replacement for paper, now as an alternative fuel.

      Given that cellulose is a poor fuel feedstock to start with, I'd suggest they'll have even less success this time around.

      • Re:Precision in Reporting ... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cosmicaug ( 150534 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @06:39AM (#23196042)
        The BBC article (which is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll in her grave were she not still alive) was actually reporting on an article investigating homologies of cellulose synthases in several species of cyanobacteria. Curiously, the current U of Texas at Austin is not about harnessing native cellulose production by some cyanobacterium but rather about "Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100 [metapress.com]". I guess that they decided that inserting required cellulose biosynthetic enzymes from an organism (apparently) known to produce a lot of cellulose was easier than trying to optimize the miserly levels of cellulose biosynthesis in some cyanobacterium.
        • That should have been "... is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn Margulis roll..." rather than "... is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll...".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by alta ( 1263 )

          Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100
          WTF? You must do this for a living! I can't understand the title, much less the article.

    • Re:Precision in Reporting ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cosmicaug ( 150534 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @05:21AM (#23195672)
      It looks like they they need to control the simple sugar secretion problem. This is not only an organism which wastes energy (from its "perspective") for no good reason by making cellulose but also an organism which is considerate enough to potential competitors to give them an easy to use energy source in the form of simple sugars.

      The former (the part we want) makes the organism weak but might be manageable. The latter, makes the organism "stupid" and, if it produces large enough quantities of simple sugars to sustain high densities of other microbes feasting on simple sugars, suicidal since secondary metabolites (or simply overwhelmingly high numbers of competitors) will probably make a population of this organism unsustainable.
      • So, good for environment, as this organism will not spread like fire. It will be used in lab vats with very small possibilities of contamination.
        • We can't make enough vats to make this practical.

          • We can't make enough vats to make this practical.
            The word is: yet.

            Brown and Nobles are now researching the best methods to scale up efficient and cost-effective production of cyanobacteria. Two patent applications, 20080085520 and 20080085536, were recently published in the United States Patent and Trade Office.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Dynamoo ( 527749 )
              So it's a weak organism.. until it mutates. Which these things have a habit of doing..
              • And evolution will make sure that the mutations that survive are the ones we want the least, i.e. those unable to produce biofuels. Thus rendering them useless.

      • Not necessarily suicidal (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @08:05AM (#23196654) Journal
        It's not necessarily suicidal.

        Cyanobacter are routinely part of lichens, which are a very weird mix of fungi and bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The fungi form a matrix in which the bacteria are trapped, and help collect minerals and moisture for the trapped bacteria.

        The arrangement isn't entirely mutually beneficial, from the point of view of the individual bacteria, but from a propagating-the-genes point of view (which in evolution is the only one that matters at all) it does allow the bacteria to live and multiply in some places where it otherwise could not.

        And the fungi aren't doing it as some kind of act of kindness, either: fungi can't do photosynthesis on their own, so those lichens growing on rocks and whatnot, well, would die if noone in that arrangement provided food for the fungi too. That's the bacteria's contribution there: those sugars.

        At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.

        From another point of view, fungi are nasty critters, which can only live on organic matter produced by someone else. It may be parasitic (they take other cells apart and eat them) or they can live on dead matter, but nevertheless they absolutely need someone else to manufacture those nutrients for them. Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite. They don't just live off the nutrients that the bacteria excrete, but actually poke the bacteria with tiny filaments and suck the nutrients right out of the living cell. The trapped bacteria are routinely killed in the process, but the colony survives by just allowing them to multiply faster than they're killed.

        Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Eccles ( 932 )
          At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.

          Just watch out for the bacteria Morpheus and Neo.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bwcbwc ( 601780 )
          And consider the brewery as well. The measures that brewers have to take to keep their strains of yeast pure are so well understood that people do it at home: 1) sanitize your containers, 2) disinfect/cook the source material. The fact that the bacteria/algae are producing sugar instead of consuming it is still a negative, but I don't see it as insurmountable in an industrial environment. We aren't going to have these things growing on trees, they're going to be in "refineries" under tightly-controlled (eve

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khallow ( 566160 )

          Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite.
          The term is "symbiont" not "parasite". As you note, the cyanobacteria gets significant advantages from the arrangement.
          • Yes, well, I know the term "symbiont", I'm just sorta weary of applying it to that kind of an arrangement.

            It's just about akin to our relationship with Broiler chicken: we breed them by the millions in cramped dark spaces, slaughter them wholesale, eat them, and keep just enough of them around to lay enough eggs for the next batch of chickens. Repeat every couple of weeks, because we selected the ones which grow that incredibly fast. (Let's just say that most of what goes into a McChicken still has blue eye

        • Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.

          Ah yes, just like my real life.

      • Hmm, a brew of that schtuff will likely result in beer with some cellulose in it which might give Kellogs' All Bran pause.

    • Yeah, i know It is tough to read TFA (Score:5, Informative)

      by someone1234 ( 830754 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @05:25AM (#23195698)
      From YFP (your frickin' post):
      "So ...
      - Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
      - More likely it was newly discovered.
      - Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.

      OK, so not created."

      From TFA:
      "Nobles made the new cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) by giving them a set of cellulose-making genes from a non-photosynthetic "vinegar" bacterium, Acetobacter xylinum, well known as a prolific cellulose producer."

      Compare!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by arotenbe ( 1203922 )

      It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing ... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.

      The Sun produces a lot of energy. If we had some super-efficient way of converting sunlight to usable energy, we could replace oil for most uses. Lack of energy from the Sun is not the problem - efficiency and limited funding is.

      On an unrelated note, I'd like to point out the last lines of TFA:

      Brown and Nobles are now researching the best methods to scale up efficient and cost-effective production of cyanobacteria. Two patent applications, 20080085520 and 20080085536, were recently published in the United States Patent and Trade Office.

      Patents on biological processes are never good. What are these patents and what does this mean?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by torkus ( 1133985 )
        Actually you don't need super-high efficiency in converting solar to usable energy. There's a huge amount of energy hitting the ground.

        Ignoring clouds, the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kWh/m)/day) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation)

        Based on other posts they idea microbe needs 20m acres. Let's see what solar energy that gives us.

        20m acres = ~81B/m2 * 6kWh/day/m2 = 486billion kWh per day or 486,000 GWh/day = 177,390,000 GWh/year

        Let me say that again:

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by budgenator ( 254554 )

      - It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work ... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.
      [no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]

      In the past productivity has gone through the roof when they went outside, even the article said a 17X increase was possible. in Arizona an algae CO2 capture plant had to be shut down because the bioreator's production increase overwhelmed the processing plant! Give them a chance and let's see what happens in the real world.

    • Being grumpy is fun and all, but is solving the 'clean room problem' really all that difficult to envision? Popular Science was on this topic quite some time ago (the startup in the article was experimenting with algae as the producer of fat). From PopSci [popsci.com]:

      Sears's solution was inspired by the most humble of kitchen implements, the Ziploc bag. Clear plastic sacks, he realized, would let in enough light to help the algae thrive yet prevent unwanted species from invading. The crux of his innovation is his design for a full-scale algae "reactor." Two 350-foot-long parallel tracks about three feet apart hold the bags in place. Custom-built rollers occasionally squeeze them like tubes of toothpaste, circulating the algae; a current gives them the intermittent sun exposure they need to flourish. Once the algae is grown, a refinery extracts its oil and converts it to biodiesel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by adisakp ( 705706 )
      AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]

      OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form.

      - Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.

      If splicing DNA isn't creating new (as in previously non-existant) life form what is it? For that matter, breeding can create new lifeforms (mutation, breeding, and natural selection have created nearly all the lifeforms on
  • Reading this article is encouraging, but I have to wonder, why oh why isn't more being done to find alternative ways to make ethanol. At this point $200.00 barrels of oil is not that far off. We should be doing a full court press on ethanol and ways to produce it without endangering food supplies. I am curious as to how much water it takes to produce the ethanol in the bacterial slurry, as water resources aren't so plentiful either.... Now, if the bacteria becomes scalable and able to salt water as its s

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Raptoer ( 984438 )
      Because this is the real world. And in the real world we have these people, called politicians. It is their job to go out and get reelected every term. Which means that they need two things, money and votes. You get the money from oil companies, and the votes from dumb farmers in the midwest who think that corn ethanol is a great idea and ignoring the whole thing about food prices almost doubling from a year or two ago.

      • Re:Why, oh why.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @08:05AM (#23196660)
        Um.. to "dumb farmers" corn based ethanol IS a good idea. Higher demand drives up the price for their corn, making them more money.

        Sounds like you are the dumb one for not realizing why farmers are pimping their corn for ethanol.

        And no, I'm not saying corn based ethanol is a good idea, because it's not.. I'm just saying to farmers in the mid-west it's a good thing because they make more revenue. I guess the sad thing is there are a large number of "super farms" that are owned by New York businessmen.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by maxume ( 22995 )
      I'll bet you a nickle that oil doesn't cross $150 in the next five years.

      Cellulosic is being industrialized as we speak. People are noticing that butanol isn't nearly as polar as ethanol and has a higher energy density to boot. Junk to diesel processes seem to work. There is plenty being done; trying the 10,000 best ideas isn't necessarily better than trying the 500 best ideas.
    • they do grow in brackish or salt water, they are grown in bio-reactors, clear plastic tube filled with water and cyanobacterias and these things tend to go ape-shit when they scale up to production sized units. We could put them on roof tops and the side of buildings if things got bad enough.
  • ... have created a microbe capable of making cellulose, which can then be turned into ethanol.

    Great. Now all we need is something to convert the carbon produced by burning the ethanol back into cellulose [wikipedia.org]...

    Hey, wait a second...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Back up. Where was "the carbon produced"? Hint: The carbon cycle using fuel from this process is closed.

  • Issues with PETA, I'm sure ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by krygny ( 473134 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @06:27AM (#23195960)

    ... that is, Protozoa for the Ethical Treatment of Amoebae. Humans don't have the right to enslave bacteria.

  • Better options than biofuel from grain (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lonewolf666 ( 259450 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @08:15AM (#23196740)
    TFA describes an approach with nice potential, but it seems to need a lot of work before it becomes commercially viable.
    Another is oil from algae: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture#Algae_as_an_energy_source [wikipedia.org]
    and it seems to be closer to commercial use.

  • What about carbon sequestration? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BVis ( 267028 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @08:25AM (#23196840)
    Has anyone seen any information regarding whether or not this process removes CO2 from the atmosphere in significant amounts? It would seem that if they're making carbohydrates (sugars) that this process would be pulling carbon from the environment to do it, which is another side benefit to the process if non-trivial. In other words, not only do we get usable fuel relatively cleanly, we remove greenhouse gases from the environment at the same time.

    By the way, I'd like to remind people that how expensive a process is isn't always the only thing to consider.

  • I am Legend!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @08:47AM (#23197086) Homepage Journal
    Didn't you guys see I am Legend? I just saw it last weekend. This is a terrible Idea, they're going to develope a mutant strain of bacteria that will turn all 'designated' corn into fuel. Then in a few years it will turn all the plants, not just the corn into human eating vegimonsters that will devower all people and force us to live in New Hampsher in a walled colony with just the few vegetables (asparagus, brussel sprouts) that are immune. That is until a super smart plant in manhattan develops are cure and is killed right after it's made. Luckily he attached it to a few dandylion seeds that floated to NH so the cure was not lost.

    No Thanks, I'll just keep burning oil!

  • Closed Cycle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday April 25, 2008 @09:52AM (#23197794) Journal
    Combining this technology with algae after treatments like those used by GreenFuel Technologies [greenfuelonline.com] and you have a true closed carbon cycle. Greenfuel uses sunlight and CO2 from power plants to grow massive amounts of algae. The algae grows rapidly because of high concentrations of CO2 and large surface area of the bubbletubes.

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