A brave new world of fossil fuels on demand

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GRtak

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...rld-of-fossil-fuels-on-demand/article1871149/

A brave new world of fossil fuels on demand

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for ?a proprietary organism? ? a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium ? that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, ?fossil fuels on demand.?

We?re not talking ?biofuels? ? not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no ?feedstock,? no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these ?inputs,? it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as ?artificial photosynthesis.?

Joule says it now has ?a library? of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has ?proven the process,? has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

By way of comparison, Cornell University?s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

Joule says its ?solar converter? technology makes the manufacture of liquid fossil fuels 50 times as efficient as conventional biofuel production ? and eliminates as much as 90 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions. ?Requiring only sunlight and waste C0{-2},? it says, ?[this] technology can produce virtually unlimited quantities of fossil fuels with zero dependence on raw materials, agricultural land, crops or fresh water. It ends the hazards of oil exploration and oil production. It takes us to the unthinkable: liquid hydrocarbons on demand.?

The company name honours James Prescott Joule, the 19th-century British scientist. Founded only four years ago, it has begun pilot-project production in Leander, Tex. Using modular solar panels (imagine an array of conventional panels in a one-acre field), it says it will quickly ramp up production this year toward small-scale commercial production in 2012.

Joule acknowledges its reluctance to fully explain its ?solar converter.? CEO Bill Sims told Biofuels Digest, an online biofuels news service, that secrecy has been essential for competitive reasons. ?Some time soon,? he said, ?what we are doing will become clear.? Although astonishing in its assertions, Joule gains credibility from its co-founder: George Church, the Harvard Medical School geneticist who helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Joule began to generate buzz toward the end of 2010. When U.S. Senator John Kerry toured the company?s labs in October, he called the technology ?a potential game-changer.? He noted, ironically, that the company?s science is so advanced that it can?t qualify for federal grants or subsidies: The government?s definition of biofuels requires the use of raw-material feedstock.

In December, the World Technology Network named the company the world?s top corporate player in bio-energy research. Biofuels Digest named it one of the world?s ?50 hottest? bio-energy enterprises, moving it ahead 10 places in the past year (from 32nd to 22nd). Selected from 1,000 eligible companies around the world, 37 of the ?50 hottest? are American-based ? another reason not to count out the U.S. just yet.

Conventional fossil fuels are formed from solar energy, too ? in a process that takes zillions of bugs and millions of years. Joule?s technology ostensibly produces the same products in less time. In other energy-producing roles, vast quantities of microbes are already hard at work underground, loosening hard-to-recover crude oil. It could be time for science to bring these bugs up into the light of day.
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[...]it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water [...]
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That?s only half the story. The bacteria doesn?t grow on water, Co2 and Sunshine. Those are just the ingredients it needs to make the hydrocarbons.
Picture it as a kitchen. It?s like saying a cake will bake itself (and cheaply) when you provide the raw materials and an oven. They skip the part about paying a cook to do the work (or rather, raising and training it - if this analogy is supposed to make any sense). Now, what does this E. coli cook cost me -that?s the question.

Apart from that ... interesting. Will be a question of price in the end, no doubt. Hard to imagine lab-grade handling of bacteria turning out cheaper in the end than farmers handling crops for making biofuel ... but hey - I?d love to be wrong on that one ...
And on a sidenote: I always thought we?d see a genetically engineered H2-producing bacteria first ...
 
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Interrobang said:
That?s only half the story. The bacteria doesn?t grow on water, Co2 and Sunshine. Those are just the ingredients it needs to make the hydrocarbons.
Picture it as a kitchen. It?s like saying a cake will bake itself (and cheaply) when you provide the raw materials and an oven. They skip the part about paying a cook to do the work (or rather, raising and training it - if this analogy is supposed to make any sense). Now, what does this E. coli cook cost me -that?s the question.

Apart from that ... interesting. Will be a question of price in the end, no doubt. Hard to imagine lab-grade handling of bacteria turning out cheaper in the end than farmers handling crops for making biofuel ... but hey - I?d love to be wrong on that one ...
And on a sidenote: I always thought we?d see a genetically engineered H2-producing bacteria first ...
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Hehe, they make it sound like you could just give these bacteria some water, CO2 and sunshine and they will start spewing an endless flood of hydrocarbons :rolleyes:

I'll believe it when I see it. Until then this is just alot of hot air for the investors.
 
Interrobang said:
That?s only half the story. The bacteria doesn?t grow on water, Co2 and Sunshine. Those are just the ingredients it needs to make the hydrocarbons.
Picture it as a kitchen. It?s like saying a cake will bake itself (and cheaply) when you provide the raw materials and an oven. They skip the part about paying a cook to do the work (or rather, raising and training it - if this analogy is supposed to make any sense). Now, what does this E. coli cook cost me -that?s the question.

Apart from that ... interesting. Will be a question of price in the end, no doubt. Hard to imagine lab-grade handling of bacteria turning out cheaper in the end than farmers handling crops for making biofuel ... but hey - I?d love to be wrong on that one ...
And on a sidenote: I always thought we?d see a genetically engineered H2-producing bacteria first ...
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The start up cost would be quite large for sure but as far as maintaining the population, I would assume as any bacteria these can multiple on their own. Just have to make sure they don't escape otherwise we might have some interesting diseases :p
 
prizrak said:
[...] I would assume as any bacteria these can multiple on their own.
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On their own, yes. Without additional food, no. Like a Plant takes what it needs to grow out of the soil, so Bacteria need stuff to feed on too (Nutrions etc). They don?t feed on sunlight, Co2 or water ... they need a Growth medium of some sort and special growing parameters (temperature, humidity - for example) to reporduce and stay alive.
 
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What a bunch of Negative Nancies.
 
deathrazor said:
In before Shell/BP/whoever buys it out and makes it disappear.
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Buy it out? Yes. Make it disappear? Not bloody likely.

Oil exploration is expensive. Oil drilling is expensive. Oil refinement is expensive. Oil shipping is expensive. All four are getting more expensive all the time, as our stock of dead dinosaurs is now in harder to reach places. If this thing can get you good gas for really cheap, the oil companies would cream themselves. A huge portion of their costs, gone.

It might not reduce the price at the pump, but oil companies are interested in profits, not about just drilling shit. If they can buy a patent on these organisms and have a cheap way to produce oil, you can bet your ass they're going to do it. They'll market it as their new shiny green fuel - probably with a markup, for being environmentally nice - but there's no way in hell they're going to let a chance to reduce their costs pass them by.
 
deathrazor said:
In before Shell/BP/whoever buys it out and makes it disappear.
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They will buy it out, but disappear? Highly doubtful.

It costs between 8 and 10 million dollars to drill an oil well. That is a huge cash outlay for something that has a very good chance of being a dry hole in the ground. This technology would allow the energy companies to continue to produce what people want without the cost of drilling more wells.
 
It's much more safe than traditional oil exploration, assuming the bacteria are handled properly and not capable of causing some weird uber-disease.
Safe in term of economic risk, no need to explore and drill potentially worthless wells.
Safe in terms of work safety, drilling is very dangerous.
Safe in terms of the environment, see Gulf of Mexico.

If any big oil company was to buy this tech, pursuing its development would be a no-brainer because it's safe for them in so many ways.
 
Sorry but I read The Globe quite often and Neil Reynolds is an absolute idiot who has a terrible history or betting on the wrong scientific endeavours. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Those yields are absurdly high.
 
Canuck said:
Those yields are absurdly high.
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:nod: 23l/m?a is a lot, that figure is only a planned figure. However, they claim to already achieve 9l/m?a. Add improvements, deduct non-lab losses and maybe get that lab figure as a realistic figure for production, who knows. That would require one square meter to do 100km per year at 9l/100km. An average car might do 15000km per year, so that would be 150m? per car. Part of your back yard may be able to provide your fuel (not in Canada, obviously - needs moar sunlight).
As a comparison, making ethanol from wheat yields 0.18l/m? of petrol equivalent - that's where their claim of being 50 times as efficient as biofuel comes from, 9/0.18 is 50.
 
I?ll believe it when I see it. It does sound interesting though, any links to further reading?
 
Wasn't something similar posted on the forums a while back? Though I believe the bacteria was meant to eat garbage and produce petrol.
 
I only have one question:

Will I be able to buy them at walmart?
 
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