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Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 04, 2008 01:46 PM
from the gliocladium-roseum dept.
from the gliocladium-roseum dept.
Fluffeh alerts us to a report of a fungus that naturally produces diesel fuel, or something very close to it. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth. ... [T]the paper's authors admit that the technique is far from any sort of industrial production. 'This report presents no information on the cost-effectiveness or other details to make G. roseum an alternative fuel source,' they write." NPR has an interview with the fungus's discoverer.
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First Use (Score:5, Funny)
I think it would be really poetic if the first use of this fungus is to digest the entire Patagonian rain forest into sweet, greasy diesel.
Re:First Use (Score:5, Funny)
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That's funny, but it is exactly what happens in the Alberta oil sands.
Massive amounts of energy are used to extract oil from oil-saturated sand. The oil is then refined into gasoline, some of which inevitably ends up powering the extraction machinery. [wikipedia.org]
You need a mod +1 ironic on top of the funny...
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Pretty spiffy (Score:3, Interesting)
if you ask me. I hope we are smart and research more ways to provide energy, and don't just hop on another band wagon technology.
Re:Pretty spiffy (Score:5, Insightful)
This by itself may not be the breakthrough we're looking for. None of the other alternative energy stories on /. in the past few months may be either. But they keep coming, research continues in countless labs and studies across the globe, some things don't work, and others lead to more inquiry, and that's what is really important.
This will not be a puzzle solved by a single genius in a moment of discovery. It will be solved over time, by many talented people with many discoveries. But I think that's why it's safe to say it will be solved.
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Re:Pretty spiffy (Score:5, Insightful)
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.
I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets? In the real world, the most profitable investment may have a huge environmental cost canceling any benefit therefrom. Even restrcting to nominally "eco-friendly" fuels, you have to factor in their *relative*, *total* environmental harm, and weigh it against the utility to users, in order to find which is the best. And since "total life-cycle environmental harm" is not a parameter in the corporate profitability computation, we shouldn't be surprised if they don't factor it in.
Of course, environmental costs do, in a sense, show up in balance sheets ... but not in any efficient, sensible way. They manifest as stuff like:
- Bribe to regulator.
- Lobbyist salaries.
- $Environmenal_harm1 denial campaign.
- Compliance costs of $efficiency_standard1 which barely accomplishes anything.
- Goodwill (modulo the impact of advertising)
Please, please stop assuming "profitability within current system" is the same as "efficiency, discounting for meaningful environmental damage".
No, I'm not a greenie, just upset at how blind people can get to the other side's arguments.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I never said they did. What I said is that the non-balance sheet environmental costs don't make a difference in decisionmaking, because everyone who matters ignores them. Do you really think China's Ministry of Transportation gives a shit about Braziallian rain forests? Or BP's stockholders? They don't, or at least not enough to matter when it comes down to money.
If the options are $X for thi
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Joke of the Day! (Score:5, Funny)
One is a parasitic inhuman slime capable of producing copius amounts of fuel, and the other is a mushroom.
Wrong fuel (Score:5, Funny)
When we looked at the gas analysis, I was flabbergasted," said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University
So it's not producing diesel, but some fuel called "Flabbergas"
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't you mean Fungas?
1. isolate the genes (Score:5, Insightful)
2. put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format
3. profit. MAJOR profit. and just financial profit
a. geopolitical: you don't fund wahabbi islam via saudi arabia, blowhards in venezuela, or neoimperialism in russia.
b. environmental: you don't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, you simply recycle it.
c. economic: a stable agricultral source of fuel is a lot better for a healthy economy than undependable one you need to mine
please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes. and then someone else: make your first trillion, turn this genetically engineered plant into a major company
Who the hell modded parent Troll? (Score:2)
Please mod parent UP!
The basic premise of the parent post, sucking the right genes out of the fungus and splicing them into something a little more productive, is right in the frickin' article and bears repeating:
Troll my ass...
Re:Who the hell modded parent Troll? (Score:5, Funny)
I marked him troll. I am a wahabbi living in venezuela, and I summer in Russia where I volunteer for the local young men's neoimperialism association (YMNA). I was upset by the "blowhard" comment, but what really stung was the implication that I didn't deserve all the billions I've been getting.
Not to mix a joke with a serious point, but his point number two of "put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format" seems a bit off. The genes take cellulose and break it down, wheras plants make the cellulose to make themselves. It would probably be rather inefficient to have the plants digest themselves. I think it would be easier to come up with a culture system to feed non-foodstock plant material into bacteria engineered to digest the cellulose.
What would be truly a shoe-in for a nobel would be if you could engineer a 2 microbe system, one to make cellulose from photosynthesis, the other to digest the cellulose, either in tandem to continuously produce fuel or after some harvesting. Naturally I have no idea as to the feasibility of any part of that, so don't blame me if you you're a venture capitalist and this idea goes nowhere. ;-)
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Your sig.. (Score:4, Informative)
I used to be your average Joe Sixpack. After 8 years of Bush, I'm now your average Joe 40-oz.
This seems funny at first, because comparing one 12 oz beer of a sixpack to a 40 oz of malt liquor yields more drinking. But, a sixpack of 12 oz beers is really 72 oz. So now I'm confused. Do you actually drink less beer now than you used to?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
AC is almost correct, it's an economy joke, not a "I have to drink more to forget" joke. It's more confusing to others than I anticipated. A 6 pack has more alchohol but also costs more. I'll get around to changing it eventually.
Systems of Plants and Fungi (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I'm lichen your idea... Technically a lichen [wikipedia.org] has a fungus and something that photosynthesizes, usually algae or cyanobacterium (or sometimes both). And the nutrients that get passed back and forth usually aren't cellulose, but maybe it'd be possible to get that kind of fungus together with a plant.
Alternatively, you could combine the fungus's cellulose-to-diesel features with growing cellulose-stalked grains, so instead of using corn to produce ethanol competing with using corn for food, you'd grow t
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I guess it is partially stubborness, because we've dropped the many advantages my system has on yours, I guess I've already won ;-P
I am curious as to tissue or temporal specific promoters in plants. I'm guessing you don't know of any either. The lactose promoter would be good if you were going to make diesel from your small intestine, but of course that's not what you were suggesting, so you'd need a specific promoter, which may or may not be known. Like I said: another layer of complexity that's not an
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Of course, if this happens, someone will start whinging about all the food we're not growing because of that evil biodiesel being more profitable than corn.
Followed quickly by laws making it illegal to grow the stuff, so as to allow us to concentrate on growing food....
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How do you figure? Ethanol use by vehicles is expanding by various government decrees in the US even as we speak.
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The only thing I'd caution is that sucking out genes that allow something to eat cellulose and having it somehow released to the wild could be very detrimental to the environment and industry. Cellulose is intentionally hard to break down for exactly the reasons that plants don't really want random organisms attacking them there. If we go and engineer microbes that can eat away at stalks, leaves, tree trunks, grasses, etc., we should be really careful about how it's applied.
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The last time someone did this, the biomass of the entire planet was dissolved into great big pools of oil that we are still using today.
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I think you missed something...
This is not a plant. It is a fungus... it eats plants. So what you are suggesting is a plant that eats itself.
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And just a day or so ago. . . (Score:2)
people were whining about 1/3 of the amphibian population possibly going extinct in the near future and why should they care? I'm sure these same people adhere to the adage, as promulgated by Rush Limbaugh, of cutting down all the trees to make way for development.
This, among many others, is a classic example of why we need to keep the rainforests around for as long as possible. Who knows what other goodies are lying in wait for some curious scientist to find?
If people think that clear-cutting forests and
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And even Manhattan isn't absolutely devoid of greenery. There's Central Park, and several other smaller parks scattered out on the island.
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True, except that Central Park was specifically set aside as an open space because those in the upper echelon of society were trying to create something along the lines of London and Parisian parks so New York would be recognized on the international scene. It wasn't an altruistic creation in the strictest sense. Regardless, it certainly provides an outlet for the masses.
The few smaller parks I've visited, Sara Delano Roosevelt being the most recent, are nice diversions from the concrete, steel and marble
Obvious Joke (Score:5, Funny)
There are lots of ways to make diesel fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
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But there is a problem with this idea. Turbo-diesels require highly refined and filtered fuel to run properly and not clog the injectors and filters. You would have to restrict it to non-turbocharged and non-injected engines to be able to use most of the homemade stuff. Thankfully there are a lot of them still around. Mercedes says that nearly 80% of all of the vehicles it's ever made are still on the road. You can't hardly go a mile in most towns without running across an old Mercedes diesel.
Those engines are already here.... (Score:5, Informative)
....Just look under the hood of one of DoD's tactical military vehicles. You'll find a turbocharged, multi-fuel Diesel, capable of burning anything from LH to bear grease.
Parent
Next: Herds of mattresses found in the Sahara! (Score:5, Funny)
can't wait for this (Score:4, Interesting)
yet I won't hold my breath. In the mean time, I will continue to burn B20 and SVO in my old diesel.
In addition to brewing diesel from cellulose, I would also like to see biofuels manufacturers brew butanol (with Clostridium acetobutylicum, or better) from cellulose. Seriously, it is a much better gasoline replacement than E85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol [wikipedia.org]
In any case, foodstock based ethanol is the WORST FUEL SUBSTITUTE EVAR. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0512/p08s01-comv.html [csmonitor.com]
If the chevy volt doesn't turn out to be a piece of shit, (yeah, good luck with that. Can GM manage NOT to make a piece of shit?) I would totally buy that for my daily commute and keep the diesel for my occasional interstate forays. Or maybe the Th!nk OX http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2008/03/think-ox-concep.html [cars.com] will be available in the US by then. Or maybe Toyota will get its head out of its ass and realize that not everyone thinks a hybrid is the future, and they will out-chevy-volt the chevy volt.
While I am enumerating my wish list, a 10 minute recharge battery, and start the infrastructure build-out by creating charging stations at toll-way rest areas, then add them to interstate rest areas (which tend to be 50 miles apart on most of the interstates I've traveled.) http://www.onelectriccars.com/lightning-gt-promises-10-minute-recharge/74/ [onelectriccars.com]
That will "untether" electric cars, and is feasible with current battery technology. Then fueling stations can invest in charging devices if enough people have EVs in their area
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/fuels/electricity_locations.html [energy.gov]
heh. I'm just rambling now...
Perfect example (Score:2, Insightful)
Score one for the tree huggers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.
If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.
Cellulose ? oh crap (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad it doesn't run on cellulite, that would solve America's energy problems for millenia.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Who needs fungus. Bodies burn just fine.
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!
I couldn't resist.
Re:but it's still only bio-diesel, Nope (Score:2)
Switch grass is not a crop you can eat, and it would ideally be grown on marginal land.
Waste paper could also be used, do you eat a lot of that?
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Yeah, because we eat a lot of tree trunks, blades of grass, and stalks. Plus we eat things like scrub weeds that can grow in the harshest of conditions with no irrigation or pesticides.
Or we could convert them into biodiesel.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_rainforest [wikipedia.org]
Nope. Not a necessary qualification for rain forest. "Rain Forest" needs well... um... lots of rain to qualify.
We have rain forest in northern United States, and Chile and Argentina have a bunch on the southern tip of your continent.
Not really that long a shot. (Score:3, Informative)
If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video [youtube.com] of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running [powells.com] his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.
The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surp
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and algae is the most abundant carbon-based vegetation, not trees and grass.
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The humans are dead [youtube.com], already.
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Not all rain forests are 'tropical'. Sections of Chile, along with the Pacific Northwest of North America, Japan, New Zealand, and parts of China are 'temperate' rain forests.
Re:Neat (Score:4, Informative)
There is a rainforest in Patagonia. It's a temperate, as opposed to tropical, rainforest. Patagonia is a large area, and diverse, varying from near (ant)arctic to almost warm.
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