Synthetic Biology For Natural Fuel

CoolBeans writes "Making ethanol is easy. Making enough ethanol to fill every gas tank in a developed country is tricky. The Department of Energy has promised $125 million to the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a team of six national labs and universities that will be run like a startup company. They intend to create new life forms that are optimized for alcohol production. The genes of crops that produce large amounts of cellulose will be tweaked to improve the yield per acre and to increase drought and pest resistance. Microbes that produce sugar from cellulose and ethanol from sugar will be built for speed and efficiency." The article mentions as an aside that earlier this year, "the energy giant BP gave $500 million to Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for similar alternative energy research. That gift will fund the Energy Biosciences Institute, which will operate separately from the JBEI." So UC Berkeley and LBL are both participating in two separate energy-biotech research programs.

Sometimes I wonder....

[Twixter]

If BP and other large energy companies fund this type of research because they know it won't ever be practical to grow gasoline. Even the most efficient converters from sunlight to sugar or ethanol aren't even close to what we have for solar cells. Granted, its cheaper to plant grass then build solar farms, but fixed cost will be nominal in the long run.

With Ethonal BP can make money with its current infrastructure, keep positive press about their company, and develop alternatives that will never truly be able to replace fossil fuels.

Creating life

[stinkwinkerton]

I guess what is freaking me out on this (probably too much science fiction) is the whole "creating new life" thing. I don't consider myself a deeply religious guy, so it isn't that. It is more along the lines of the fact that we can barely understand what is going on with the life that CURRENTLY exists. That, and and the potential for this new type of life to make it into the ecosystem with unknown ramifications. Kind of like when a species from another continent hitches a ride on a cargo ship or something and decimates the native species. I realize that there is nothing we can do to stop the wheels of progress, I just wish there were a common code of ethics that was enforceable but not constraining to research and development. What a conundrum!

Re:Any money for biodiesel?

[evilviper]

I have seen several pieces lately about ethanol vs. biodiesel, which seem to indicate that biodiesel is a much more realistic alternative to gasoline than ethanol is,

On what planet is an incompatible fuel with a slightly higher yeild "a much more realistic alternative"? You believe we should force everyone across the country to throw away their old cars and trucks, buy new ones with diesel engines, so that we can provide just slightly more fuel?

Neither option is a long term solution... it's just an effort to slightly increase supplies and so drive down prices. By trying to force a wholly incompatible fuel on everyone, you can only possibly further delay the use of biofuel.

The long-term solution they're aiming for is hydrogen, but I believe fully electric battery/capacitor/flywheel vehicles are far more realistic and therefore likely.

Answers

[goombah99]

Why Ethanol? Simple
1) we have the infrastructure to use it immediately.
2) It's not corrosive or particularly toxic.
3) unlike algae it's grown by agricultiure so Archer Daniels Midland can get their cut of the pie.

the latter is probably the most defining reason.

But I think ethanol may be the wrong ticket. Obviously corn ethanol is a bad idea. But even cellulosic ethanol may be a bad idea.

two reasons:
1) Now matter how you produce it, evenif a miracle in effciency happened, at the end of the process any ethanol produced is going to be dissolved in water. Drying it out is going to eat the efficiency.

2) Cellulose and Ligno-cellulose is desinged by trees to be indigestible and energetically inaccessible. If it were easy to digest the bacteria and termites would have eaten the whole forest a long time ago. Trees would not be huge cellulose containers. That should be a clue.

Now it is true that man made enzymes can in some instances beat natural ones by an order of magnitude of more. But this is one place where nature has had a lot of different creatures all working on the same problem independently for quite some time.

One the other hand it's almost commerically viable now. So we only need maybe a factor of ten improvement to open up wide spread production. However then other scaling issues will raise their heads. Farmland will be used. in many case it will be existing farm waste, but in others, say poplar trees, it will be for non-edible products. And if we try to open up new farmlands to compensate then were back to having a water budget problem.

Algae making diesel would seem to bypass a lot of these problem. It can be grown off croplands, in many cases using sea water or brackish water. And it's easy to separate the oils from the water. the product has a higher energy value than Ethanol per volume and per weight. And it does not produce as much toxic waste in the production process (ethanol uses acid treatment and produces loads of crap to dispose of).

Re:Why a grant??

[wsherman]

...why pay out grants? We should take advantage of the natural benefits of competition; pay $X to the organization that reaches a specific milestone.

Grants are already quite competitive but let's try some numbers.

Let's say that it take $1 million to achieve a particular milestone and that there are 10 organizations that each have a roughly equal chance of achieving the milestone first. In order to provide adequate incentive, the payout for the prize will have to be $10 million (plus a risk premium - but we'll ignore that). That is, an organization that has a 1 in 10 chance of winning the prize for an outlay of $1 million will only compete if the prize exceeds $10 million. So, essentially, the government ends up paying $10 million for $1 million worth of research.

On the other hand, let's say the government holds a competition for grant funding. In that case, the government chooses the organization with the best chance of reaching the milestone efficiently and pays that organization $1 million to complete the research. In this case, the government is paying $1 million for $1 million worth of research.

Not only that, but if the government plays it's cards right, in the grants case the government can get the research released into the public domain. Strictly speaking, the government could also get the research released into the public domain in the prize case but in practice the organization is going to fight harder to lock the research away as it's own "intellectual property".

Speaking of intellectual property, that's really the key to understanding why the "free market" breaks down for scientific research. For physical property (e.g. an apple pie), there is a need to manufacture multiple apple pies. For intellectual property, once the first "apple pie" is "manufactured" then all the other pies become worthless. That is, you only need to make a scientific discovery once.

Re:Answers

[e3kmouse]

Ya, but why not electric (hybrid + plug-in hybrid). I still haven't heard a good argument why this isn't "THE" way to go for our automobile fuel. The "well then it runs on Coal" argument doesn't really float, especially if you live in a state like Idaho or California. They are being mass produced NOW... I don't see why we can't just pursue better battery technologies and call it good... really.

Re:Sometimes I wonder....

[Attila Dimedici]

"oil companies are making profits that would make 19th century robber-barons feel guilty" If 19th Century robber barons had made the same return on investment that oil companies are, they would have disappeared without a trace. Yes, the oil companies are making huge amounts of money, but they are investing huge amounts of money as well. I don't know of any industry where the return, dollar of profit for dollar of investment is not higher than the oil industry. Of course, it is next to impossible to lose money in the oil industry, which is why people still invest in it.

Ignoring the real issue

[Anonymous Coward]

For the last. effing. time.

The real issue is curbing consumption, not trying to make our already ridiculous consumption levels more "green" somehow.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Answers

[ChrisMaple]

Diesel engines are more expensive than gasoline engines, which is one reason that they aren't popular with the buying public. Another is that they're slow to start in cold weather. Body rot and other mechanical failures can make a car useless before the engine fails; this reduces the value of a highly durable engine. The manufacturers are happy to build them if people will buy them and the government allows it.

Reference other than cypress hill ??

[sillyphisher1]

The version I am familiar with is an acre of hemp producing as much as 4 acres of trees. My question is always: are we talking about the same acre of land? Or are we comparing Ohio farmland with Oregon forest land? What kind of trees? A lot of forest production in the western U.S. is on land too steep or rocky to be cultivated and planted with an annual crop. Even in your hybrid poplar production systems proposed for riparian areas, we are talking about land that we don't want to be tilling every year for the production of an annual crop. From a physiological basis, I doubt that a C3 plant like hemp could outyield a c4 plant like corn or switchgrass (panicum spp.) in a favorable environment

Forcing a wholly incompatible fuel on everyone?

[Chuck Chunder]

It seems unlikely that biodiesel would all of a sudden start being produced in immense quantities while petrol suddenly disappears. Cheap, available biodiesel might help people buying a new cars consider diesel which is a step in the right direction.

It is not as if ethanol is magically "compatible" with the majority of cars already on the road. My car won't take E10 let alone something with a significant ethanol component.

There are no magic fixes. All solutions will take time to have an impact and no solution is an ultimate solution, rather we need to look to a variety of solutions together, put them out there and see what works.