GE Microbes Make Ersatz Crude Oil From Many Sources 525
polymath69 writes "According to The Times Online, genetically modified microbes have been developed capable of turning surplus material such as wood chips, sugarcane, or others, not into ethanol, but into a substance which could substitute directly for crude oil. They claim it could be sold for about $50/bbl, and the production process would be carbon negative."
Why talk (Score:5, Insightful)
that's the ideal (Score:5, Insightful)
the ideal though is not to store or transmit that eletrically, but chemically (storage density, thermodynamic efficiency, etc)
i'm looking for the guy who turns poor fishermen in the philippines and indonesia (or anywhere access to shallow seas is easy) into the next sultans of brunei:
1. give them a bunch of specailly shaped clear plastic jugs, mini floating stills
2. they put a little gm algae inside the jugs
3. they throw the jugs in the ocean with anchors
4. they come back a month later, pick up the jugs
5. they are processed dockside directly into octane, in a low-tech facility
the guy, or gal, who figures out how to get algae to directly produce octane saves the world from itself geopolitically, environmentally, developmentally. then we have enough breathing room to master fusion
right now, the world is in an energy crunch. we will have more wars, the environment will suffer, there will be more poverty, until we get our act together on a truly large scale renewable energy source. too much renewable energy sources look at so far have been boutique, things that can never scale up
the cheap dig-it-out-of-the-ground era is over. oh of course, there's still more of it to dig out. its just too damn deep, and getting deeper every day, to call it cheap anymore
Re:Why talk (Score:3, Insightful)
Buy it, of course. (Pick the right small company and buy some of their stock, now. :) )
Re:Why talk (Score:0, Insightful)
If they say they can do it, I believe them - if for no other reason than they'd be damaging their massive reputation by putting out press releases that turn into gotchas.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everlasting Lightbulb? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Everlasting Lightbulb? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:that's the ideal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So genetically modified has stopped being evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So genetically modified has stopped being evil (Score:2, Insightful)
The second law of thermodynamics precludes this principle from working "sustainably". Oh sure it might increase our supply for a short while (- I doubt it will, but hey it *might*).
Plants are 2-3% efficient solar panels (at best, that is assuming 100% green cover, and every last square millimeter of green leaves perfectly illuminated and tracking the sun). Using their dead residue to power cars is about 10% efficient, which can be raised to about 30% efficiency full cycle. (which is a LOT better than using it to power humans btw, who are at best 3-5% efficient in using plant energy, it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car, not worse)
Knowing that we use about 3x the total energy present in the biosphere yearly, you know that we'd need 200-300% efficient conversion of plant matter to movement energy. We are, at best, at 0.2-0.3%.
Using plant matter to make biofuels can therefore not increase our energy supply (... for long).
The solution ?
-> short term : nuclear power
-> long term : efficient solar power
Although I'll readily admit that this could be useful for the petrochem industry (and by that I mean plastics, and *perhaps* fertilizer, not fuel).
Without an immediate serious increase in nuclear power, we're fucked. Badly fucked. Even the Saudi "allah will replace our oil" nutcases are building nuclear power plants, do you really want to be considered dumber than them ?
Re:Why talk (Score:2, Insightful)
Doing the work for them (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Peak oil... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:1, Insightful)
But I'm sure half of slashdot took GE as General Electric. The editors were just stupid here and should have spelled the name out. They can't put "IBM announces Desktop Quantum Computer" either in the title, if by IBM they meant Internesting Busty Models Inc. and not Big Blue.
Re:Why talk (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding? If they can make oil using an alternate technology for cheaper than they can get oil out of the ground then there is every benefit. They could _bury_ the competition!
1. Discover alternate technology
2. Sell off existing oil assets while the alternate technology is unknown
3. Pay politicians (using funds from step 2) to outlaw the use of crude oil extracted from the ground.
4. Profit!
Re:Why talk (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Looks interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution to the current bubble: When the contract becomes due, pull up to the trader's office with a tanker truck and flood the building with the crude. That'll teach'em not to speculate.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_degradation [wikipedia.org]
There are places in Syria and Northern Africa where traces of very old villages were found in the middle of the desert. Why would they build a village in the desert? The answer is that they didn't, the desert formed around them as they consumed all nutrients in the topsoil.
Apart from that, if we want to keep the CO2 levels in our atmosphere in check, it's not such a good idea to keep cutting down photosynthesis capacity.
Re:do the math (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your estimates for production are low - I doubt it would take 3 months for 100 gallons of bugs to excrete a gallon of oil. Even using your figures, my wife and I could easily put in a reactor large enough to generate that much fuel. Toss in the odd orange peel, and voila! Fuel for the family.
Doing the math:
1.3 gal/person/day = 2.6 gal/day for us. Using your figures that's approximately 9000 gal of bugs per gallon-day of fuel. That's 23400 gallons (or 3128 ft^3) of bugs. A pit 20x20x8 would comfortably hold them.
My concern with that many critters would be the disposal of the dead ones. That in itself is a lot of biomass - wait, maybe they can 'eat' their own dead! Soylent oil for real!
Re:Why talk (Score:3, Insightful)
As with all these kind of technologies it will take time (either 4-10 years or forever). But at 50$ per barrel it wouldn't exactly destabelize OPEC (production cost of most middle east crude is around 2-6 $).
Re:Peak oil... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
"weeds" of one type or another will always grow. one uses up one kind of nutrient, another will use another and replace the one used by the previous species.
A word of caution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A word of caution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So genetically modified has stopped being evil (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how good the safe guards. There is always human error to watch out for. And human stupidity, and malice. Then there are supposedly failsafe devices that aren't.
As for the waste, well, that hot radioactive rock has to be stored somewhere. American mid-west? Under NY? Outback Australia? Arctic/Antarctic? Even safe transport is massively complex undertaking. Try and predict what might be around in 1,000 years in those areas.
It's polluting, very, very polluting. It's just that it doesn't go up in the sky and turn it browny/orange.
And no, it's not cheap either. Whatever cost advantages per Kw/h, are more than outweighed by the massive storage costs, generally underwritten by the various governments.
Re:Wrong, its so valuable because it is scarce (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on they'll pull a TimeWarner-AOL merger that actually makes sense for their industry. The Oil/Energy companies aren't going anywhere. Those that have only oil from a single source or subset of politically liable sources as their main energy source of product may die off. Those "energy" companies that were oil, but have invested in other forms of energy production will make the natural shift to what is more profitable, less political liable, and better for their company's long term bottom line.
It's sort of like how none of the major car companies went all out for either electric or hybrid cars until some one else figured out how to profitable sell them. Then all the sudden all sorts of car makers have or are looking into hybrids. The same mindset is behind those in the "energy" companies. The really funny part is as far as the big boys in that field are concerned about, it may not affect them too much. Look it up, there is tons of companies competing in that field and as long as these types of companies can say we need X input to produce Y grade of oil, they'll likely fit right into the entire over all oil/energy industry. (Expect the big boys to buy ten percent of any given handful of these companies right before that really hit it big.)
Re:Wrong, its so valuable because it is scarce (Score:5, Insightful)
*I know, it wouldn't be exact, but most of the artificialy generated stuff I've heard about is actually easier to refine into stuff. Heck, as I understand it the oil resulting from thermal depolymerization can pretty much be poured straight into a diesel engine.
Re:Why talk (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doing the work for them (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, really, Why would an oil company do that? Why would an oil company only produce oil by having someone suck it out of the ground? What possible benefit would sitting on it have, if this is cheaper? They would still sell their products.
Maybe you think they're just pissed off at the Earth?
The vast majority of oil companies aren't in the oil business and realize that. They're in the energy business and act accordingly. its just that, until recently, oil was pretty much the only way to get it.
It is not a matter of ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:1, Insightful)
Because conspiracy theories about bought off politicians are a good way to get positive moderation?
It's another biomass fermentation system (Score:3, Insightful)
OK. It's another biomass to hydrocarbon conversion by fermentation with genetically engineered bacteria system. The company web site [ls9.com] is all hype; it just mentions a "proprietary microbe", the only new part of the process. It's a lot like "cellulostic ethanol".
Vinod Khosla, a well-known venture capitalist, has been funding multiple startups in this space in hopes that someone will make a breakthrough.
There are many known ways to convert biomass to fuel, and most of them are expensive. You can't predict costs from lab-scale work. Until the process is working at pilot plant scale, cost predictions are hype.
In the lab, tests are typically run in batches, in glass containers, starting with fresh input materials. For commercialization of a low-cost product, the process has to work with a continuous flow. Continuous flow fermentation is hard to do; by-products may build up in the system, or contamination in the feedstock may mess up the process. They haven't dealt with those problems yet.
If the process has to be run in batches, like a brewery, with flushing and cleaning at the end of each cycle, the process is more tolerant of difficulties, but the operating cost goes up. It's possible to get the cost of a batch process down; beer production in bulk runs about $65/bbl. But beer is around 95% water, and for fuel applications, you don't get to count water as product.
Khosla has the right approach. He's placing little bets, in the tens of millions of dollars range, on many technologies. His experts check on how they're doing. The ones making progress get another round of funding, and the others don't. One or more of them will be a big win.
Re:Why talk (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So genetically modified has stopped being evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why talk (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes there is. Some refineries can only refine high-quality crude ("lighter" in the parlance). It would be very expensive to upgrade such refineries. Heavier crude is cheaper and more readily available. This technology would allow a refiner to buy heavy(er) crude nad mix it with algae-produced light sweet crude, resulting in a cheaper costs while also not having to spend hundreds of millions (even billions) in refinery upgrades.
Note that this is unusual in alternative energy technologies, in that oil companies really could see short-term benefit from the technology and the technology could be easily incorporated into the existing energy infrastructure.
Re:Why talk (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Peak oil... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Peak oil... (Score:3, Insightful)
the bigger issue is that the actual energy (ignoring economics because energy is more fundamental) ratio for oil has dropped from 100+:1 in the 70s to 10-18:1 now. cellulosic ethanol and this technology as well (because it uses the whole plant) are likely ~20:1!
very soon, it will be a better thermodynamic investment to use biofuels than to use dug up oil. digging and exploring take energy -- more and more as we use the easy energy. it's just a matter of the economy (subsidies, infrastructure) catching up to the physics.
Re:Wrong, its so valuable because it is scarce (Score:3, Insightful)