This looks like a pretty big breakthrough:
Just how fast are Rice’s single-celled chemical factories? On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, a biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.
“That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts,” said Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study.
Gonzalez’s laboratory is in a race with hundreds of labs around the world to find green methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.
“We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products,” he said. “That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”
I wonder what the catch is, if any?
[Update a while later]
The man-made miracle of oil from sand. And as Glenn Reynolds points out, it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.” And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.
Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.
Glucose requires a fair amount of processing to produce; they would have to ferment grass or other organic waste to make the sugar. Thermal depolymerization seems more likely to be able to accept widely varying feedstocks, without the hassle of keeping a fragile colony alive.
I dunno, Doug. In the first place, glucose is the universal substrate of biology — every organism makes it. It is extremely easy and cheap to make, from the crudest possible 1 AD methods — the plain fermentation you mention — to any number of imaginable genetic tweaks to photosynthesizing algae, etc. What these folks have done that is clever is find a cheap and fast way to reduce carbohydrates, which makes them far more useful industrially. I’d be happier if they could make an unsaturated carbon-carbon bond, but you have to walk before you can run.
I don’t agree it’s a major breakthrough, but it’s definitely good work, and a solid step towards what has always struck me as the obvious solution to all our 20th century fuel and emission woes: adapt the natural processes that have very successfully run the biosphere for the last 500+ megayears. There is a greater mass of single-celled organisms on the planet than there are humans plus all human works, which is plain evidence that we can become a lot larger and still fit in most excellently with our natural environment. We just need to engineer our tiny friends to work for us.
Thermal depolymerization? Of what? Cellulose? How?
The biggest problem with biofuels is the area of farmland required to supply the “bio”.
“And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.”
People that worry about peak oil are aware of the potential of oil sands, imminent “peak oil” refers to conventional oil sources.
“Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.”
Atmospheric CO2 is now going up by 2-3ppm/yr, if we see more economic growth based on fossil fuels that rate is likely to increase, in the last 150 years we’ve gone from 280ppm to 390ppm, you think >800ppm will be OK in 2111?
Atmospheric CO2 is now going up by 2-3ppm/yr, if we see more economic growth based on fossil fuels that rate is likely to increase, in the last 150 years we’ve gone from 280ppm to 390ppm, you think >800ppm will be OK in 2111?
That projection is based on two assumptions, neither of which are likely to be accurate:
1. Growth will be linear.
2. Technology in use 100 years from now will be the same we’re using today.
Supply, demand, and changes in technology mean projections based on today’s growth rates are unreliable 100 years into the future. Frankly, I doubt that growth rate will be accurate 30 years from now, much less 100.
Rand – you’re confusing two different energy sources with different carbon footprints. Biofuels are carbon-neutral. They take CO2 from the atmosphere (either directly or as glucose), manipulate it into fuel, and the carbon gets dumped back into the atmosphere. There’s no net gain, and (if the fuel is substituted for a fossil source) a net loss of CO2.
Shale oil is just another fossil fuel, and burning it adds to CO2 in the atmosphere. Shale oil is worse than regular oil because you need to expend extra energy (by heating the rock) in order to get the oil out. This also makes it more expensive.
Andrew W. – the more efficient the process, the less land needed for the biofuel.
Shale oil is worse than regular oil because you need to expend extra energy (by heating the rock) in order to get the oil out. This also makes it more expensive.
Clearly, it isn’t more expensive, or at least it’s not sufficiently expensive, or we wouldn’t be using it. Unless there were some sort of ethanol-like subsidy, which as far as I know doesn’t exist. I say let the market decide (something that this White House seems unwilling to do, whether for shale or drilling in the Gulf).
Well, everything I Google says shale oil is more expensive. I can remember not too long ago oil was at $20 / barrel, and waaayyy back in 2008 when it ran up to $130, people started complaining about the high price of gas. It seems to me you can have all the shale oil you want, just not at the same time as gas prices below $3 / gallon.
You are confusing shale oil and oil sands.
Of course it’s more expensive than just pumping it out of an underground lake. That doesn’t mean that it’s too expensive to be marketable. Particularly when one accounts for transportation costs (and other intangibles, like the fact that we’re putting money in the hands of people who are making war on us when we but from the Middle East).
Shale doesn’t work at $20/barrel, but we’re way above that right now (it is easily profitable at $40/barrel).
a net loss of CO2.
You have now failed chemistry. Congratulations.
You might have meant a net loss of CO2 growth, but that’s not what you said. Do you also think cutting the rate at which spending increases is the same thing as cutting spending?
Why is the price of oil so high now, when the big Western economies are in such a bad way? What makes people think it can go down in price without the global economy crashing? And why are people not linking the oil price to the economic ills??
“Andrew W. – the more efficient the process, the less land needed for the biofuel.”
If you could harvest a net of a thousand liters of biofuel/ha/yr, which is about as good as it’ll get with traditional cropping, you’d have to plant all of Asia to meet current world demand. If you could get ten times that production with ponds of algae or some other intensive form of growing biofuel, you’d still need to convert an area half the size of the US.
Rand – I didn’t say too expensive, just more expensive. Regarding source of oil – the market has no reason to care where we get our oil from. That’s a governmental concern.
leoncaruthers – no, I meant a net loss, because:
1) Fossil fuel not burnt, thus not adding to CO2
2) Decline in atmospheric CO2 as normal sequestration processes (tree growth, subduction, etc.) reduce CO2 levels.
Yeah, the net loss is slow, probably too slow on a climatic scale, but a small loss beats a big gain.
Andrew W – supply and demand. China is adding millions of new drivers every year, as is India. Cheap oil is gone.
Andrew W – since I don’t know where your numbers are coming from, I’ll not dispute them. Having said that, much of our oil use can be substituted for electricity from nuclear or other means. We really only “need” oil for long-range car and airplane travel.
For all our sakes, we should hope/pray there’s no serious actual loss of atmospheric CO2. The current atmospheric CO2 level is ~380 ppm. Plant growth slows at 220 ppm and stops at 150 ppm.
you think >800ppm will be OK in 2111?
We’d be fine at twice that number.
If biofuels actually get going on a massive scale, we start competing with plants for CO2 in the air, rather than feeding them. I’m sure absolutely nothing bad will come of that.
I can think of at least one potential problem with using butanol as an automotive fuel. Incomplete combustion of butanol (quite possible in a badly-tuned engine) might well lead to the emission of various aldehydes – all of which are toxic and evil-smelling – and also various organic acids such as acetic, propanoic and butanoic acids. The exhaust of a car using this stuff as fuel might well smell like a mixture of vinegar and rancid butter.
The biggest problem with biofuels is the area of farmland required to supply the “bio”.
This problem is common to all the solar-based energy collection methods. However, if one can derive the biofuels from “garbage” plants such as kudzu rather than food plants like corn, then the land use isn’t such a big deal.
Aldehyde exhaust is an excellent argument in favor of using simpler alcohols like ethanol and methanol. Same thing with the longer alkanes.
Because supply has been hit, not just demand, and because flagging demand from the Western economies gets more than made up for by growing demand from the growing economies.
Because exactly the opposite would happen. Energy is an input to everything, and the cheaper it is the more profitable everything is. Plus, energy multiplies the productivity of labor, which increases the number of people you can profitably employ.
Hell if I know. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a factor.
Chris Gerrib Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
“- the market has no reason to care where we get our oil from. That’s a governmental concern.”
Our market does. Foreign oil purchases represent a net outflow from our nation. That can be an especially big deal as the Fed monetizes our debt, and the value of our currency drops relative to the rest of the world.
As a rule of thumb, I take a pretty jaundiced view of any idea which seeks to satisfy our energy needs with ‘instantaneous’ energy, i.e., energy which is produced and consumed at more or less the same time. Energy storage in oil has been going on for eons. How can you compete with that short of splitting or fusing atoms?
Sorry, I didn’t express cause and effect correctly, it should have been: “What makes people think oil can go down in price without the global economy having to crash first?”
“And why are people not linking the oil price to the economic ills??”
Because Bush is not the President.
Cheaper oil would drive shipping costs down and the cost of anything that uses petroleum in the production process (just about everything).
Right now there are a lot of people who shop online and see a good deal but the shipping price kills it. They decide to see if a local store has it but then determine it will cost almost as much in gas as it would to ship, so they stay home.
The most epic quote from the comments at Reason,
Sorry, I didn’t express cause and effect correctly, it should have been: “What makes people think oil can go down in price without the global economy having to crash first?”
If you increase the supply of oil (or oil substitutes), the price of oil will come down. This is what happened in the 1980s when the price of oil tumbled to about $10 a barrel following the much higher prices in the late 1970s.
Doing stupid things like limiting our own production (limiting supply) works to drive up the price of oil. This is why Obama’s ban on Gulf drilling, combined with efforts to hinder domestic oil production from land wells, is such a bad idea. Instead of hiring Americans to produce the oil, we’re killing jobs and running up our trade deficit. As we have to get more of our oil from the overseas market, we’re competing with other countries which tends to drive up the price. High energy prices hurt our economy, too.
“I wonder what the catch is, if any?”
Dunno, but there’s always a catch. 🙁
Chris, Puckett is right, shale oil is not the same as tar sands. Apples and oranges. You don’t have to retort tar sands to get the bitumen out, you can use solvents at room temperature. As tar sands are extracted from near the surface, on land, via open pit mining processes, the resulting oil is probably quite competitive in “lift cost” terms with conventional crude pulled from deep ocean wells even if it is more expensive than oil from the stick-a-straw-in-the-ground-and-stand-back wells that still exist to some extent (though not nearly to the degree they formerly did) in Saudi Arabia.
As to all the commentary about biofuels requiring land, that seems less than germane to the article Rand cited. The organism the researchers engineered to make butanol is good old E. Coli. Assuming this technology ever gets to industrial scale, that’s what it will be – industry. The little buggers will do their thing in reactor vessels in factories, not out in the open in soil. Hell, E. Coli isn’t even a plant and doesn’t use photosynthesis to do its thing. Land use isn’t really much of an issue here. Even on the question of where the feed glucose will come from, my guess would be complementary microbes that depolymerize cellulose and/or lignin living in neighboring reactor vessels in the same factories. The current fuel production infrastructure is largely divorced from agro-centric vagaries like weather and climate. Our furture fuel production infrastructure is going to need to be at least as robust. The more it looks like industry and the less it looks like farming, the better.
Dick Eagleson Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Dick – the energy has to come from somewhere. Even exotic microbes can’t just pull it out of the vacuum.
Fine whence the energy originates. That’s where you’ll find your bottleneck.
larry j Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 3:39 pm
I doubt Obama’s policy has had much affect on global production, certainly not as big an effect on the supply and demand equation as increasing consumption in China and declining production in Mexico.
The US domestic petroleum price is determined by international prices and domestic taxes, apart from the cost of shipping it, nothing to do with whether the oil is foreign or domestic sourced.
Dick Eagleson Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
What Bart said. The energy doesn’t come from the E Coli.
We aren’t useing oil shale, but we are using shale oil. They are different things. Shale oil is conventional liquid oil trapped in extremely low porosity shale. Fracking can get it out. Oil shale is the source rock of oil, not yet thermally processed to liquefy the kerogen into oil (and char).
I find it puzzling that, with the original economic crash happening shortly after oil hit $147/bbl in July 2008, and the subsequent oil price and economic roller coaster we’ve been on ever since, people just don’t seem to want to acknowledge that the two are somehow related. Lets blame the collapse of the subprime mortgage market! Or Obama’s financial policy! Or whatever, but just don’t mention that in the past high oil prices cause recessions in oil consuming economies, or the fact that the oil price remains high (and $80+ is very high by historical standards) despite recession and that this could be a really bad indicator of the future supply situation.
It all seems very head-in-the-sand to me.
I doubt Obama’s policy has had much affect on global production, certainly not as big an effect on the supply and demand equation as increasing consumption in China and declining production in Mexico.
It has a hell of an effect on employment on the Gulf Coast. But those bastards aren’t going to vote for him next year anyway, so what does he care?
Er, extremely low permeability shale, I meant to write.
Putting people out of work that wouldn’t vote for him? How cynical Rand. He’s our president you know. He would neevvveeerrr do a thing like that. He’s just healing the earth with the laying on of teleprompter. Didn’t you see him do his Putin imitation in the gulf? He da man. He’s going to produce Obama money from his stash and save us all.
…and he’s not a Keynesian because those Birchers say so. He was born in the united states of Hawaii… both hospitals.
Tar sands are a historical but inaccurate name – they are oil sands. Tar is a derivative of coal – there is none in the oil sands. What they are mining is bitumen.
Only about 3% of the oil sands is accessible by surface mining – the rest is mined using in-situ recovery methods such as steam flooding, SAGD (steam assisted gravity drain) and some new experimental techniques like THAI (toe-to-heel air injection) which actually burns some of the bitumen in the formation resulting in heat and pressure to push the oil to a production well. They’re experimenting with solvent injection too. It’s an ongoing process to increase productivity and reduce costs.
Remember what we produce here is “ethical oil”. Nobody had to die or starve to produce it. Canadians don’t hate the USA.
Lets blame the collapse of the subprime mortgage market!
Again, I’m not sure anyone is denying that oil prices had a significant impact on the economy. But are you going to deny that the subprime mortgage market collapsed? If you are saying one caused the other, then you never understood the delicacy of the subprime situation, or maybe even what the word “subprime” means. Alas, that’s a different subject, and you’d do well to leave it out of this discussion, because you don’t understand it well enough to discuss it.
I’ll argue that the after hovering at around $20/bbl through the ’90s oil got to $40 in 2000, $50 in ’04, $70 in ’05, $80 in ’07, US house prices peaked in ’06, foreclosures started to climb in ’07 (At this point people start chanting “correlation is not causation”).
The subprime market was always going to go with an economic downturn affecting property values and interest rates, all that was needed was trigger for that downturn.
Now, if oil had stayed at $20/bbl for the last 12 years, maybe something else might have triggered an economic downturn and caused the subprime collapse, though I don’t know what.
“…the oil price remains high (and $80+ is very high by historical standards) despite recession and that this could be a really bad indicator of the future supply situation.”
Despite? Or, because of the misbegotten measures taken to address it.
Bart, I’ve no idea why you think Alabama having lower gasoline prices in April compared to other states is some how relevant.
Bart and Andrew W:
Reading comprehension, people. The engineered E. Coli transform glucose into butanol. The glucose can come from any economically rational source. I posited, as a plausible future source, industrial-scale use of other engineered organisms to depolymerize/transform cellulose and/or lignin. The cellulose/lignin is the primary mass and energy source in this scenario. Using forest products in this way makes good sense as it doesn’t impact the food supply and provides an alternative market for all of that timber that isn’t going to be used by the rapidly shrinking newsprint and publishing paper industry in future.
The process of getting transportation fuel from cellulose/lignin is a transformation process, as is the conversion of crude oil into transportation fuel. The energy to run the transformation process chemistry comes, as it does in the petrochemical refining industry, from using a modest fraction of the fuel output to keep the process going. There is no violation of thermodynamic laws here.
Dick Eagleson, your August 10th, 2011 at 5:24 pm was all about how this process was going to be “industrial”, that “Land use isn’t really much of an issue here”, that “The current fuel production infrastructure is largely divorced from agro-centric vagaries like weather and climate. Our furture fuel production infrastructure is going to need to be at least as robust. The more it looks like industry and the less it looks like farming, the better.”
I think the comprehension problem is yours, look up the definitions of “instead of” and “as well as”, as the process being discussed requires vats of bacteria “as well as” a plant feedstock grown on vast areas of land, not “instead of” such a feedstock.
This is the problem that biofuels always comes up against:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
So, per unit of collecting area, solar electric systems are about 30 times as efficient as plants.
Andrew W Says:
August 11th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
“Bart, I’ve no idea…”
Em-hmm. Maybe if you tried to read through the article, you’d get an idea or two.
Dick Eagleson Says:
August 12th, 2011 at 4:40 am
Even Andrew has better reading comprehension.
… than you do.