U of M researchers close in on technology for making renewable "petroleum" using bacteria, sunlight…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2011/UR_CONTENT_314387.html

News Release

U of M researchers close in on technology for making renewable "petroleum" using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide

Contacts: Peggy Rinard, College of Biological Sciences, [e-mail], [phone]
Jeff Falk, University News Service, [e-mail], [phone]

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/23/2011) —University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and dioxide, a goal funded by a $2.2 million United States Department of Energy grant.

Graduate student Janice Frias, who earned her doctorate in January, made the critical step by figuring out how to use a protein to transform fatty acids produced by the bacteria into ketones, which can be cracked to make hydrocarbon fuels. The university is filing patents on the process.

The research is published in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Frias, whose advisor was Larry Wackett, Distinguished McKnight Professor of Biochemistry, is lead author. Other team members include organic chemist Jack Richman, a researcher in the College of Biological Sciences’ Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, and undergraduate Jasmine Erickson, a junior in the College of Biological Sciences. Wackett, who is senior author, is a faculty member in the College of Biological Sciences and the university’s BioTechnology Institute.

…

The U of M team is using Synechococcus, a bacterium that fixes carbon dioxide in sunlight and converts CO2 to sugars. Next, they feed the sugars to Shewanella, a bacterium that produces hydrocarbons. This turns CO2, a greenhouse gas produced by combustion of fossil fuel petroleum, into hydrocarbons.

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[WatsonT]

1. We've been close to this technology for decades

I wish them luck but I will remain skeptical until it goes in to production.

[TheWraith]

3. It's not really the tech that's necessarily been sketchy, it's the production.

For instance, we know well enough how to produce bio-oil (technically all oil is bio-oil, but you know what I mean) using algae, with far greater yields than any surface crop. But going from that to having an industrialized production line running on it is a bit different. Particularly the problem of finding investments for it.

[WatsonT]

9. Industrial engineering is part of the technology

making something work in the lab and making it work in the real world, at a profit, are often very different animals.

And when they're proposing this as a real world solution they should make sure it can work in the real world first.

[JDPriestly]

2. Your tax dollars at work.

This should make the headlines tonight. Republicans should raise taxes and increase funding for university research grants after hearing this good news. :sarcasm:

[drm604]

4. From this article, at least, it sounds promising.

Let's hope that it's as promising as it sounds. I've thought for years that this is the way to go.

Assuming it works as stated, you're storing the energy from sunlight in a hydrocarbon fuel with the only inputs begin CO2 and light (and presumably some water). Since our current infrastructure is based on hydrocarbon fuels it shouldn't be too difficult to transition to this.

It will emit carbon into the atmosphere when burned but only the amount taken from the atmosphere when it was created, so it's carbon neutral.

We could have fuel producing farms in large facilities in sunny areas such as deserts.

[drm604]

5. Big oil likes their tax breaks?

Fine, let's just make them contingent on investing in developing things like this.

Seriously, you would think that they'd be interested in something like this. They make their money by refining and selling hydrocarbon fuels. Why should they care about the source of their raw material? This has got to be cheaper in the long run then drilling and pumping in oceans and politically unstable countries.

[masmdu]

6. Late to the game. Already done by Joule Unlimited. $30 / bbl deisel

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/

[drm604]

7. From your link

Requiring only sunlight and waste CO2, this system can produce renewable diesel fuel in virtually unlimited quantities at costs as low as $30/barrel equivalent, overcoming the challenges of oil exploration and production.

What is "waste CO2"? It sounds like this process depends on the burning of fossil fuels for it's CO2.

Come to think of it, the process in the OP doesn't say where it's CO2 comes from. I'd assumed that it came from the atmosphere, but maybe not. Maybe it also requires "waste CO2". :(

If waste CO2 is required for a process, that greatly limits it's applicability. It can only be used at sites that generate "waste CO2" and have lots of sunlight. And it's dumping carbon in the atmosphere that originally came from fossil fuels, so the cycle as a whole is not carbon neutral.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. Same game, team -vs- singles

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=09-P13-00048&segmentID=2#links

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YOUNG: Sims is tight-lipped when it comes to intellectual property, a common trait among the handful of companies trying this technology. In academia, things are a bit more open source.
Biochemistry professor Larry Wackett leads a team at the University of Minnesota, taking a different approach to direct solar fuels. Wackett says, no matter how much you modify an organism, you can only teach it so many tricks.

WACKETT: If you try to engineer that organism to do many additional things, it puts stress on it and it’s often very difficult to highly engineer that to do all of the things that you want.

YOUNG: Wackett’s working on a bacterial buddy system. A genetically modified cyanobacteria, the ancient bugs that were the Earth’s first photosynthesizers, and a bacteria called Shewanella, which is good at churning out the building blocks of hydrocarbon fuels.

WACKETT: Now if you take a photosynthetic organism, something that harvests sunlight and then you take another organism that will now take the energy from the photosynthetic organism – the carbon – and convert that into something that you want like a hydrocarbon, this could be a very effective team.

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