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Oil Excreting Bugs to Save the World?

June 15th, 2008
By JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor

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yeast.jpgSpeaking as an amateur home brewer, I’m a big fan of yeast. They are marvelous little critters who have the incredible ability to eat sugar and excrete alcohol. What’s not to love? Other sorts of yeast make it possible for us to have bread to eat and medical products to improve and extend our lives. Well, now there may be one more, earth shaking reason to cheer for miniscule engines of biology. Some clever scientists appear to have genetically modified a relative of the noble yeast and created a bug which can eat organic waste products and excrete… OIL.

[T]he genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Before you get too excited, the oil crisis has not suddenly been ended in one fell swoop. The technology has a ways to go, and currently the tank they have of these bugs can produce a whopping one barrel of oil per week. But with some further development and expansion, Mr. Pal thinks we can move into full scale production.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

If they are right, commercial production of “renewable petroleum” could fill approximately one third of the nation’s transportation petroleum needs in the next decade. This approach also offers one very attractive feature: other renewable energy sources such as hydrogen would require a complete re-tooling of the infrastructure to put them in service. The ability to create petroleum on the fly would allow most machinery to continue operating as it always has. Also, the fuel is being billed as “carbon negative” which means that the amount of hydrocarbon emissions it puts into the atmosphere is less than the amount that the fuel’s raw materials extracted from the system during their growth.

Hang on to your hats. We may be living to see interesting times. (And perhaps that’s not always a bad thing.)



This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 8:16 am and is filed under Alternative Energy Resources, Oil, Energy, Science, Math, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 12 Comments

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    It's good for humanity....but I admit one of my 1st thoughts was, "Wow, how can I get some shares in the upcoming IPO?"
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    This is impressive but really doesn't get around the main problem: oil reserves represented hundreds of millions of years of stored biomass. If the facility would have to cover 205 sq miles, just think about how much we would have to grow to feed it! Even if we could make our own oil, it's just not very feasible to grow/harvest enough stuff to do it.

    Now if we cut down on cars by 50% and they all got 300 mpg (both of which I think aren't totally insane ideas) then maybe it's not such a crazy idea. By far the most important technologies over the next hundred years won't be energy generation (unless we have fusion) ones but energy reduction ones.
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    Good post, Jazz. As I have commented here before, if we apply ourselves to innovating in the area of alternative energy, we can and will succeed. The technology you highlight here is yet another example of how American ingenuity can free us from dependence on foreign oil if we really set our minds to it. More importantly, if we really allocate our resources to innovation rather than continuing to pour them down the same big oil rat hole that we are currently feeding.

    While this new bioengineered bacteria is interesting, we are much closer to application with biodiesel from microalgae. This does not have to be done in big fermentation tanks, and uses current technology such as that used to grow spirulina. It will yield more than 30 times the oil per acre than corn or soy and does not require clean freshwater (in fact, salt water will do, something we have plenty of). Take a look at the first facility, which will produce 4.4 million gallons of oil and 110 million lbs of biomass a year. Better still, such algae production facilities could be placed at the mouths of big polluted rivers like the Mississippi, and could convert nutrients from agricultural runoff into fuel. Currently these nutrients create an enormous "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the algae can be used to consume CO2 from power plants. Cleans up the river, sequesters carbon from polluting industries and turns it all into fuel. Oh, and the exhausted algae can be used as fertilizer after extracting the oil.

    Another exciting technology in this area is a starch to hydrogen technology developed by Virginia Tech, that can convert a safe, non-toxic and nonflammable starch and water slurry into hydrogen to drive a vehicle. These are only the tip of the iceberg. We can lead in green energy and clean tech if we commit to doing so instead of bowing down to petroleum and coal interests.

    We limit ourselves when we think that every problem has to be solved with current technology. This is a great failing of our current energy policies. We have shortchanged research budgets into alternatives and still, our tenacious scientists come up with new leads all the time. Meanwhile, the GOP and some of their supporters here on TMV wail that the sky will fall if we don't start drilling in Alaska today. That's not the solution. Let's turn the page on that old thinking.
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    mikkel and others concerned about the land needed to create biofuels feedstock, check out THIS analysis of how it can be done. We could replace all vehicle fuel at current levels on 9.5 million acres of desert land ! For comparison, we use 450 million acres of prime agricultural land to produce food (most of it food for livestock) and another 500 million acres for grazing livestock. Since the algae can grow anywhere, we're not talking about diverting a single plot of prime farmland to fuel production.

    (BTW kryon, the stock in Petrosun is about $0.15 a share, but I'm not buying any of it yet). Here's a good rundown on alternative energy stocks.
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    Jazz, great post!

    GreenDreams, thanks for the great contribution.

    I personally think that we can't simply replace oil with "x". What we need to do is develop an array of alternative, renewable and non-polluting energy sources to meet our demands. In some areas that might mean those yeast tanks to meet a percentage. In other areas, the alternative sources mentioned by GreenDreams would be great. Still we can harness the power of tides, solar, wind, etc in other places.

    I'm all for an energy "Manhattan Project" and even bigger... a combination of tax breaks for private R&D, government grants (and government R&D, any patents or licensing fees would help fund future R&D), etc.

    Our energy security (whether actual supply, competing for scarce supplies, securing the energy infrastructure abroad and delivery routes, etc.) is just too important not to ignore. Our economy totally depends on energy and having to depend on foreign energy (or dwindling supplies) and competition just hurts the US. We also need clean energy- what good is having all the energy in the world if it destroys our environment?
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    Greendreams I don't think you got the link in with the analysis. I did find this though.

    Thanks for the thing on the algae though, I hadn't heard about it. Algae is definitely the only thing I can think of that would come even close to producing the amount of mass needed...especially as the oceans warm up and really we'll have dangerous amounts of it around anyway. I could definitely offshore algae farms.
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    Great info, GreenDreams. It's always seemed to me that there will be no magic bullet with energy. Instead, we will learn how to get 3% of our needs from one place, 11% somewhere else, and it all adds up.
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    I agree with pacatrue. There is no one answer. It will be a combination of many factors. Combine the yeast based waste processing system, that very promising algal system, better fuel efficiency from several technologies, solar, wind and nuclear and there's a lot of energy available and savings from new more energy efficient devices of all kinds and you have our energy future for the near term.
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    Update: Here's an aerial view of the Texas facility on Google maps. Another technology, using fresh water but enclosing the ponds to avoid evaporation, would reduce water usage to the equivalent of 3 inches of rain a year. Farmers know how little will grow with that low water usage. Most of the country has more than that, so all the needed water could be from rain catchment.
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