Welcome to...The twilight zone.
Posted on 01/18/2011 7:27:49 PM PST by SCPatriot77
In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”
. . .
Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Which means this is the last we'll ever hear of it.
Que The Twighlighty Zone Music.
Do not attempt to siphon E. coli gas using your mouth.
Well if the little bugs eat up all the CO2 won’t that cause an ice age? Better call Al Gore.
It probably doesn’t work at least in the field, the creator(s) will be bought/pressured/driven away, or the progressives will make sure it never sees the light of day.
Believe it when I see it. If it worked they’d be busy counting money instead of putting out news reports.
Welcome to...The twilight zone.
So if it gets out of the production plant and gets into the swamp behind my house? Do I get a nice little oil slick that never seems to go away? And lots of dead frogs?
I can se it now - redneck E. Coli
“Hey Bubba, watch me light this!”
well I guess Dad was wrong....you can sheit money
Eats CO2 (cause of AGW,Ha), and $hits oil—sounds like a golden goose to me..where do I invest?
Why not? They sell it in India as fuel.
Riiiight!
Litteral drop in the ocean......
BS
100% BS
You doubt the perfection of the plan?
agreed.
I smell an IPO announcement shortly to raise capital to “perfect” the process.
This makes nooo sense. Where does the E.coli get the energy to bump CO2 up to a hydrocarbon? E.Coli lives on crap, it isn’t a photosynthesizer. I guess the energy just poops itself into existence.
We import what? OVER A million barrels A DAY?.....
We would need the entire state of Texas to grow our own fuel.....
Is this the same company that came up with a cold fusion sustained reaction?
Reminds me of the joke
Guy runs in the room “I got good news and I got bad news”
The others ask “Well, whats the bad news?”
“The Martians have landed in Denver”
“So whats the bad news?”
“The Martians are eating (fill in the blank) and pissing gasoline”
Does this mean the new microbes are from Mars????
The engine on the bus goes poop poop poop
I did a quick back of the envelope calculation a while back. If the entire annual output of palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia were converted to motor fuel, it would supply domestic US automobile demand for just about three weeks. And that’s coming from countries blessed with optimal growing conditions, and grows the stuff like its going out of style.
And we get mutant E. Coli! Woohoo!
By my (quite possibly messed up) calculations, this means we could replace our present consumption of oil (roughly 7B barrels) by converting about 13000 square miles to production with this process, or about 20% more area than the state of Maryland.
That's quite a significant footprint. Since I assume this requires tanks, that's also quite a lot of infrastructure investment.
“Where does the E.coli get the energy to bump CO2 up to a hydrocarbon?”
Sunlight, of course.
The limiting resource in the process is probably water.
What could possibly go wrong?
If true, it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to the warmist crowd. Although I’ll only believe it when I see it.
One is forced to ask... where does the hydrogen part of "hydrocarbons" come from?
Exactly!
It seems like a perfect cycle complete with mutant E. Coli.
If they opened up exploration tomorrow the economy would be fixed pretty quickly. Just opening up access to shale oil would do that. But we won't. Why not? Because we have morons in Washington and Obama is working hard to destroy America.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,794,969.PN.&OS=PN/7,794,969&RS=PN/7,794,969
The first rule of PIMPING your IPO....File a B**S**T Patent.
Am I the only one that wonders...What if this thing gets loose?
Yep. They would not be hunting money, they'd be printing it.
Every day we find a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS, something to replace oil...
“One is forced to ask... where does the hydrogen part of “hydrocarbons” come from?”
Water?
“The first rule of PIMPING your IPO....File a B**S**T Patent.”
The founder of this outfit has a PhD from MIT and an MD from Harvard. If he’s a scammer, he’s an extremely well-credentialed one.
my favorite part of the patent is about 3/4 in...
“gggctggcga tgagcgaaat gtagtgctta cgttgtcccg catttggtac 342gtaa ccggcaaaat cgcgccgaag gatgtcgctg ccgactgggc aatggagcgc 348gccc agtatcagcc cgtcatactt gaagctagac aggcttatct tggacaagaa 354cgct tggcctcgcg cgcagatcag ttggaagaat ttgtccacta cgtgaaaggc 36cacca aggtagtcgg caaataatgt ctaacaattc gttcaagccg acgccgcttc 366cggc ttaactcaag cgttagatgc actaagcaca taattgctca cagccaaact 372tcaa gtctgctttt attattttta agcgtgcata ataagcccta cacaaattgg 378tatc atgaggcgcg ccacgagtgc ggggaaat”
now, where did I leave my micro-biology textbook????
happens all the time.....there have been countless patents files when a firm is in need of cash infusion. Either for IPO or so they can go to their investors and hit them up again.
Trust me, got burnt by this junk.
A lot of times the problem is that the trick only works in a few drops of water. The bacteria can’t reproduce after a few generations, need special conditions.... on and on....
Basically, everything has to go right, and one little itty bitty problem will sink the whole thing.
There are bacteria in everyone’s petri dishes that do some trick. The trick is doing it on a truly industrial scale.
I am sure eventually someone will actually pull it off, but this patent filing isn’t a press release saying they are anywhere close to going to market. No, it is nothing more than a whimpering of a patent filing used for begging for money.
g=guanine, c=cytosine, t=thymine, and a=adenine
I have no idea what the numbers mean.
May/June 2010 article in Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, talks about this guy and product, too.
Water?
/sarc
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