Posted on 02/27/2011 11:30:05 AM PST by kingattax
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A Massachusetts biotechnology company says it can produce the fuel that runs Jaguars and jet engines using the same ingredients that make grass grow.
Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically-engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels.
What can it mean? No less than "energy independence," Joule's web site tells the world, even if the world's not quite convinced.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Everyone is wishing now that the evil oil companies had kept at least one copy of the 100 mpg plans. /Sarcasm with a capital S
With $7 corn and $13.50 beans, I can guarantee you any plantable land in the midwest is already gonna be worked this spring.
Can’t wait to put a solar/microbe panel on the roof of my car and let it sh*t in my gas tank.
First of all I doubt that this biological process even works as advertised. Secondly, it's a big difference pumping crude from a well and waiting for a microorganism to excrete a meaningful amount. Could the process be scaled-up to produce refineable amounts of oil?
Much of this lessor known oil in under Government lands, we could pump it to help out the treasury.
"ooooooh , what he said!"
If sunlight is a major factor in the process, then the rate of production would be limited by the amount of real estate devoted to the process. IOW this process is basically the same as growing grass and then burning it for fuel. You are only going to get a limited amount of calories per acre of land committed to the process.
The bottom line is that even with this process the cost of fuel is going to be increasing and the cost of food is going to increase as more and more agricultural land is devoted to fuel production.
16 CO2 + 18 H2O + (energy) = 2 C8H18 + 25 O2 for gasoline
24 CO2 + 46 H2O + (energy) = 2 C12H23 + 47 O2 for diesel.
Well actually, these organisms do exist. They are called plants.
TY! Exactly what I was wondering.
Wondering why they could use hexane for the oil extraction like the do in the food industry.
Good call. And when they decompose and sink into the soil, a million or so years go by and they DO produce, in a way, diesel !
A couple of years ago it was algae ponds in the Arizona desert, thousands of square miles of ponds, producing algae for an algae refinery.
Apparently there are still a few “technical” problems to work out.
Thanks for posting some common sense.
I was going to post basically the same response, but violated FR tradition by reading the other posts first.
How many gallons will be produced per acre of facility? How much infrastructure and labor are required to produce and refine it? What happens when the little organisms “get sick?”
IOW, what will it cost in the real world? I suspect $50 to 100/gallon or more.
Shouldn't be thinking this with Mrs p6 away for the afternoon...
So, it is possible, but it would take as much - probably more - energy to create the product as to "burn" it?
Yes, it would take considerably more energy to create it than you could get out of it. It’s hard to fight the third law of thermodynamics.
Lots of speculation about this, particularly when some oil fields replenish themselves. I tend to believe oil is created by natural processes, and is not just the result of decaying dinosaurs.
Regardless, we need oil. Last week at a party, had an argument with a liberal. He said we don't need oil, just use solar, blah, blah. I pointed out all the material things around him that are made from oil - plastics, textiles, solvents, asphalt, tools, fertilizers, etc. He said we can get those elsewhere. For instance textiles, use cotton. I said farms rely on equipment that rely on oil - you just can't grow enough cotton and food to feed billions based on manpower alone. Liberals are brain-dead. Pie-in-the-sky ideas won't replace oil!
“The LAST thing on earth they want is cheap, renewable energy, because that would annihilate their plans for totalitarian control.”
Exactly. But they’ll be happy to “invest” hundreds of billions of dollars on “research” because it’s the closest thing to actually destroying wealth that there is short of transmutating gold into lead.
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