Like the beginning of every great science fiction movie, experts claim that they've discovered a cure for our fuel-dependency woes that only requires an army of genetically modified bacteria... that eat wheat straw and excrete crude oil. You read that right: scientists have created bugs which are able to snack on woodchips or sugar cane and produce waste in the form of easily malleable oil. Not only are the buggers capable of creating a byproduct which can quickly be refined into fuel for vehicles, but scientists say the process is carbon-negative -- it outputs less carbon than is required to produce it. Director of the project -- dubbed LS9 -- Greg Pal says that barrel prices could run as low as $50, and that the company plans to have a commercial facility producing the crude in 2011. And as for the potential threat of world-destroying attack from the mutant feeders? Says Pal, "We're putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we're done with them, they're destroyed." Sure buddy -- but we're going to re-watch
Them! just in case.
posted Jun 16th 2008 10:31AM
I, for one, welcome our crude-producing bug overlords.
/obligatory
What, oh what, will become of our precious woodchips and sugar cane!
Wait - so their entire explanation to question re: world-destruction is "we're being REALLY careful"?!
Here's the thing - some bacteria WILL escape eventually if these are used industrially. It's gonna happen. Rather than take this stand, they should really be exploring the question "What WOULD happen if we released this bacterium into a nutrient-rich environment"?
Seriously though, there is some potential here.
Recently a 16 year old Canadian student found a bacteria that could eat plastic ( http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/WWSEF/08Awards/08BurdReport.pdf ). Just imagine if they could be modified to produce usable petroleum like these bacteria, you might be able to cheaply recycle the plastic back into petroleum. Cool possibilities I think.
As long as they are produced in the EU, US, Canada, or Australia I am all for it. I'm tired of giving all my gas money to dictatorships and theocracies.
Andrew Jones: I wish your entire universe was inside a tank.
This seems like a major step backward in energy efficiency. First of all, this wouldn't work in the United States, since we don't produce our own sugar, and the protective tariff on sugar is ridiculously high. If we do end up using woodchips, then we have the problem of tree chopping all over again.
To all of you that panned Flashpoint for his views, I think the problem lies beyond the fact that this "solution" continues our oil usage. The problem is really that internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient. That's horribly low, considering electric cars generally get around 80%-90% efficiency. The basic combustion model has not changed drastically since the car's inception, yet car models and extras have evolved enormously.
I agree with Flashpoint in that this is the perfect time for the automobile industry to change. Most people are aware of global warming (whether human-caused or natural is irrelevant), people are generally becoming more aware of the environment by the day (example being the "go green" phenomenon), and, most importantly, fuel prices are at an all-time high. There is now a race to the top for automobile companies to be the first to change the industry with an alternative to fuel for the sake of minimizing the cost of gas to consumers, as they don't want to be the ones stuck behind the times and lose sales (much like what happened with Ford and GM in the '80s).
My fear is that all of this R&D and innovation right now will come to a screeching halt with a development that produces more crude oil. No, maybe we won't have fusion and hydrogen fuel power in our lifetime, but without any pressure to develop these technologies, progress will not continue. I have faith in the fact that ANY technology can continue to be developed further, and that includes hydrogen fuel. Sure, it's inefficient now, but money needs to be available for companies to continue to develop and refine the technology.
@Dave
I see what you did there.
@Dave:
The US isn't a dictatorship and theocracy? You haven't been paying attention the last 20 years or so.
Clinton and Bush have set the record for using presidential signing statements and executive orders to do whatever the heck they want regardless of what the public want or the Constitution mandates.
Johnzilla, you can argue that all you want, but I love living in America, and would not (as a whole nation) feel safer anywhere else in the world. I'd much rather see US and NATO countries get money. Also, last time I checked the US is still the only place that truly allows free speech (at least in the purest form to any Eastern Countries).
@John: We don't produce our own sugar in the United States? Have Hawaii, Florida, Texas and Louisiana seceded from the union?
@Dave
Go shoot yourself in the face, the US is the worlds biggest propoganda machine, and the western media has been surpressing free speech for 20 years.
The fact that think otherwise is proof that the US government and media have succeeded in their quest
..."claim that they've discovered a cure for our fuel-dependency woes that only requires an army of genetically modified insects..."
Bacteria are not insects.
Many animals have intestinal bacterias which can take raw products in the digestive tract and fix them to more useable products.
There is actually a civet cat that we feed coffee beans and then use the bacteria in his stomach to fix the material before he sh*ts it out...then we harvest the beans and use it to make cofee. KOPI LUWAK.
We use bacteria for cheese, yogurt and many foods you probably eat.
We also use bacteria to help us with waste management.
Writer's license.
Did the mistake affect your ability to comprehend the article?
Carbon negative? Using live creatures (bacterium)? $50 a barrel? Sign me up!
THIS IS FANTASTIC.
Now we can use bugs to produce oil and continue to add pollutants to our atmosphere.
Oh sure, it puts out less carbon than is required to produce it, but, high oil prices are what keep a large percentage of people from being able to afford to drive. IF everyone could actually afford to drive, streets would be parking lots and the atosphere would resemble industrial England.
What we need is further development of nuclear power and more devvelopment of FUSION.
And before you say "NO WE CAN'T" keep in mind that back IN THE 90's technology was introduced that could seperate Hydrogen from WATER via electrolysis and use that as fuel...FROM WATER.
Now the JApense are reintroducing it (last week).
WE HAVE GOT TO CUT THESE OIL BARONS OUT OF OUR LIVES PERMANENTLY.
Your and idiot
The oil suckers low ranked me... SO WHAT.
Your day is coming. The uprising will claim your very lives.
I agree with your support of alternative energy sources, but the idea that high oil prices preventing consumers from being able to drive is a good thing is ludicrous. I suppose you've never had to watch the price of your daily commute double in a year.
You sir, with all due respect, FAIL.
Tarrence...
its spelled T E R R E N C E
@Flashpoint: It's spelled "Flash Point." As in, two words.
wow....I wish I could believe everything I hear without using reason....fight the man! Those evil barons are so evil....aside from giving jobs to people and keeping the economy going. Other than that they are evil.
I hate idiots.
wow, this discussion became very infantile very fast.
note to all other engadgeters: never wrestle with a pig. You'll just get muddy and the pig will enjoy it.
I'm going to remove myself from this discussion.
take it outside ladies
(and then film and post on intertubes)
Flashpoint, why you continue to comment on Engadget baffles me as you are wrong nearly all of the time. Usually fantastically so.
There are no "oil barons", just simple economics. High oil prices are not keeping people from driving. There are more cars on America's roads now than there were when oil was $70 per barrel. In fact, the number of cars on the roads has steadily increased since 1960. I notice that we are not living in the horrible dystopia you're dreaming of.
Hydrogen is not the answer, nor will it be within our lifetimes. Electrolysis is inefficient at best, at worst it's downright wasteful. Hydrogen is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream; we should be focusing on new sources of energy that don't require a complete rebuilding of our entire energy distribution infrastructure from the ground up.
Americans can hardly complain about oil prices, come over to England and paying nearly $9 per gallon of petrol (gas)..
I live in "industrial England", and am happy to report that no one has caught cancer or started glowing in the dark as a result of car ownership.
a good portion of global warming is caused by water vapor in the atmosphere, while carbon emissions are not helping, they aren't exactly the main cause
what happens if the bacteria get out and start producing crude oil in forests and wheat fields, etc....could be as bad as oil spills...
there better be a ton of safeguards to prevent these things from getting out
Couple of interjections:
1. I'm pretty sure Oil prices are NOT set by Supply/Demand but a chair of people trying to anticipate demand.
2. Switching over to Water based energy would only reduce our naturally limited fresh water supply. (Salt water on the other hand...)
3. The price of Oil BEFORE Bush was near $20/barrel, it's now up to $140
Flashpoint wrote...
"And before you say "NO WE CAN'T" keep in mind that back IN THE 90's technology was introduced that could seperate Hydrogen from WATER via electrolysis and use that as fuel...FROM WATER."
I have a couple of things to point out here.
1. The process is called electrolysis.
2. Electrolysis requires electrical energy, which world-wide is mostly coal.
3. Electrolysis generated hydrogen burned in ICEs or converted back to electricity via Fuel Cells, is less efficient than simply using a battery. Converting energy from one format to another is inherently inefficient.
4. Electrolysis is much older than 20 years. Admittedly, it has been refined over time.
5. The Japenese care is simply a fuel cell with a lot of hype. Pretty much all the major car manufacturers have one.
Honestly, I figure you're just a troll, but hey it does get a lot of comments like mine here.
By the way, "They" are working on fusion. There are several reactors in the countries you'd expect to have them, US, Japan, etc. There is a huge one being built in France.
Flashpoint, you're the worst thing that's ever happened to Engadget.com. as Josh L said, you're always wrong on every topic, every post...please just stop trying.
For whoever voted me down on interjection #3:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/rclc4M.htm
You can clearly see the oil prices/barrel in this chart.
I don't get it. If we have water as a cheap fuel, won't the streets still turn into parking lots?
Everybody would drive and nothing would change.
Gas is still cheap. Don't forget the cost to buy a vehicle and to maintain it.
Electrolysis is not revolutionary. Drop a 9 volt battery in a glass of water and you will produce hydrogen bubbles. The problem is that it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than you can get back out of it.
Sounds too good to be true to me. It can't be that damn easy
IT Accountant
High oil prices have increased THE COST OF LIVING.
Food, apparel, heating oil,...the list goees on.
If people run out of speding money because they are using it all for transportation and food prices, then they end up cutting back elswhere...many opting for public transportation.
It is a good thing.
#1 The environment would be a MESS if we doubled the number of cars on the road. Global Warming whether you choose to believe it or not is REAL. Not evn 20 years ago, gasoline had LEAD in it, MERCURY and other cancerous additives (that we know off). You can't be a 100% sure you know what the health effects of oil are so don't pretend to.
#2 more cars on the road = more traffic. THAT'S SIMPLE MATH.
more traffic = more traffic accidents due o the law of averages...more people driving = more traffic related occurences.
No, it's not a good thing you jackass. High prices help no one. If people can't drive in order to buy food, what happens when prices keep going up. Do they cut back on eating? Do they die, and help lower CO2 emissions? But I guess in your idiot mind that's a good thing too.
So your saying that only wealthy people should be *allowed* to drive and that we should regulate the price of oil so only certain people can drive?
Also... how does having alternate forms of energy help this problem?? Doesn't that also make driving more affordable for poor people too?
Maybe we should start regulating how many kids people can have too... you know cause that could increase the number of drivers...
Didn't someone else have ideas like this... I can't quite put a "Marx" on his name though...
@ Jason:
You hit the nail on the head. Flashpoint here apparently subscribes to the Congressional Democrat line of telling 3rd-world countries to stay poor and not try to develop infrastructure or raise their standard of living in order to save the planet from a manufactured crisis based on junk science.
I'm sure he pats himself on the back for these bigoted, racist views too.
Flashpoint:
With your regards to global warming.
I've heard this theory, y'see that the earth heats up and cools down naturally (we get ice ages, stuff goes all firey, etc, etc), maybe this is causing your so called "Global warming"?
Pfft, Global Warming, I've still got my ice caps..
*walks outside, and falls through said ice cap*
Balls.
I live in the outskirts and need to travel to the city centre to feed my children. The car gets me there in ten minutes. The bus takes 20 for the first half of the journey, until I have to change to another bus which takes a further half an hour to do a round tour of the suburbs before arriving at my work, either five minutes late (angry boss) or if I get up (much) earlier half an hour too early. Why on earth would I use public transport when I could make savings back by not buying luxuries like the Internet or clothing?
"Global warming" is indeed happening, but we do not know to what degree, if any, our emissions are responsible (them making up just 5% of the planets total CO2 emissions eg other species and volcanic activity) or whether this will be any more or less severe than any of the other examples of temperature shifts in earths history.
Crude oil simply consists of hydro-carbons of various sizes, with led having been added to petrol for awhile to improve engine performance until it's air pollutant side effects were discovered. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about when you complain about catching cancer from cars.
You strike me as one of those people who likes to think they are green because it is very much in vogue. I sincerely look forward to us running out of oil so that I can point and mock you when the power stations close and your electric car no longer works, and when the plastic bits of it need to be melted down to create more important products. Equally entertaining would be the possibility that we are entirely responsible for climate change, in which case you would have no means of powering your gee-wiz factories or doing... well anything at all, really, including breathing... without frying the planet and having to where an "I'm a self righteous hypercrite" badge.
I do agree that an increase in public transportation will be a good long term goal. I always thought that they could make connections between suburbs and the cities via some sort of drive-on device that is in constant motion (aka less stop and start) but building that kinda of infrastructure is many years in the future.
But I do disagree with this whole Global Warming thing. I enjoy alternative energy for its engineering posibilities (I am a mechanical engineer), but the fact that car emission are raising the heat of the earth is not true. There are tons of sources if you want the detail. But animals (sorry PETA) cause way more carbon monoxide than cars. If you really want to stop a supposed warming of the earth, lets eat more animals! Our solar system is cyclic. One of the reasons for possible temperature raises is do to the amount of sunspots that are on the sun. The sun has an cycle where it produces sunspots (kinda like seasons) which cause it to be hotter or colder (depending on the activity). There are reasons for the supposed 2nd ice ages and all that that has happened. We do have control over the amount of pollutents that we are breathing, but the sun has WAY more control over how the earth is "warmed" then our vehicles "destroying the ozone layer". If you want to know where I got my data from, I have attened many lectures from the STEREO group (Nasa solar observatory missions). I also work for a prominent Diesel Engine maker and have deal with emisions work.
i think marx would want everyone to be alloted the same amount of oil producing bacteria
@Flashpoint
I'm not sure if you have ever had an economics class, so I'll let you in on some small part of it. Gas is, more or less, an inelastic item(more or less because there aren't any perfectly inelastic items). Now when I say inelastic, I mean that Fred is going to drive to work, whether gas is $4 a gallon, or if it is $10 a gallon. Fred drives about 30 miles a day to work everyday, and on the weekends he might drive a total of 30 miles in those two days. If gas spikes, he may cut out a few miles on the weekend, but more or less 80% of his driving continues regardless of gasoline prices. So yes, it is causing prices of many other commodities to be driven up, but Fred will still drive to work and lose money, because the bus sucks. So high gas prices really help no one, not even tree huggers, because all thats happing is Fred doesn't get to eat at Olive Garden on Saturdays like he usually does(lol).
Actually, why don't they raise the driving age. That would help keep immature Ricers off the streets. :D
I lovee how people who didn't major in natural sciences can claim GLOBAL WARMING is a myth.
What's funny is, they only get their antii-GW views from TV.
Now don't refute yourself here. I'm assuming that natural sciences must be/have been your major, yet you make claims about economic theory. By your line of thought, the only way to have anything relevant to say about a subject is to have majored in it, thus refuting your claims about economics (assuming your degree, of course). And I don't believe I have ever seen anything on T.V. that is anti-global warming. Ever.
@ Flashpoint
I love how people who didn't major in natural sciences can claim GLOBAL WARMING is real and sit on the UN's IPCC panel.
What's funny is, they only get their GW views from watching morons who act in TV or movies, washed up singers, liberal politicians, and others who are imminently unqualified to discuss something as complex as climatology.
For those curious ... "The IPCC is not, as some believe, a group of scientists, but a panel set up by the United Nations comprising representatives from about 140 governments to consider what we currently know about climate change"
I hear the argument being made here as:
"High energy prices are good because people will stop using energy. If poor people can't afford transportation or food, well, that's just a byproduct of our wasteful, harmful society. Maybe they'll just die and decrease the surplus population. Oh, all that and there's an evil conspiracy keeping the little man down."
Did I get that right? No? Really? Because that's what I thought I heard. Sounds a lot like some 18th century thinkers I've read. Of course, I could be part of the evil, transnational, imperialistic cabals trying to fill my pockets on the backs of the common man.
Just my 2¢...
Dear people,
May I knidly ask what it is exactly that this Flashpoint character did to so annoy ye?
Yes, one or two of his/her comments may have been a little misguided or unsubstantiated perhaps, but the myriad of negative votes his/her comments are getting (coupled with the high votes for those trolling him/her) are a bit surprising.
Yes some of flashpoints' comments are a little innacurate/hasty, but he/she's certainly not the only one:
@Mike_NYC
On electrolysis - yes the whole fuel cell things seems a bit pointless (although I'm no expert), but no, I'm afraid "Fusion" is not being used "in the countries you'd expect to have them, US, Japan, etc." (unless you're talking about experimental reactors - the biggest is in Oxfordshire, UK - but they're just big laboratories really). I believe you're referring to "Fission" there, something quite different. Get your vocab straight before you discredit others.
@bjsguess
"The IPCC is not, as some believe, a group of scientists" - true, but it does consult (and it's publications are written by) a huge number of reputable scientists. Also, the idea of global warming being a DIRECT cause of excess carbon emmissions is no longer under debate in scientific circles. It is accepted as scientific fact by about 99.5% of reputable scientists worldwide (for some odd reason the majority of that 0.5% seems to reside in one particular part of the world) Come on people, this is engadget, you're supposed to be AHEAD of the times. This 'theory' was accepted as fact by scientists years ago.
@skun
"animals .. cause way more carbon monoxide than cars" - true but if you'd actually read any literature on global warming you'd realise it's the CHANGE in production that causes warming not the total (i.e. animals have always produced that much, cars are only starting to in the last 100 years)
"If you really want to stop a supposed warming of the earth, lets eat more animals!" - Nice. But as it happens slaughterhouses actually produce more carbon than live animals. (Although I'm still not a veggie)
Finally... on mutant bugs:
Cool! I want one.
and 20 years ago all the scientists were scaring us with global cooling, amasing they fixed it in 20 years, so that we have to battle the other extreme now
And I'd like to remind everyone we have had more than 30 years to come up with viable alternatives to Texas tea. Always with the crisis management. For once I'd love to see us address a problem BEFORE it threatens our way of life/existence.
Now to dine on woodchips and sugarcane, and poop my way to financial freedom!
Hey, how about some north sea brew!
but, but, but, spending 0.003% of our resources on prevention makes baby jeebus cry!
...did we just go back in time to april 1st? o_O
"it outputs less carbon than is required to produce it."
Wait, isn't that a bad thing?
And, as another commenter posted, these aren't "bugs" or "insects". They're just bacteria.
Anyway, they're not going to supply us with any respectable amount of oil, but they're darn cool nonetheless.
Thanks. I hate when people refer to bacteria as "bugs". It's confusing and facilitates the uninformed to then make the jump to calling them "insects", as we see in Engadget's first sentence.
If they're removing carbon from the atmosphere then reemitting it from cars there's no net increase in atmospheric carbon levels, thus no problem. The problem is releasing it from sources other than the atmosphere, oil, coal, gas etc.
Greg Pal? Are you sure it isn't George Pal?? (grin)
Global warming is a THEORY. Not proven. If you follow any kind of news the temperature of Mars and Jupiter is going up to. Is that because of global warming? Or is the natural cycles of the sun and/or normal rotational variations?
keep your religion to yourself.
you better be careful, Al Gore and ManBearPig may not like what you are saying. i for one don't believe in global warming, but i do believe in christianity which to sum it all up says, "accept the one true faith and savior or forever burn in a fiery lake."
kinda think of it, global warming in christianity.
Vote Nader for President 08
Global warming is a fact. You just measure global temperature over a several year period and note the results. This isn't the contention. The debate, if you can call it that (since the vast majority are on one side) is the role of humans in the process. You admit this much yourself, since you then go on to point out warming on other planets. As it turns out, there is both warming *and* cooling taking place, depending on which planet you look at. Each instance is readily explained by other phenomena. Output of the sun is steady to within a fraction of a percent not enough to account for any climate change. Then changes that do take place, such as sunspot activity, are cyclical on a short (11 year) time scale. These changes may have a small, cyclical impact on weather due to changes in the solar wind changing the concentration of charge particles in the atmosphere that can nucleate condensation and thus impact cloud cover. Global warming, however, refers to a larger, monotonic (in one direction) trend, not this small, cyclical process.
You don't know what theory really means. I am a computer science student. These are the definitions from a class I had concerning fossil fuels.
Hypothesis - a tentative and speculative explanation advanced for testing
Theory - An explanation for a phenomenon, which has been well tested and generally agreed as an accurate statement of our current understanding of phenomena.
Law or Principle - embodies the highest level of confidence, based on having survived numerous episodes of rigorous testing
People like to discredit theories by saying they are just theories. What you think is a theory is actually a hypothesis
Gravity is just a THEORY but it manages to keep your ass on the planet doesn't it? There's a huge difference between a HYPOTHESIS and a THEORY.
I suggest you look up both words jackass.
I was hoping steadily depleting fossil fuels would drive renewable energy resources into the mainstream quickly, rather than have them trickle in while the world suffers.
Cocaine's a helluva drug! I don't believe it until I see it.
So now we are going to give food and forests to bacteria to obtain oil? I thought the main problems we were facing were deforestation and an increase in the prices of basic food, while oil reserves would last 100-200 years at least. Why can't we take oil from Earth's crust while a viable replacement is found? Is it really needed to make the problem worse?
http://digg.com/general_sciences/Giant_microwave_turns_plastic_back_to_oil_2
Use bugs' output to use as input for the microwave.
replace "bug" with "bacteria".
NOM NOM NOM
POOP -> OIL
Chinese food joke?
Oh, no, I was just pretending to be a bacterium, eating my way through your kitchen and making oil slicks along the way. Don't mind me.
for some reason this reminds me of what happens when you feed spinach to babies...
Now the cost of sugar cane and wood will rise dramatically in speculation and forests will be depleted by profiteers. You'll see the raw material prices more than triple in price before the process hits mass production, so the $50 cost per barrel will quickly shoot up to $150.
Sweet... fill 'er up!
If that counts as carbon-negative, then I guess a plant that runs on coal is carbon-neutral? I mean, the same amount of carbon goes into it that comes out (or maybe even less). Let's all switch to coal-power!!!
Substantially less carbon comes out of a coal-fired plant than goes into it. There are lots and lots of filters and converters in place to reduce emissions and there have been since long before idiots started believing humans were making the planet heat up.
Zerg Overmind says "Evolution complete"
nostalgia: the swedish title for Them was translated to "The Spiders" (but in swe ofcourse). lawl!
ok global warming is happening but I read some where that the us army/ forces give out double the amount of co2 in the air then the rest of the American public... What about that...
I think this idea is amazing if will help the world bring down prices of everything not just fuel... But I agree we should also keep looking on how to make the world a better place to live
just my opinion
Great idea..until Big Oil steal..I mean..buys the rights to it..
Jurassic bugs!!! quick! call Ian Malcolm!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
#1) People are forced to drive in America. Sorry but outside of very few metro areas you must own a car or form of motorized transport to make a living. Period undebatable.
Yes I know there are some people that will bike 20 miles to work and back but for 99% of people that just isn't an option.
#2) Hydrogen cars produce a lot of water vapor. The #1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, thousands of times more potent than Co2. You want global warming, have millions of cars spewing water vapor into the atmosphere raising the relative humidity of an area by 20%.
#3) Oil at $140 a barrel has nothing to do with supply and demand. When the mortage mess started to appear large investment banks used a loophole that allowed them to trade huge ammounts of cash for oil futures on the London ICE echange bypassing US trade regulations. Overseas investors use the same loophole to trade oil on the NYMEX. The runup in oil prices is 100% controlled by billionaire investors using oil as a hedge against losses in the mortage backed security market.
Suadi Arabia has already boosted production by 500,000 barrels a day since May. The market said, meh this isn't about supply you idiots and just kept trading higher.
People have to understand that the mega rich never lose money. They only transfer it from one place to another. While someone may take a $250 million hit in the market they will make $300 million somewhere else through market manipulation.
#4) Wood chips are a wasteproduct from all lumber producers that is just ground into sawdust and burned. Millions upon millions of tons each year. Using this wasteproduct to make fuel is just a smart thing to do. Because the oil is made from sources outside of the regulated petroleum market and can be sold as biofuel, it can be sold at a true market price rather than an artificial controlled price like oil futures. This will help drive oil prices back down to true market levels.
#5) Drop the idiotic, Gas is $9 a gallon in the UK and Americans should be happy with $4 gas argument. The Imperial gallon and US gallon are different quantities, gas in Europe and thw UK are much higher grades, and the tax on fuel is much much higher than the US.
If the UK gallon was priced at a fair market level it would be about the cost of US premium.
There done for now.
so you mean the demand for oil stocks went up and so did the price? How is supply and demand not involved?
I think we should produce trash eating, energy pooping bacterium that could power our cars like in Back to the Future II
Greg Pal is the directory of the project, eh?
Any relation to George Pal the director of many classic SF/Horror movies of the same genre? :)
Kinda puts a whole new spin on the ol' sugar in someone's gas tank prank huh?
it reminds me of how terrans try to "benefit" from handling zergs, in the end, terrans were overrun by THEM....
So if i'm gettin it right, we should encourage our oil dependency and keep killing ourselves with it :) awesome
1. First, we'll have crude oil-producing bacteria in bio-factories, producing oil out of vegetable matter for later transport and consumption.
2. Then, some will escape into the wild, destroying vegetation and ruining farmland by reproducing unopposed and secreting oil into the top soil.
3. Engaging in a kind of "scorch the earth" strategy, this out-of-control strain of bacteria will spread like a scourge on the land.
4. Wildfires will become much more problematic, children will be sickened and deformed, the incidence of brain damage will rise, and people will become sterile from hydrocarbon poisoning.
5. Then, a genetic mutant of the plastic-decomposing bacteria will become a crude oil-eating bacterial strain, living in a commensal relationship with the crude oil producing bacteria at first, and then moving on to infect our existing oil- and gasoline-production and -transportation network, bringing the world economy to its knees.
6. Scientists will introduce a genetically modified, antimicrobial compound-producing fungus into the environment in an attempt to combat the crude oil-eating bacteria.
7. However, and finally, the widespread growth of this fungus will promote resistance to antimicrobial compounds in pathogenetic organisms that affect human physiology, resulting in a devastating, untreatable plague that will wipe out 3/4 of all humanity, sending the survivors back to Bronze Age technology (except this time, with the added advantage of post-modern criticism and a full understanding of color matching and its role in home decor).
"the company plans to have a commercial facility producing the crude in 2011"
"the company plans to have a commercial facility producing the crude in 2011".
Wont that be too late?
Here's where I'm pessimistic:
My good ole US of A uses, on average, 20 million barrels of oil per day. 20,000,000 barrels per day. That's over 7 TRILLION barrels a year - and only for one country.
How much wood, sugarcane, etc. would it take to make one barrel - and in how much time? Obviously I don't know the answer to that, but I can't help but believe that we'd just be quickly destroying other resources just to keep pumping out oil. As someone else posted, it seems like the real solution is to focus more on alternative fuel sources, instead of just gunning for more oil.
oh good! another attempt to fix the fuel crisis that really just increases our dependency on oil and a random plant that will screw with the rest of the economy! by 2011 we need practical, affordable alternative sources of energy that don't require plants to be destroyed or oil to be burned. this will obviously still be expensive because it will have the ability to compete with other oil companies. this seems, like ethanol, to be a step backwards. i'm hoping for semi-affordable, heterosexual-looking, hydrogen powered vehicles by 2011.
OH WAIT, they're serious?
Science fixes everything. Even if this is total BS, can you imagine what we could accomplish if we spent more $ on research in this country?
Or we could just invade Iraq...
Sigh. Well, this looks to be just propaganda to match the Amyris announcement earlier this year about basically the same thing. This really isn't as big a deal as it sounds like, guys. If you read a little more closely, you can see that they're saying that anything that can be broken down into simple sugars can be used as fuel, but they aren't selling a bacteria to do that, they're selling just the bacteria to ferment the sugar into biocrude. And really, that's the easy part of the process, there's a natural bacteria that can turn sugar into butinol, BP was looking into using that, Amyris is saying they're going to have pilot plant in Brazil doing some sort of sugar to biocrude production by late 2009, this is really nothing new. The only real plus from a production standpoint of biocrude over something like ethanol is that biocrude doesn't dissolve in water, so it's a lot easier to separate out than ethanol, which takes distillation. And biocrude is compatible with existing fuel infrastructure, so that's a help. The real key to making this profitable and good for the environment is the step where celluosic stuff (wood chips, straw, etc.) get turned into simple sugars, and these guys haven't been working on that.
And as far as environmental release goes, that shouldn't be a problem. As I just said, this bacteria needs sugar to produce the biocrude, so it'll only be eating sugar, it won't be melting your house or anything. The bigger safety of these biocrude bugs is that they can only tolerate a fairly low amount of their output products in their immediate environment. In a distillery, they immediately remove the byproduct as soon as they can, so the bacteria keep seeing a low concentration, but in nature, if they ran into a good food source and started producing the biocrude, they'd wind up killing themselves on it. So, don't worry, it won't start running amok anytime soon.
Doesn't this remind anyone of the game Starflight?
These are the bugs mentioned in the Book of Revelations, LOL