From the University of Minnesota:
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/23/2011) —University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and carbon 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.
“Janice Frias is a very capable and hard-working young scientist,” Wackett says. “She exemplifies the valuable role graduate students play at a public research university.”
Aditya Bhan and Lanny Schmidt, chemical engineering professors in the College of Science and Engineering, are turning the ketones into diesel fuel using catalytic technology they have developed. The ability to produce ketones opens the door to making petroleum-like hydrocarbon fuels using only bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.
“There is enormous interest in using carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbon fuels,” Wackett says. “CO2 is the major greenhouse gas mediating global climate change, so removing it from the atmosphere is good for the environment. It’s also free. And we can use the same infrastructure to process and transport this new hydrocarbon fuel that we use for fossil fuels.”
The research is funded by a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-energy (ARPA-e) program, created to stimulate American leadership in renewable energy technology.
The U of M proposal was one of only 37 selected from 3,700 and one of only three featured in the New York Times when the grants were announced in October 2009. The University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE) and the College of Biological Sciences also provided funding.
Wackett is principal investigator for the ARPA-e grant. His team of co-investigators includes Jeffrey Gralnick, assistant professor of microbiology and Marc von Keitz, chief technical officer of BioCee, as well as Bhan and Schmidt. They are the only group using a photosynthetic bacterium and a hydrocarbon-producing bacterium together to make hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide.
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.
Hydrocarbons (made from carbon and hydrogen) are the main component of fossil fuels. It took hundreds of millions of years of heat and compression to produce fossil fuels, which experts expect to be largely depleted within 50 years.
###
In press at the Journal of Biological Chemistry
Purification and Characterization of OleA from Xanthomonas campestris and Demonstration of a Non-decarboxylative Claisen Condensation Reaction*
+ Author Affiliations
From the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics and BioTechnology Institute, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota 55108
- 1↵ To whom correspondence should be addressed: Dept. of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics, 140 Gortner Laboratory, 1479 Gortner Ave., University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108. Tel.: 612-625-3785; Fax: 612-624-5780; E-mail: wacke003@umn.edu.
Abstract
OleA catalyzes the condensation of fatty acyl groups in the first step of bacterial long-chain olefin biosynthesis, but the mechanism of the condensation reaction is controversial. In this study, OleA from Xanthomonas campestris was expressed in Escherichia coli and purified to homogeneity. The purified protein was shown to be active with fatty acyl-CoA substrates that ranged from C8 to C16 in length. With limiting myristoyl-CoA (C14), 1 mol of the free coenzyme A was released/mol of myristoyl-CoA consumed. Using [14C]myristoyl-CoA, the other products were identified as myristic acid, 2-myristoylmyristic acid, and 14-heptacosanone. 2-Myristoylmyristic acid was indicated to be the physiologically relevant product of OleA in several ways. First, 2-myristoylmyristic acid was the major condensed product in short incubations, but over time, it decreased with the concomitant increase of 14-heptacosanone. Second, synthetic 2-myristoylmyristic acid showed similar decarboxylation kinetics in the absence of OleA. Third, 2-myristoylmyristic acid was shown to be reactive with purified OleC and OleD to generate the olefin 14-heptacosene, a product seen in previous in vivo studies. The decarboxylation product, 14-heptacosanone, did not react with OleC and OleD to produce any demonstrable product. Substantial hydrolysis of fatty acyl-CoA substrates to the corresponding fatty acids was observed, but it is currently unclear if this occurs in vivo. In total, these data are consistent with OleA catalyzing a non-decarboxylative Claisen condensation reaction in the first step of the olefin biosynthetic pathway previously found to be present in at least 70 different bacterial strains.
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I hope I’m wrong, but “The research is published in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.” does sound like some bad joke.
REPLY: Dozens of science websites and magazines are reporting on it, and the release date was March 23rd. The Journal is legitimate – Anthony
How many more steps at $2.2 million a crack will it take to prove the concept?
The next question is “At what cost?”
“There is enormous interest in using carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbon fuels”
Well, lets see. There’s lots of CO2 deep down in the earth, volcanoes tend to leak a lot of it. We have bacteria that live in rocks. Hmmm.
Maybe Earth has been making hydrocarbon fuels out of CO2 for a very long time.
There is a startup company in Cambridge, Joule Limited, which is building a protoype facility in Leander, TX, outside of Austin. They have patented bioengineered algae (which they created) which make gasoline or diesel fuel (different algae) out of CO2 and sunlight. John Podesta is on the board, and they just closed $30M in venture financing. The greens better get ready, because here come the bioengineers.
How does this constitute “the greens worst nightmare,” wouldn’t it really be more like “the greens dream come true?” A potential method in which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted into a renewable form of energy! That is something a lot of people on either side of the climatic debate, Republican or Democrat, green or industrialist, etc… would likely welcome if it could be implemented on the large scale. I think you are sorely mistaken if you think climate scientists who advocate climate change have some sort of sick stake in the future of the planet, and will only be satisfied until they see their predictions of warming to n’th degree come true.
REPLY: How? They won’t be able to complain about oil anymore in the CO2 context. – Anthony
I still like superrenewable fuels better. Turning CO2 into petroleum gives us fuel, but only releasing fossil carbons from their long imprisonment in the Earth can green up Earths’s vast deserts.
Also, burning fossils increases carbon-based fuels, such as wood or this petroleum. You eat your cake and have it, too. So you get more fuel out the more fossils you burn. Super-renewable is better than merely renewable.
” fossil fuels… to be largely depleted within 50 years. Uh huh. I’m inclined to look askance at any research which is accompanied by boilerplate nonsense.
We already have a device that can convert CO2, sunlight and water into a flamable liquidl it is called a pine tree.
It does not sound like this process will be less expensive than making turpentine.
I guess the turpentine research grants dried up 50 years ago.
“In early 19th-century America, turpentine was sometimes burned in lamps as a cheap alternative to whale oil. It was most commonly used for outdoor lighting, due to its strong odor. A blend of ethanol and turpentine added as an illuminant called burning fluid was also important for several decades.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpentine
“It took hundreds of millions of years of heat and compression to produce fossil fuels, which experts expect to be largely depleted within 50 years.”
I wish these people would catch up with current and breaking news. Apparently they haven’t heard of the Barnett Shale, Fayetteville Shale, Haynesville Shale, Bakken Formation, Marcellus Shale, oil shales in the West, deep-water discoveries in the Gulf and Brazil, undeveloped prospects in Alaska, oil sands in Canada, huge coal deposits throughout the US, lignite deposits in the Ark-La-Tex, and this is just for starters. These fossil fuels would last hundreds of years. And these are the people who think they are intelligent and educated. Distressing.
I’ve seen this on NCIS… it was silly then and it’s silly now.
Whatever, if it works and is profitable then why not? At least it will shut up those eco loons.
Beat ya 2 it. I wrote this yesterday:
“OK, it sounds really strange to be talking about recycling carbon dioxide — but it could happen. Imagine not sucking fossil fuel petroleum out of the ground, but actually MAKING it with carbon dioxide. So either extract CO2 from the atmosphere (admittedly that would cost a bit), or pipe the CO2 generated by primary fossil fuel energy production to a second plant where the CO2 is put to work making more oil — the biggest problematic thing in this 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics nightmare would be finding the power to run the second process.
Now, I have at length chided the advocates of solar and wind power about the fact that solar don’t work good when the sun don’t shine, and wind don’t work good when the wind don’t blow — but I can see using these in production mode to make renewable oil. And if the net result is CO2 neutral, then maybe, just maybe, we have something here.”
One issue is that to produce useful amounts of fuel, you have to have lots of CO2, and nobody has a reasonable way to get that density of CO2 from the atmosphere. You get it by burning fossil fuel. There would be lots of CO2 coming from the generation of electricity with coal or gas. It might be pretty useful if they could generate transport fuel while they are at it.
RE: Anthony. I would argue that any “green” that is more concerned about the loss of a talking point over the gain of a potential energy source is more of a subversive dissident [of the establishment] than a true advocate for environmentalism.
“There is enormous interest in using carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbon fuels,” Wackett says. “CO2 is the major greenhouse gas mediating global climate change, so removing it from the atmosphere is good for the environment. It’s also free.
Well, let’s give them a pass on the GHG bit; they need that for continued funding. But the idea of “removing it from the atmosphere” is somewhat of a problem insofar as it is very dilute. One will have to process a large volume of air to make a barrel of oil. That brings us to “free.” Some such notion may be construed if producers of CO2 are forced to capture the stuff and dispose of it – that is, capture, store, transport and give it for free to the bacterium growers. “Free” doesn’t seem to be the best-fit word for this activity.
Wake me when they have scaled this up to a super-tanker full of oil without a massive subsidy from tax payers (see wind power), then recapture the CO2 as this “new” oil is consumed. Otherwise, there is no net reduction in the atmospheric level of CO2 after the process has been operating through the full sequence. Or did I miss a step?
Carbon Science is way ahead on a related process to turn CO and water into Fuel using an enzyme originally extracted from a bacteria and stabilised in a nanosphere and fullerene tree structure. The enzyme, I believe, runs on Heat and UV. The process makes methanol and can, with another step, make petrol.
Carbon sciences also developed a cost effective way to combine mine tailings with CO2 to make chalk. A profitable form of carbon sequestration because the chalk sells for more than the carbon price of the CO2 in it. The governments and IPCC has religiously ignored such solutions so the company switched to the fuel making process. That’s now being ignored by the IPCC too.
See http://www.carbonsciences.com/ they are at preproduction stage. The greens will be truly horrified because the fuel plant will be spliced onto the side of a coal fired plant for maximum efficiency.
‘OleA’ ? , can find a link to olea genus , but OleA ?
Speculator mode on:
Let me see if I have this right. Pull my life savings out of all of my current investments and dump the whole wad into fossil fuel burning power companies now. Smart fossil fuel burners will capture much of their own CO2 rich emissions and recycle them into more fuel and a fatter bottom line. Everyone else will be at a disadvantage as they are forced to pull their CO2 supplies from the CO2 poor atmosphere LMAO. Sell, sell!!
Special bonus: carbon trading dies worldwide overnight. Sorry Al, lemons = lemonade.
Speculator mode off: I sure hope this can be done on a massive scale.
J. Knight says: March 29, 2011 at 9:41 pm
“And these are the people who think they are intelligent and educated.”
It is important to understand how to read these things. Whenever you see the generic term “expert”, or “scientists” you need to substitute the phrase “no one”. If the sentence actually contains the Name of a Person, or a Phycical Law, or a Falsifiable Theory then it requires actual investigation.
“which experts expect to be largely depleted within 50 years”, becomes “which no one expect to be largely depleted within 50 years”
“The scientists claim that the glaciers will melt by 2050” becomes “No one claimed that the glaciers will melt by 2050”
“The scientists said that if the warming had stopped then the oceans would be cooling” becomes “No one that if the warming had stopped then the oceans would be cooling”.
All you really need to do is to look at the phrase as it will appear in the future, and it will not bother you so much in the present. I’m sure that you can come up with other examples where the “experts” or “scienticts” have been disolved out of some predictions, leaving “no one” in their place.
At 10:00 pm
I forgot to mention that being downwind from a facility that is sucking all or almost all of the CO2 out of the air would soon be a vegetative dead zone!
Plants using sunlight to make something useful from CO2. Not the most original concept, but if they can make gasoline without subsidies, I’m all for it.
Where are the vast ponds or algae and water filled solar collectors going to be located?
50 years? Experts? Do these people not have editors?
You can get one of these that already works .. cost $10,000 2.2million would buy alot of them. Just sayin.
Can it be any more expensive than the present madness of using food producing land for the production of very expensive so called Green Bio Fuels?