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.
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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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h/t to WUWT reader JPE for the starting point link to Science Daily in Tips and Notes
I’m trying to understand.
The Premise: Global warming is caused by the trace gas CO2. While making up only a small amount of the terrestrial atmosphere, a tiny change in this concentration can have enormous effects upon the global climate. Humans, through our destructive habit of living, have increased this concentration by possibly more than 100 ppm — enough to create severe climate change/disruption/holocaust.
Right?
Solution: There is wide public agreement that we must cleanse the atmosphere of its excess CO2. Not only must this be done, but it must be done quickly, because the concentrations of CO2 are already so high that Britain, Europe, Russia, and many other places in the world are experiencing snowless winters.
Right?
This new process being proposed (providing it works, and providing it works efficiently) can take CO2, and turn it into oil.
Which is the fuel that runs the world.
Now, because it’s the “fuel that runs the world,” we’re going to need a lot of it, no matter how much we cut back, reuse, recycle, or turn out our lights. To supply this global request, a lot of CO2 would be needed to manufacture this fuel.
We could, as has been pointed out, take CO2 from non-atmospheric sources, which would probably also be cheaper and produce more fuel, but since this would be releasing banked-CO2 into the atmosphere, the world would continue its collapse into an environmental hell of less-cold winters and lush vegetation.
Or, we could make the “fuel that runs the world” from CO2 taken from the atmosphere, thereby meeting our commitment to cleaning up atmospheric CO2.
But CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the “fuel that runs the world” requires a lot of CO2.
Now this worries me because, while our planet may or may not heat up a bit according to small fluctuations in CO2 concentration, and whether this warming is small or massively disruptive, the more sobering fact is that when CO2 reaches BELOW a certain concentration, pretty well everything on Earth dies — and that includes all those animals that we’re trying really hard not to make go extinct.
By taking CO2 from non-atmospheric sources (providing the process worked, and providing it worked efficiently), we would essentially have an endless, and widely-accessible source of energy. Freed of concerns regarding access, we could turn all our engineering attention to capturing CO2 emissions, possibly channelling it into large, hermetically sealed agricultural regions where our pollution would increase crop yields. Whatever the capture method, once in place, we would have energy for the next hundred thousand years.
Whereas, by taking CO2 from the atmosphere (providing the process worked, and providing it worked efficiently), the only thing stopping a global extinction from CO2 scarcity within 100 years is the moral integrity and ethical characters of those controlling the trillions and trillions of energy dollars.
See my point?
This has been reported before (BWUWT in fact). So a repeat and well worth reporting.
It is also possible to produce fuel, (diesel and petrol, sorry gasoline) from biodigesters which produce methane as a primary product. This can be further altered to fuel for cars and trucks.
It is better as a liquid because methane is far more difficult to handle than a liquid and far more flamable in small concentrations.
Big deal. You can make light alkanes (methane to heptane) out of nothing but water, limestone and an iron (III) oxide catalyst. All it takes is heat and pressure. It occurs in the mantle at depth of 80-120km.
But the idea of “removing it from the atmosphere” is somewhat of a problem insofar as it is very dilute.
But CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the “fuel that runs the world” requires a lot of CO2.
Stop. Think.
Every plant in the world manages to do this with “dilute” levels of CO2. Given the right conditions of light and nutrients, plants can grow very quickly indeed.
The issue will not be supplying the CO2, especially with aerators and the like.
It will be harvesting and purifying, just as it is with bio-ethanol.
What if these new organisms go wild and eat up ALL the CO2? Then we’d all die from lack of food, and the world would freeze due to lack of global warming, and it would SERVE THEM RIGHT! That’s probably the master plan! HaHaHaHaHA!
Ever heard of fool’s day?
We call it 1 April in Holland.
Frias ?
Whacket?
good joke.
harry
according to wikipedia’s discussion of energy consumption this would have to be pretty efficient to be a complete solution to energy consumption – it seems our energy consumption is about 25% of radiant energy. The sahara – at 9400000 square km and 150w/m2 for 8 hours a day and 365 days a year would produce 41.12E18W or 1% of world energy consumption – presumably at 100% efficiency. If c02 is scarce this is unlikely to be 100% efficient.
In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×1018
J=132,000 TWh). This is equivalent to an average annual power consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×1013
W) [1] The potential for renewable energy is: solar energy 1600 EJ (444,000 TWh), wind power 600 EJ (167,000 TWh), geothermal energy 500 EJ (139,000 TWh), biomass 250 EJ (70,000 TWh), hydropower 50 EJ (14,000 TWh) and ocean energy 1 EJ (280 TWh).[9].
For the Greens, at least a direction that would eventually work. The current mass production method is called synfuels. Been around since Hitler’s time. Goes in fits and starts but the basic idea is dirt simple. Basically use electricity to make dry ice (CO2) from air (refrigeration); use electricity to make H2 (electrolysis); stuff into process plant and out comes completer pure hydrocarbons. Los Alamos folks even did a feasibility study a few years ago using nuke power plants and found it was completely feasible and most importantly, price competitive. Proven. Reliable. Will simply recycle CO2 and water for the life of nuke fuel sources – somewhere around few billion years.
But, of course, what we’re mass producing, if we take away Obama and the Dems and OPEC price rigging, would be cheaper than dirt. Cheaper should always win in a market economy if you want to eat something other than dirt. Energy is life, cheap energy is prosperity. See how your iPods run and communicate without cheap energy.
“But the idea of “removing it from the atmosphere” is somewhat of a problem insofar as it is very dilute.”
The exhaust gases from carbon fuelled power stations will be rich in CO2.
It will not take much to have a more economical ‘CO2 disposal system’ than carbon sequestration, even if the resulting ‘fuel’ was buried! It wouldn’t wouldn’t bubble up and kill wildlife as reported here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/11/co2-sequestration-splodes-in-saskatchewan/
Paulo says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:09 am
$ 30 a barrel…
Bio Fuel Systems (BFS) transforms CO2 into bio-oil PDF Print E-mail
The plant does seem to be working. Impressive.
What about the Rossi/Focardi Energy Catalyser? Coldfusion reactor.First 1 Megawatt plant opening in Greece in October.That should shut the greens up.
This is a shocking waste of good carbon dioxide which should be left alone as a vital ingredient to the growing of more food to feed the growing population.
If you want to move around in cars, then just add pedals or better still use petrol from oil available in the ground.
There is still some left and available for this purpose, so I’m told.
citizenschallenge says:
March 29, 2011 at 11:09 pm
“The greens worst nightmare: A CO2 to Oil process”
Do you WUWT folks listen to yourselves?
What’s up with the totally demonizing of “greens” ?
And the disgusting fantastical twisting of other’s motives?
You folks have actually convinced yourselves that greens don’t want solutions.
It’s sad and helps explain my sense of hopelessness everything I try to reason with Global Warming “skeptics”
Ken Hall says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:23 am
So you see, the leading environmentalists do not want clean energy. They want the de-industrialisation of the developed world, the population of the world reduced from its current 6.8 billion people down to between 100 million and 500 million people who will live like stone age cavemen, apart from a chosen few who will get to serve the elite as their slaves.
@ur momisugly citizenschallenge: Could we have your thoughts on Ken Hall’s very comprehensive comments and quotes please?
We have had guest posts on WUWT talking about how oil will eventually run out and presenting scary scenarios. I have replied that human ingenuity has been underestimated in the past. One example was the prediction around the late 19th century about how horse manure would be many feet high in London by the year 2000. They hadn’t thought that the car would take off as it did. ;O)
Making oil from bacterial processes has been feasible for years, but it is NOT economically feasible. Doing this is so expensive, it is a Mad Max, end of world strategy for fueling the few remaining vehicles. It’s too bad we have this kind of money to waste on Pyrrhic victory type efforts when we are sitting on huge resources of actual, real oil and gas.
Perhaps we can harness the gas being spewed out in Washington.
Now all we have to do is drive enough large cc V8’s and the CO2 should fall….
I’ll try my best with mine….
Anthony,
When will we know if we have tinkered around with the chemical composition of this planet that it comes back to bite us?
Ken Hall says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:23 am
You have said it ALL! They deserve their titles of Nazis, Stalinists, lunatics. Whether it’s the Socialism of the left or the right, it will do so much damage to humanity! But that is of course what Socialism is all about, they don’t think they know what’s good for everybody, they don’t even believe they know what’s good for everybody, they just plain KNOW what’s good for everybody!
Matt Taylor says:
March 29, 2011 at 9:32 pm
How does this constitute “the greens worst nightmare,” wouldn’t it really be more like “the greens dream come true?”
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It constitutes in that “greens” are cause orientated, the issue is feigned.
Take away the feigned issue and they disappear with the cause.
They are no more complicated than that.
But if they suck up too much carbon dioxide the growth of cucumbers and the sunbeams extracted from them will fall and the process will go into a death spiral.
@ur momisugly Matt Taylor, Ken Hall has hit the nail on the head with his quotes. I’m sure there are many people in the ‘green’ movement who are well intentioned people who just want a nice place to live, a clean environment, etc., and have no ill will or motives. However, underlying the movement is what has been a constant socio-political movement which is essentially anti progress and anti human. Malthusians, basically. Take this account for example:
—–
“One fine day in the year 156 A.D., in Phrygia (now part of Turkey), the prophet Montanus suddenly reeled round and round and keeled over into a trance in which he envisioned Christ’s second coming and the end of the world. Thenceforward, Montanus roamed the dusty paths of Asia Minor, proclaiming to all who would listen that doomsday lay just round the bend. Montanus gathered many disciples, among whom was one Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Tertullian, who went on to become a champion of Monantism and a dynamic intellectual force and teacher in the early Christian church. At the core of Tertullian’s teachings lay his bitter admonition that life in the 2nd century had become “too extravagant, too wasteful”, and that “population growth had run out of control”. “Mankind was raping the Earth of its resources”, Tertullian warned grimly… “…we men have actually become a burden to the Earth … the Earth can no longer support us…”. – The Fascism of Environmentalism
—–
Sound familiar? For some reason Malthusian End of World! types have always been with us, always exploiting the fear du jour, and usually also claiming the only way to avert certain disaster is to give them boatloads of money and privilege so they can manage society the ‘correct’ way. They are anti human and anti civilization, always have been, always will be. Now I doubt that this is the majority of the green movement, but they do represent a potent force that’s been a part of our world ever since someone saw the sun set and feared it might not rise again. And Global Warming Climate Change Climate Disruption Climate Challenges are the fear du jour. Hence some greenies will hate and fear this because it means human progress without total destruction, which means their apocalyptic visions and remedies are a harder sell.
Algae of course can already turn CO2 and sunlight into oils.
The big problem is the capital cost of providing the covered tanks/tubes so the bugs can absorb the sunlight without being killed off other invasive bugs.
If the Minnesota bug can survive in open pools without being out-competed, then this a big breakthrough. If not it is a non-event.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just make transport fuel from coal? Fischer-Tropsch process was invented in the 1920s. It’s all about cost, unless of course you are a warmist.
But this “trick” would be the ultimate warmist tweak.
Hydrocarbons, some of the most interesting molecules in nature.
Because the Greens don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment they just want power over other people’s lives, and the best way to do that today is by controlling the supply of energy, specifically the most prevalant and cost effective, fossil energy. Do you really think Obama, Pelosi, Ted Turner, Al Gore, and on and on and on are really going to reduce their carbon footprint? No, they buy papal indulgences.. er I mean carbon offsets (best case) or simply pay lip service. It’s like Animal Farm, the Pigs REALLY want to live like the other farm animals, but they are sacrificing for the revolution so they must have electricity, live in the house, drink the whiskey, sleep in the beds, all for the good of the proles! (or in 2011, fly in private jets, have a 10,000 sq foot mansion, drive a fleet of gas guzzling cars, work in an totally frivolous, energy sucking industry… Hollywood, all for the good of the revolution you know!).
The Green’s are frauds, hypocrites and liars, or at best brainwashed, weak minded rubes.
BTW, Obama just annouced he plans on cutting imported oil by 33% over the next 9 years. Cause you know.. it’s the right thing to do… sending regular Americans into the poor house.
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Matt Taylor says:
March 29, 2011 at 9:32 pm
How does this constitute “the greens worst nightmare,” wouldn’t it really be more like “the greens dream come true?”
oh no, they are going to use up all the carbon dioxide and the planet will freeze! global cooooooling