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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h/t to WUWT reader JPE for the starting point link to Science Daily in Tips and Notes
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I continue to be amused by the “greens” who protest that they want solutions, yet depend on the solutions to be provided by extorting money from people and giving it to “businesses” that live for extortion grants.
If it really is a business, then it doesn’t need a subsidy. If it needs a subsidy, it isn’t a business.
Steves says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:40 am
I hope they’re not running on a subsidy.
I sincerely hope that R&F have solved the problems of the catalyst. I also fervently hope they’ve built in safeguards to stop cascading hot spots. Seeing obviously, previously molten pits in high temperature materials makes me nervous.
Ahh, Anthony –you underestimate the flexibility of the Greens. If necessary (should this process prove out for large scale introduction), the new mantra will be that the evil industrialized world is stealing all the C02 from our common atmosphere, reducing crop yields, starving poor nations, and therefore we MUST transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the poor countries to make up for stealing the food from their mouths.
John F. Hultquist seems to have hit the nail on the head: “at what cost?” Also the troubling aspect of reversing the thermodynamics (i.e. in the manner of hydrolysis), and its attendant energy budget. Reactions like this like to go in one direction. Forcing them the other way requires endothermy.
John F. Hultquist says:
March 29, 2011 at 10:15 pm
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!
Answer – Move the facility to the Long Valley Caldera.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/co2.php
“How does this constitute “the greens worst nightmare,” wouldn’t it really be more like “the greens dream come true?””
Greens hate all energy. They hate humanity.
They will object to this on the same grounds they object to feeding the poor: bioengineering. FRANKENFUELS!!!!
Seems like a competitor to algae bio-fuel.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/14/biofuels-bonanza-exxon-venter-to-team-up-on-algae/
There’s a pilot plant near me being built that uses a single patented cyanobacteria to directly produce diesel from sunlight, municipal wastewater, and CO2. No ketone cracking required. Just crush the cynobacteria like so many grapes then separate the fuel from the suspended solids and water. The crushed bacterial corpses are excellent livestock feed high in protein.
Synthetic biology is the future not only for fuel production but also for producing just about everything. Once we’ve mastered the ability to program bacteria to cooperatively produce macroscopic structures out of carbon and carbon compounds the sky is the limit to what they can produce.
There will come a time, not far off, when CO2 regulation is turned around 180 degrees and there will be restrictions on how much you can remove from the atmosphere instead of how much you can add to the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 will shortly become one of the most valuable commodities in the world when it is being utilized to build durable goods that for all practical purposes permanently remove it from the atmosphere.
@Matt Taylor says:
March 29, 2011 at 9:32 pm
Deep greens really don’t care about AGW at all – it’s only a means to the end – the end being the government controlling what we do & how we do it. Take away AGW & you take away the means of control. That’s a nightmare for them. I am guessing the means will be gone (completely de-bunked & laying in the ash heap of failed hypotheses) long before this technology is commercialized.
Articles like this & like the sea water / salt water battery yesterday are very encouraging for our collective future – bright people will come up with creative ideas & provide the energy we need to power our society indefinitely.
1) If the process uses generically modified (GMO) bacteria then the WWF and Sierra Club will be opposed to it on the grounds that it is evil “Franken Oil.” ☺
2) Seems like just another slant on bio fuels … an advanced technology whose economics and carbon budget seem to be in question. Just how carbon efficient is the production of ethanol and bio-diesel from corn and canola?
3) As noted already … golly this would take one humongous bacterial “swamp” to supply significant quantities. Imagine bio-oil manufacturing plants large enough to supply (say) one million barrels of oil per day? Like THAT would not have a footprint.
I understand the desire to use oil for fuel, but there have been work for decades on algae that produce methane as a natural biproduct. The only problem is that its more expensive than just tapping existing natural gas supplies. This, at its core, is also a sunlight + CO2 produces stored energy formula. That’s what plants do. That’s why fossil fuels exist -plants combined CO2 + H2O + energy(sunlight) to produce carbohydrates that end up as hydrocarbons.
crosspatch says: March 29, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Maybe Earth has been making hydrocarbon fuels out of CO2 for a very long time.
The abiogenic theory seems to be gaining support and supporters 🙂
Practical issues with the “green” dream of using sunlight and CO2 to produce fuel. CO2 is a trace gas, very low concentration in the atmosphere (0.04%). Sunlight is also diffuse, and maxes out at ~520W/square meter at the equator, during the summer solstice. Extracting CO2 from coal/gas power plant exhaust makes a lot of sense, but insolation makes a pretty hard cap, even if you had 100% efficiency. They only way to get around that is supply energy from other sources, at which point your solution stops being “green”.
According to conspirators, the diligent young scientist should have disappeared already and the patent should had been bought by the big oil. Instead, trial is coming. Whom, oh whom to believe? What now?
Larry says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:24 am
“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.”
This is WAY wrong. Discounting clouds the average insolation on the earth’s surface is 250 watts per square meter. This is the average for all latitudes 24 hours per day. The Sahara desert being a low latitude would get more than the global cloudless average. So lets call it 350 w/m^2 for an entire 24 hour day. One square kilometer is one million square meters (10^6) times 10 million square kilometers (10^7) comes out to 3.5 times 10^15 watts or 3500 terrawatts at 100% efficiency. At even a paltry 1% efficiency after including distribution losses it would be 35 terrawatts of energy delivered to all points of consumption. Total global energy consumption is currently around 15 terrawatts. So the Sahara could realistically power the whole world twice over at current rate of consumption.
But that’s just not realistic because fuel production using synthetic biology is emminently decentralizable. There is sufficient sunlight, CO2, non-arable land, and non-potable water all over the continents. Moreover, since the fuels are liquid, energy storage is not a problem. Even in high latitudes enough fuel can be produced and tanked locally during the summer to last through the winter.
The pilot biosynthetic fuel plant being constructed near me (Leander, TX) by Joule Unlimited is expected to produce 15,000 gallons/acre/year of diesel at a price equivalent to that made from $30/bbl light sweet crude.
This plant has the added benefit of utilizing municipal wastewater high in nutrients that the city of Leander is wanting to dump into Lake Travis. I live on the shore of that lake and there’s a battle going on to squelch giving Leander a permit to dump more wastewater into the lake which lowers the water quality and fosters algae blooms. The algae at the pilot plant would instead be consuming those nutrients instead of wild algae in our pristine lake.
The same diesel producing cynabacteria that Joule has patented can produce just about any hydrocarbon fuel desired by plugging differnet genes into them so if you want ethanol or methane (natural gas) you can get that too.
This is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to the potential of synthetic biology. The larger opportunity is when we can program bacteria to produce macroscopic structures out of carbon and carbon compounds. Production of hydrocarbon molecules is just a baby step on the way to the full potential.
Keith Minto says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:37 am
philincalifornia says:
March 29, 2011 at 11:06 pm ,
Thanks, had not seen the term before. Do you have any more information?
OleA catalyzes the condensation of fatty acyl groups , but does not describe what it is exactly.
———————————–
I’m not sure how much level of detail you want to get into, and I have to leave right now.
Here’s another paper (that’s not behind a paywall) on the family of bacterial olefin-synthesizing genes and their gene products (the enzymes):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2893475/
It looks like they don’t quite have the exact mechanistic details pinned down yet but, I’m pretty sure that all the genes and their encoded protein sequences can be found in public databases if you’re interested at that level of detail.
Oh No!!! The bacteria will escape into the enviroment and begin consumming all CO2 from the atmosphere until it is devoid of CO2. Then, lacking CO2 the plants will die and then there will be no food and without CO2 there will be no greenhouse effect and the world will plunge into another ice age. and …and… and… ahhhh !!! We’re all gonna die! /sarc
@ur momisugly Matt Taylor and Citizenschallenge.
I take it you’ve read the climategate emails. I’m thinking of the one where Phil Jones expresses his wish that it had warmed more so that he could be proved right. Just saying.
Notwithstanding your protestations you might like to read them all – there is a summary here:
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate
The devil is always in the details, that’s what engineers are for. Every bit of affordable energy that does not come from oil in the ground helps.
The home of the commmunist is the environmental movement. People who think the free market is brutal and archaic and that central planning can give us an equal, compassionate society. For some reason, they don’t quite understand that human nature will always get in the way and that such a society requires a great deal if threat if violence to “work”. (it can never work well)
The beauty of free markets is that structure arises out of caos, and that structure adjusts very quickly to human needs and changes that are very difficult to predict.
Give us liberty!
My vote for the best comment on this thread so far:
crosspatch says:
March 29, 2011 at 9:13 pm
“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.
mrjohn says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:45 am
oh no, they are going to use up all the carbon dioxide and the planet will freeze! global cooooooling
If you are going to make a joke about this, and try to spoof the “greens” at least use something that has a semblance of truth. Fuel made from Algae and CO2 gets burned, and releases the CO2 back to the atmosphere rather quickly. In fact I haven’t read any criticism of the environmental impact of this idea from the “greens”. The problem is that as far as I know, it requires a huge costly plant which may not be economic. Anything is better than Alberta tar sands!
Sorry Matt, I realise that its annoying when posts tell you to trawl all over the place.
You said:
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.
Phil Jones said:
As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.
Add to this the blatant efforts to present the “right” picture, the many man hours spent trying to silence any dissenting opinion and the vile utterances of the execrable Mann about anyone who doesn’t agree with him and I think we can all agree that in fact it is you that is sorely mistaken.
All the best,
Richard B
It’s hard not to notice the numerous suggestions among the comments that we’ve “already done this years ago” or “here’s another alternative that’s already working”, etc.
Until we come to grips with the fact that the price mechanism (free market) is the most efficient process ever developed for making these sorts of choices/decisions, we will continue to waste tax dollars, all while those very tax dollars frustrate those who actually do have solutions, but are being buried by subsidized competitors.
Why does that process that produces the equivalent of $30 oil look so remarkable? Not because of the science, but because $30 oil has become a bargain. When oil was $20 a barrel, the science might still have been there, but no one was willing to invest in it.
Leave the markets alone to sort this stuff out and we’d all be far better off. The future would take care of itself (yes, environmental regs are still necessary) and we could quit worrying about the government jamming crap down our throats every day (crap financed with out own tax dollars.)
Incidentally, you can sort “good greens” (ones who actually want working solutions) out from “bad greens” (ones who want to run our lives for us because they “know” they’re right and we’re wrong) just by running the above comments by them. The “bad greens” have absolutely no interest in delegating the power they seek to some amorphous “free market” beast. The “good greens” are at least open to reason.
Good God! Imagine the carbon taxes they will have to pay on all of that CO2 consumption!
But, seriously, this technology is a brilliant example of the kind of innovation homo sapiens are capable of. When it comes to solving issues, such as fuel shortages, this sort of work should be our focus. It will be interesting to see the cost.
Once again, humans are trying to force the poorest of the poor to carry the load of their energy demands. Humans have NO RIGHT to exploit these poor, defenseless bacteria! I propose a class-action suit on behalf of bacteria rights. All proceeds, of course, will proceed to me. /sarc off
Chuck Dolci says:
March 29, 2011 at 10:52 pm
I’m with you on this one. Can anyone remember the promise of the “room temperature superconductor”?