From the University of Georgia:
UGA discovery may allow scientists to make fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere
![Pyrococcus-1[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/pyrococcus-11.jpg?w=300&resize=300%2C225)
Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. Their discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air that is responsible for trapping the sun’s rays and raising global temperatures.
“Basically, what we have done is create a microorganism that does with carbon dioxide exactly what plants do-absorb it and generate something useful,” said Michael Adams, member of UGA’s Bioenergy Systems Research Institute, Georgia Power professor of biotechnology and Distinguished Research Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
During the process of photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy, much like humans burn calories from food.
These sugars can be fermented into fuels like ethanol, but it has proven extraordinarily difficult to efficiently extract the sugars, which are locked away inside the plant’s complex cell walls.
“What this discovery means is that we can remove plants as the middleman,” said Adams, who is co-author of the study detailing their results published March 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. “We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass.”
The process is made possible by a unique microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or “rushing fireball,” which thrives by feeding on carbohydrates in the super-heated ocean waters near geothermal vents. By manipulating the organism’s genetic material, Adams and his colleagues created a kind of P. furiosus that is capable of feeding at much lower temperatures on carbon dioxide.
The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism that incorporates carbon dioxide into 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a common industrial chemical used to make acrylics and many other products.
With other genetic manipulations of this new strain of P. furiosus, Adams and his colleagues could create a version that generates a host of other useful industrial products, including fuel, from carbon dioxide.
When the fuel created through the P. furiosus process is burned, it releases the same amount of carbon dioxide used to create it, effectively making it carbon neutral, and a much cleaner alternative to gasoline, coal and oil.
“This is an important first step that has great promise as an efficient and cost-effective method of producing fuels,” Adams said. “In the future we will refine the process and begin testing it on larger scales.”
The research was supported by the Department of Energy as part of the Electrofuels Program of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy under Grant DE-AR0000081.
UGA Bioenergy Systems Research Institute
The Bioenergy Systems Research Institute at the University of Georgia supports alternative energy, fuel and materials production through the conversion of biomass. The institute encourages and facilitates research projects in bioenergy that pool UGA’s strengths in forestry, environmental science and engineering with carbohydrate science, genetics and microbiology. The institute also supports education and training of scientists as well as outreach projects designed to involve public and private stakeholders in the development of next-generation bioenergy technologies. For more information about the institute, see bioenergy.ovpr.uga.edu.
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“Peer reviewer #1: “Okay, this paper is really thin. But if we put some “Global Warming” into it somewhere, it will fly like an eagle!”
Peer reviewer #2: “Yup!”
@Jeez
Already available, and natural too. Called the “Diesel Tree” or “Kerosene Tree”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaifera_langsdorffii
So 10k litres / hectare / year of ‘biodiesel’… About $10,000 of liquid fuel. Call it $4,000 / acre. Plus, eventually, the wood.
I thought this had already been done, tried and tested on an industrial scale, they call the fuel woodchip
DN says:
March 27, 2013 at 12:12 am
So let me get this straight…people have discovered how to create an artificial competitor to photosynthetic plants?
That was the first thing that struck me. Less Co2=reduced carbon cycle=less Co2=reduced carbon cycle=less Co2. . . . .
Or did I miss something obvious?
Genetically modified bacteria to compete for food with the plants that feed us. Well, well. Maybe I am an idiot, but that does not seem like such a clever idea on the face of it. Kinda make me want to support the wind farms.
Using microorganisms to make useful chemical products is not new, erythromycin by fermentation, for example. This doesn’t seem like a big stretch although they are not making alkanes from this modification. A source of hydrogen does seem to somewhat limit its utility.
E.M.Smith says: March 27, 2013 at 1:32 am
Already available, and natural too. Called the “Diesel Tree” or “Kerosene Tree”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaifera_langsdorffii
It produces a large amount of terpene hydrocarbons in its wood and leaves. One tree can produce 30 to 53 liters of hydrocarbons per year, en masse producing 10,000 – 12,000 litres/hectare/year which is incredibly high.
Those are massive yields .. I think palm oil is about 3.6 tonnes (3,600 litres approx) per Ha per years.
“The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism …”
As always the question is where does the energy come from to make the “fuel”? There a plenty of was to make something combustible from CO2 but they all require energy input. It’s basic law of physics, no free lunch.
So unless this microbe is photosynthesising (which it won’t be deep in a volanic ocean vent) this process requires energy input and will NOT provide an energy source.
This kind of thing may be useful once we’ve exhausted feedstock for making plastics etc but it will not be an energy source.
This press realease is just more CO2 based spin for anything anyone does.
E.M.Smith says: March 27, 2013 at 1:32 am
Already available, and natural too. Called the “Diesel Tree” or “Kerosene Tree”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaifera_langsdorffii
It produces a large amount of terpene hydrocarbons in its wood and leaves. One tree can produce 30 to 53 liters of hydrocarbons per year, en masse producing 10,000 – 12,000 litres/hectare/year which is incredibly high.
Ah … here’s the rub … 15 to 20 years to first harvest (vs a maximum of 7 years to first harvest for oil palm, and some varieties are now down to 4 years) … although they will have palms well beaten on longevity…..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-03-25/qld-farmers-invest-in-diesel-producing-trees/1082738
The energy source to reduce CO2 is the crucial question. Could it work like this?
1. Nuclear energy produces H2 from seawater
2. H2 and CO2 are synthesized into some carbohydrate …
Guys, please discuss this more seriously. We will need a lot of technology to overcome energy scarcity.
FFS.. leave the CO2 in the atmosphere where it belongs.
The VERY LAST thing the Earth needs is to lower the atmospheric CO2 concentration
“Basically, what we have done is create a microorganism that does with carbon dioxide exactly what plants do-absorb it and generate something useful,”
Why don’t we just plant more plants?
Sounds a lot like what trees do, excepting there’s no shade or places for the birds to nest.
Disregard my latest post, wrong blog
“Excess carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere…”
Whoa-up right there. Excess? This release hasn’t even left the gate and it’s already going to race down the wrong track.
If we gave plants the vote, I’m pretty sure they’d vote for a higher level than is currently present. Take a poll of any commercial greenhouse plant and see what they say.
It is also the NWO’s nightmare, they merely use the environmentalists as foot soldiers in the CO2 AGW scare campaign.
What would be funny is if this bug actually worked, got out of control, proliferated, and ate up all the Earth’s CO2, ending life on the planet. 🙂
This needs funding – and lots of it
“The VERY LAST thing the Earth needs is to lower the atmospheric CO2 concentration”
Once the fuel has been produce it will be burned. This releases the CO2 back into the atmosphere. The whole process would have no net affect on the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
agricultural economist, nobody it taking it seriously as the press release is complete garbage.
If scientists want the public to understand there work, then they need to censor the idiots who write these releases, and instead output something beleivable.
The arcticle claims that the bugs ‘eat’ CO2. Clearly rubbish, so something else is really going on, but they’ve not explained what.
The claim that sugars cannot easily be extracted from plants seems to overturn 10,000 years of farming practise, so why make this absurd claim?
There’s no point on objecting the the AGW angle, as that’s always present, so just ignore it. But what it the energy source for these bugs? That’s the vital missing data.
Just recently watched a scientific explanation of the orange coloured atmosphere on the moon Titan. It would seem that the sun reacts with CO2 and hydrogen to form long chain carbohydrates, thus it appears to be swimming in fuel. No dinosaurs have been noticed, perhaps our oil is a natural process, and not fossil.
Not new and not sensible, Joule Unlimited’s patents cover micro organisms which ‘grow’ ethanol or diesel in a continuous, carbon neutral process using waste water, industrial waste CO2 and sunlight on non arable ground.
They have commissioned a pilot industrial sized plant to prove yields of 15,000 litres an acre at costs as low as $0.17 a litre, transport future is NOT electric
“The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism that incorporates carbon dioxide into 3-hydroxypropionic acid.”
It’s well-known scientific fact that hydrogen grows in pressure bottles.
agricultural economist @ur momisugly March 27, 2013 at 2:16 am
Los Alamos worked out one of the synfuel process using nuclear called Green Freedom, et al, as described here:
http://www.lanl.gov/newsroom/news-releases/2008/February/02.12.synthetic-fuel.php
they have a paper on the process.
What’s new, here, is using microbes in the method. Of course synfuels have been around a long, long time (as in Germany post WW1). All of the current methods do scale. The real issue is whether the little beastie bugs can and their cost.
All in all, if you were going to spend billions, betting future of the species on which energy path to develop, you’d pick thorium. It’s dirt cheap, it’s just about everywhere, it scales and has essentially no waste. And it can be used to make hydrocarbons, just like Los Alamos but with a different reactor. For the CO2 crackheads, they can build them and freeze the air to make dry ice (frozen CO2) and work on sending it on rockets into the Sun or somewhere. Keep the busy and quiet.
Point is there’s so many ways to make synfuels we hardly need to spend public funds on it versus doing something worthwhile like keeping the White House open and Joe Biden in Paris. However, it would be great to terraform some planet.
“agricultural economist says:
March 27, 2013 at 2:16 am”
Energy scarcity, really? Given we can make liquid fuels from coal, given the UK has at least 300 years of known reserves, given Australia has 400-500 years of known reserves, I don’t see scarcity at all. The scaricty I do see is in the sense to use these resources to the betterment of humanity.
This seems to be to be yet another call for funding to play without actually producing anything.