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)
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.
“pat says:
March 27, 2013 at 1:05 am”
And lets not forget Combet commited 10% of the tax revenue to the UN Climate Change Fund at Copenhagen. I bet the, temporary, seat Australia bought from the UN Security Council will soon be filled with Australias first former female PM.
If one is going to comply with the laws of thermodynamics (and it’s really better if one does), this process needs an energy source. As is deploringly usual for press releases, this one doesn’t seem to specify what the source is although it sort of implies it might be heat differential. That’d be interesting and possibly useful as it’d raise the possibility of using heat from the earth’s core to generate fuels. But more likely, the source is sunlight where there are other alternatives whose current utility varies from sort of OK (solar PV in some situations) to dreadful (corn ethanol).
I think the Hydrogen thing is just a not necessarily critical process step in going from whatever (unspecified) hydrocarbons the bugs generate to something one can burn in an existing engine. Possibly not what one would do in a pilot plant if the process ever gets that far.
Environmentalist nightmare? Unproven assumption. Since the process is renewable, many may be relatively OK with it. It’d help a lot if the micro-organisms can be guaranteed to die quickly and universally if they get out of the fuel plant. If they are likely to be fruitful and multiply in the outside world, it probably isn’t just environmentalists that ought to be nervous about them.
Gras Albert’s provided link to Joule is a useful visit, as is this one http://www.cellaenergy.com/. I have followed both for quite some time. Interesting times ahead, for sure.
(Second try)
It’s been some time now that some guys in Alicante (Blue Petroleum or something) are producing oil from CO2 and algae. Somehow, nobody cares, maybe because it’s not being done in the US or UK, therefore doesn’t exist.
What global warming?….none for 16 years and overal planet cooling for 10,000 years since we passed the Holocene Climatic Optimum. And the trapped ray’s only exist as a threat in climate playstations, in reality factors such as CO2’s logarithmic ability to create heat and various negative feedbacks cancel this out.
Could someone who has Anthony’s email address let him know he’s being trashed here by Dr. John Abraham:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/real-pragmatism-for-real-climate-change-interview-with-dr-john-abraham.html
John says:
March 27, 2013 at 2:50 am
“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.
Well there are many ways of ‘fixing’ CO2 so it remains sequestered away such as in Limestone. The last thing we need is some idiot Malthusian to release into the wild a bacterium that greedily fixes CO2 – It could be one of the most efficient ways of ending all life on the planet. I have a suspicion that these researchers are unaware how close we are to the edge of that cliff.
Keith says:
An early April Fools day
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If we adopted this we would be Fools, but IMO it’s just a matter of time before some damn fool does us an irreversible favor and Hansen, Mann and Co. are doing their damnedest.
I am finished with the environmentalists and their feel good cheerleaders. All they have achieved is bad for nature, bad for the environment and bad for our economies, our freedom and future. The Dutch have high gas reserves: http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/site/pagina.php?id=1109 500,000 billion cubic meters (bcm). This is enough to cover the total current European gas consumption for more than a thousand years. Indeed it is two and a half times the world’s total proven natural gas reserves. EBN/TNO Report: http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/data/docs/Viewpoints/ebn2306.pdf
Norway has coal reserves of 3000 billion tons enough to feed the world 1 billion tons of coal for 3000 years. -norway/ Now the good old US has found a new technology for clean burning of coal, see: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/looping203.htm So there is absolutely no argument that tells us we are running out of fossil fuels. All those green zealots telling us to pee in a milk bottle to save water and shut off the city lights to save energy are crazy and in desperate need of mental treatment. The time for debate is over. These people want to have us under centralized control and rather see us dead than alive. I say let them educate themselves or get out of the way. The same goes for the political establishment and their cheerleaders. People are fed up with their poor performance, their dishonesty and the corruption.
Nice that we may have the opportunity to make fuel out of thin air but for the next thousand years we’re well served with the fossil fuels at our disposal. We need the jobs, we need the power generating capacity, we need the industry to lift the world out of poverty and create a positive view of the future. Those who claim humanity is destroying the planet and Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by Co2 are plain wrong. Mother nature tells us so.
I recieved a prompt and informative reply to an enquiry form Prof Adams confirming my intial comment above.
Greg – you are of course correct. We did indeed use hydrogen to drive CO2 fixation, as opposed to the light-driven reaction in plants. We are not creating more energy that we put in. In essence the second paragraph of what you quote states that (“the research team then used hydrogen gas to …. incorporate carbon dioxide”). Hopefully that helps.
Sincerely, Mike Adams.
We are not creating more energy that we put in.
This process does NOT and never will be an energy source.
Thanks to Prof Adams for the confirmation.
“The research team then used hydrogen gas”
And how do you make industrial size amounts of hydrogen? It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.
http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/hydrogen/basics/production.htm says in part:
Oh, Univ. of Georgia. This reads like an MIT press release, e.g.:
Uh, no. They better stick with “a host of other useful industrial products.”
Sorry, I’ve failed to publish the link about Norway having 3000 years of coal reserves: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/a-billion-tons-of-coal-a-year-for-3000-years-in-norway/
Ian W says:
March 27, 2013 at 4:30 am
I have a suspicion you haven’t considered the energy budget of this critter or the missing pieces needed to get it up from the bottom of the cliff.
There you go. A prime example of greenies driving human evolution. Every time humans discover a handy source of energy the greenies put the kibosh on it and humans, being what they are, find something better.
Ian W says: “The last thing we need is some idiot Malthusian to release into the wild a bacterium that greedily fixes CO2 ”
Malthusian or not, it doesn’t matter. Imagine that such a bacterium, nicely engineered, turned out to be very successful in the wild. It could proliferate and trigger the onset of the next glaciation.
The insanity of playing sorcerer’s apprentice should be obvious.
Anthony seems to think it funny to mock enviro’s concerns about this but I think it is a very good example of the danger of this kind of tinkering.
Luckily this one won’t get far because it needs a supply of free hydrogen, ie it’s pretty pointless anyway, but it illustrates the danger.
It is also an idea that some enviro’s might even accept if they thought it might save the planet from CO2-magedon.
Josualdo says:
March 27, 2013 at 4:23 am
“It’s been some time now that some guys in Alicante (Blue Petroleum or something) are producing oil from CO2 and algae. Somehow, nobody cares, maybe because it’s not being done in the US or UK, therefore doesn’t exist.”
The algae E. Braunii stores energy in oil droplets inside the cell; the composition is very similar to Diesel. So, producing oil with algae is happening in every pond all the time and is not remarkable. It’s the economics that count, and given that Alicante is in Spain in the EU, I would guess that what you mention is a EU subsidized project.
Their website contains only press releases from 2011. So probably the subsidies ran out and it got shut down.
http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/noticia/the-worlds-first-ecological-oil-is-made-using-profitable-industrial-processes/
The real problem is extracting the oil economically – you need to get rid of the water, and drying costs energy – and preventing the pipes or whatever you have the algae in from clogging so you can run a fast breeding cycle automatically. And preventing your algae culture from being polluted by species you don’t want.
Probably they never made it to that stage.
Patrick says:
March 27, 2013 at 3:40 am
“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.
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The US also has abundant energy reserves, especially of clean coal, but also of frackable petroleum & gas, ANWR oil & other fossil fuels that are economically recoverable but politically unavailable. Besides which, fourth generation nuclear technologies like traveling wave reactors are also not being pursued out of ill-founded fear. There is no scarcity of energy, only of will to exploit what nature & human ingenuity have provided.
I suppose a poll could be taken asking :
“Would you support the development of a bug that could possibly remove so much CO2 from the atmosphere that all life on Earth would perish or a carbon tax?”
Then it could be claimed that 97% of people support a carbon tax.
I don’t know enough about the science to comment intelligently but am a big Sci-Fi fan. Yah, that will work, the bugs multiply like Stargate Replicators and reduce all CO2 in the atmosphere so plants die, animals die, we die, and the planet loses the benign global temperature boost provided by the CO2 resulting in the Earth becoming a sterile snowball. Great idea!
You cannot create an excess of atmospheric CO2 by injecting only 3-4% of the stuff burning fossil fuels. We have yet to get anything like an excess given recent past volumes were far greater than today’s pitiful amount.
CO2 does NOT drive temperature/climate. Get used to it.
I’m sure nothing could go wrong with this idea.
Bob says:
March 27, 2013 at 2:01 am
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.
Ah, we have been making useful chemical products from microorganisms is MUCH older than that. Anyone want some flavored ethanol? I’ll have the Guiness flavor, please.
Basically, this would be the same as the algae tubes that various startups have tried attaching to coal plants over the years. The article doesn’t mention whether or not this organism requires light for its process that I can see. The wild version obviously doesn’t.
The previous attempts failed because wild algae suck at producing energy (they don’t waste energy producing the sugars or oils that the modified algae produce, so they easily out compete them) but excel at infiltrating equipment. If this bug can work in an environment that wild algae don’t like (in the dark, acid, high temp), then it has a chance of being useful.
Robert M says:
March 27, 2013 at 12:14 am
3. Atmospheric CO2 is needed for all life on the planet, why don’t we slow down and consider what might happen if the research turns out to be really successful. This sounds like a bad movie. Mankind creates a superbug that eats all of the CO2. All plant life on the planet succumbs within a year, and the planet dies. Environmentalists are thrilled!
Looks like a lot of us had that or a similar thought.
Yeah, let’s invent a frankencritter that could have a leg up on plant life. If it replicates it could suck CO2 down under 150ppm killing all the plants taking us with them.