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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markx – I won’t miss diddly. If the research truly has merit, someone somewhere will publish the results of the research or study without the obligatory BS.
This could have an even greater benefit for humanity if it finally can make people stop smoking. Accidentally inhale one of those bugs and then light up — WHOOSH!!!!!!
Nick Stokes says: “Reducing CO2 takes a lot of energy. Plants get that from sunlight, but it takes chlorophyll and a lot of leaves. And these bugs?”
Maybe we should “leave” them alone.
Relax. It’s just one study and one species. Lots of species are being looked into, and lots of companies and university departments are working on them. When somebody makes 100 kilos per week at a computable price, that will be news.
@markx:
A species can have a large response to selection in 30 generations. (That’s a more or less consistent number across all species, per the genetics I had at University 40 years back… don’t know if times have changed that metric for selective pressure) So if we start selecting now for faster growth and maturity, we could have a faster Diesel Tree in just 300 to 600 years…
Or GMO the sucker and be done in 10 to 20 years…
The bottom line is that the entire metabolic pathway is a ‘done deal’ and just needs tweaking the tree or moving to another species… Invention not required.
FWIW, fast growth algae in nitrogen deficient environments pack away solar energy for later use (when they hope nitrogen will show up and allow cell division) as oil. Up to 50% by weight. They can yield 10 x as much per acre or hectare as woody / grassy plants. (It’s a bit hard to grow them in open raceways – think cheap – as the native algae tend to blow in and take over. Easy to grow them in sealed glass or plastic tubes – think expensive – though. But it’s been done by many folks and the oil used to make biodiesel.)
Plants know what to do… we just need to find how to make them comfortable. More CO2 helps 😉
klem says:
March 27, 2013 at 8:36 am
…Um, shouldn’t the creators of this bug create predator for it as well?
XXXXXXXXXXX
This hints at my salient question: Are they tasty?
@Don K:
We don’t notice a 6 all that much. You notice, but don’t change the lunch plans. At a 7 (10x more energy and damage) we are down for a week and lose circa 100 lives. An 8? That’s 100 x the size of a 6. So you would have to trigger 100 quakes of size 6 or one every single year for your ‘century later’ avoidance of an 8 event. I think folks would get tired of a ‘6 size a year’ plan…
FWIW, that same 6 size event, not on our soft and ‘adapted to slip’ rocks, but somewhere like Oklahoma with brittle mid-continent rocks, feels like a lot more and does more damage. I don’t know exactly why and that “softer vs brittle” is just how it has been described by others, so I’m just parroting it here, not endorsing it… but the effect is real. (My theory is that our fault is submerged under the N.Atlantic plate where the old spreading zone subducted, so gets dampened by a discontinuity zone of all the sediments and ‘junk’ that got scraped into a pile to make the coastal range hills… but ask a real geologist. I just like surfing the P wave 😉
So I think you need your ‘example’ to be 6 vs 7 rather than vs 8… BTW, we’ve had an 8.6 and we could have a 9 somewhere between L.A. and Seattle; so that would be 1000 quakes of 6 size. Releasing the energy ‘slowly’ is, er, hard to do; with that much energy to dump.
Pyrococcus furiosus has a doubling time of just 37 minutes and reproduces extremely fast. If the reverse engineered strain which eats CO2 rather than produces CO2 get out into the air, they can quickly wipe out CO2 and induce planet wide extinction.
Gee, I wonder why there are no ET civilizations around. I sure hope humankind doesn’t end up killing off itself and all life on Earth through insane genetic engineering with microbes like what’s happening now.
Gail Combs says (March 27, 2013 at 8:07 am): “As an agricultural economist you want to REDUCE CO2 when C3 plants are near starvation levels???”
I think agricultural economist meant “reduce CO2” in the chemical sense, as in replacing the oxygen with hydrogen. He was wondering where the process gets the input energy.
You’re right, of course, that we could use some more CO2 in the atmosphere, both for our friends the plants and hopefully some more winter/night/northern warming.
One thing you DO NOT want to mess with is microbes.
Set your minds at ease. Starting today, this technology will be at least ten years into the future. Next year, or five years from now, it’ll still be ten years into the future. Once the scientists get their cars and mortgages paid off and their offspring through college they’ll retire and someone else will get a bright idea that won’t go anywhere.
Xi Gua says (March 27, 2013 at 12:55 pm): “I sure hope humankind doesn’t end up killing off itself and all life on Earth through insane genetic engineering with microbes like what’s happening now.”
Not to worry, everybody. The Earth is already overrun with CO2-gobbling organisms, and it all seems to have worked out pretty well.
“Gee, I wonder why there are no ET civilizations around.”
They probably listened to their own rabid environmentalists and greened themselves into extinction. 🙂
Pyrococcus furiosus grows where temperature is around 100 C. Good luck with obtaining the heat energy to grow these microbes at industrial scales.
I can’t get past the bit where these things escape, multiply exponentially and wipe out all life on the face of planet Earth.
This is a project that should be killed stone dead.
Meanwhile, there are real microscopic problems for mankind: smut, scab, rust, blast, blight, bunt, wilt, mildew and the rest, along with malaria and other diseases carried by vectors. These need to be declared as pollutants, which if anyone acts to re-introduce or multiply, through irresponsible policies, must be prosecutable through plain and just laws.
Once more: the real pollutants on this earth are smut, scab, rust, blast, blight, bunt, wilt, mildew and the rest, along with malaria and other diseases carried by vectors. These have been brought under control through chemical fertilizers, creation of new cultivars, and through pesticides, but are not guaranteed to remain under control without heightened vigilance.
While I differ with the evaluation of “excess CO2 in the atmosphere” it is good to see genetic engineering aimed at providing fuel. That is one area that has been ignored in the rush to control the world’s seed crops but a hundred times more lucrative.
Confinement or having the critters die if exposed to oxygen or nitrogen in normal atmospheric quantities or any normal temp (as seems to be the case) would be a nice safeguard. Now will it be cost competitive with natural gas? Unsubsidized of course. I could see this working if put next to a coal or other CO2 emitting plant. Excess heat, CO2 and bugs = fuel.
On a more abstract scale, this is extremely dangerous. We do NOT want the industrial scale extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. While yes, we have put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, it is ephemeral. If we were to migrate to a mainly nuclear/electric economy, that CO2 would start coming out of the atmosphere fairly quickly.
The reason it is dangerous is that CO2 depletion will ultimately be the cause of the demise of life on Earth long before the sun gets too hot or the seas evaporate into space. As CO2 is scrubbed out of the atmosphere by natural forces and the Earth cools and plate tectonics and volcanic activity slows down, CO2 content of the atmosphere falls. We were already dangerously low in CO2 content at the end of the last interglacial to the point where many species were having trouble being productive enough to survive. As the CO2 content drops, the plants become less productive and the animals that survive on the plants become less productive until they are gone.
Adding more CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere has given us a little longer on this planet. At the rate of CO2 depletion we have seen over the past few million years, I had given animal life only about 100-200 million more years of life on the planet provided we don’t have something come along that injects a large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
So what source of energy does this pico-octopus use to make hydrocarbon fuels out of CO2, and presumably water; both miraculously emitted in about the right proportions by our automobiles ?
Not to worry that CO2 eating bugs will destroy the world. This group at UGA is just spending grant money and learning something about genetic engineering. For producing fuel from CO2, Joule Unlimited is way, way, ahead of them
Apparently Joule’s “bugs,” which produce ethanol and a hydrocarbon that can be blended with diesel fuel from sunlight and CO2, really do work. They commissioned their demonstration plant in Hobbs, N.M. last September. See:
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/news/2012/joule-commissions-first-sunsprings-plant-demonstrate-commercial-readiness
Their demonstration plant in Hobbs is apparently a scale-up of their pilot plant in Leander, TX. I haven’t found anything thing that says the Hobbs plant has produced any fuel, but it would appear that any problems they have are of an engineering nature. The “bugs” do what they are supposed to do.
Joule talks about a yield of 10,000 gallons/acre per year. So how much land would take to replace the just the low-sulfur diesel market? According to DOE, 52,920,000,000 gallons of low-sulfur diesel were supplied to the US market in 2012. See:
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_a.htm
At 10,000 gallons an acre, it would take 826, 602 SQUARE MILES to produce this amount of diesel. While New Mexico has lot of empty land, its total area is only 121, 412 sq. miles. So it would take a land area over 6 times the size of New Mexico to supply the diesel used in US in 2012.
Obviously, this technology is not going to supply a large part of the market..
“The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism”
Indeed. And where is hydrogen coming from? Furthermore, if they already have hydrogen (nothing to see here move along), why feed it to pyrococcus furiosus to get a messy mixture of organic molecules instead of using it directly as feedstock to any number of well known and quite specific chemical processes?
I saw “University of Georgia” and immediately thought, “This outta be good.” Then I started reading and laughed out loud – They are proud and have discovered TREES! Alert the media! We’ve been making fuel and polymers from trees for decades. Wonderhow long it will take before they realize they don’t have to add hydrogen…..
-GT ChE
Why is a nightmare? The same CO2 that is sucked out of the atmosphere is put right back in when the fuel is exhausted. It’s CO2 neutral, eviros would love that.
Jake2 says:
March 27, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Why is a nightmare? …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Because if it works then the underlying the real objectives of the CAGW scam go down the tubes. That is the real reason the USA and EU are ignoring Thorium Nuclear and giving it away to China and India.
The first objective of the CAGW scam is carbon trading for the bankers and a carbon tax for the politicians.
The second objective is to push everyone into cities and take away all transportation. It is called Agenda 21. See: Video or link and link THIS is the ‘Socialist Utopia’ although liberals like Rosa Koire are seeing it for what it really is, slavery/neo-feudalism/communitarianism/corporatism disguised as socialism.
policycritic says:
March 27, 2013 at 4:26 am
Thanks for the link. Everyone here should read the best review of Mr. Watt’s work I’ve seen.
By the way; props Mr. Watts, on the great PV system. If 15% of folks followed your example, we wouldn’t need a “climate skeptic” website. WUWT could become a DIY blog. Good job. JP