DYFI
Active member
Or so it seems you need alot of bugs to accomplish this mighty task.
http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2495
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’.
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says
Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late
afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture,
right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of
business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs –
very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste
such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They
excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science
fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could,
theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to
us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month
before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable
petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or
near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities
such as software and networking and embarked instead on an
extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia
obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this
industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of
trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example,
for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that
is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0”
will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the
carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by
the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob
Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year
career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in
London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow
a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a
man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial
estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of
start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the
Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal
explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of
a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or
nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by
custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process
would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he
says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as
petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the
fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock,
as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it
can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to
produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the
much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as
the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City.
Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according
to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw
in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the
same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the
energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated
because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre
fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next
to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes.
It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of
one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143
million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205
square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in
laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the
same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010
and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a
commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if
LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably
cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion
in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re
putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire
universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two
children, and climate change is something that they are going to face.
The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a
collective responsibility to do this.”
http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2495
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’.
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says
Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late
afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture,
right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of
business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs –
very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste
such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They
excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science
fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could,
theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to
us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month
before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable
petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or
near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities
such as software and networking and embarked instead on an
extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia
obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this
industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of
trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example,
for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that
is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0”
will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the
carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by
the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob
Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year
career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in
London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow
a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a
man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial
estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of
start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the
Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal
explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of
a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or
nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by
custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process
would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he
says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as
petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the
fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock,
as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it
can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to
produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the
much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as
the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City.
Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according
to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw
in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the
same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the
energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated
because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre
fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next
to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes.
It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of
one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143
million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205
square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in
laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the
same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010
and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a
commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if
LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably
cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion
in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re
putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire
universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two
children, and climate change is something that they are going to face.
The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a
collective responsibility to do this.”
