Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
extremetech.com
Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#2tl;dr:carbon-neutral conversion of CO2 to fuel and back again. Essentially a chemical battery.
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#3tl;dr:carbon-neutral conversion of CO2 to fuel and back again. Essentially a chemical battery.
Well, liquid fuel, not chemical -- and its power isn't a function of the size of its electrodes.
More like a 'liquid fuel energy storage device', I guess.
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#4(http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567)
{There have been quite a few extremetech articles recently. Any estimate of how much money they're making from the ads?}
EDIT: Thanks debacle!
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#5What's wonderful about the two butanols they are making is that they are near drop-in replacements for gasoline. If this scales up, this would make an excellent alternative to expensive fuel deliveries for isolated places.
Yet another encouraging bridge between the grid and the internal combustion engine.
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#6( http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567 ) {There have been quite a few extremetech articles recently. Any estimate of how much money they're making from the ads?} EDIT: Thanks debacle!
Your link has a bit of trailing gunk:
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#7Not only a nifty idea for fuel, but a way to deal with our ant overpopulation! As with other biofuels, it may have the downside of increasing the price of formic acid as a foodstuff.
And if you've never tried ants over shoe-string potatoes, you should -- they add a delicious, lemony flavor! Just remember to check your teeth for ant-legs after dinner. :)
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#8Not only a nifty idea for fuel, but a way to deal with our ant overpopulation! As with other biofuels, it may have the downside of increasing the price of formic acid as a foodstuff. And if you've never tried ants over shoe-string potatoes, you should -- they add a delicious, lemony flavor! Just remember to check your teeth for ant-legs after dinner. :)
Reminds me of a TED talk[0], about how we'll probably have to eat a lot of lower-trophic-level food in the next few decades, as the population of Earth increases -- stuff like crickets, and other insects.
[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.ht...
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#9Unfortunately The Paper [1] is closed source. I can't find much information; no comparison with existing, chemical synfuels processes (like methanol via syngas [CO]).
There's a serious problem with the general idea: "clean" CO2 is hard to get. You can get concentrated (>10%) CO2 streams from a power plant, which could work for synfuels, but ultimately that's still transferring fossil carbon into the air (if more efficiently). The "nice" idea is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere (I think they are implying this?); this gives you a carbon-neutral cycle (CO2 => fuel => CO2). This is difficult because CO2 in the air is so dilute -- 0.04% vol., or 0.8 grams/meter^3.
Can you get CO2 from the air? There's research in this; the APS assessment [2] thinks it could be done at around $600-800/tCO2, which translates to e.g. $7/gallon gas equivalent of methanol, just for the carbon. The process uses an inorganic base (NaOH) to scrub CO2, so maybe you'd think you could genetically-engineer superbacteria to do better. But the absorbent is not the bottleneck -- it's the extreme volume and flow of air that needs to be brought to the absorbent, over an insanely large surface area. The scale is visualized in [2] figure 1.2 (http://i.imgur.com/Y0D2f.png): a very small, 10^6 ton CO2/year capture plant is designed as a 1km * 1km grid of rows of giant, sucking fans. And the NaOH process isn't particularly inefficient -- it captures 50% of the CO2 in air.
Some more about atmosperic CO2 capture from David Keith [3] and his startup [4]; this was featured in the Economist this month [5]. Wikipedia is a starting point for synfuels in general [6]; George Olah advocates a methanol/dimethyl ether economy using CO2 recycled from air [7].
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.abstract
[2] http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/dac11.cfm
[3] http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/AirCapture.html
[4] http://www.carbonengineering.com/
[5] http://www.economist.com/node/21550241
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel
[7] http://wiki.ornl.gov/sites/carboncapture/Shared%20Documents/...
Re: Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel
#10Unfortunately The Paper [1] is closed source. I can't find much information; no comparison with existing, chemical synfuels processes (like methanol via syngas [CO]). There's a serious problem with the general idea: "clean" CO2 is hard to get. You can get concentrated (>10%) CO2 streams from a power plant, which could work for synfuels, but ultimately that's still transferring fossil carbon into the air (if more effi…
Wow, awesome insight -- thanks. I'll put a link to your comment in the original story :)