11–19 of 19 posts
Okay, Awesome. Now find something else that will eat up the carbon being released from burning that diesel fuel.
Given that liquid hydrocarbon fuels aren't going away anytime soon (or possibly ever) finding non-fossil sources for them like this is pretty important.
I need some coffee.
Okay, Awesome. Now find something else that will eat up the carbon being released from burning that diesel fuel.
The bacteria will be fed with sugars from crops that pulled carbon out of the air. The whole cycle would produce energy from sunlight without netting out any carbon release. Given that liquid hydrocarbon fuels aren't going away anytime soon (or possibly ever) finding non-fossil sources for them like this is pretty important.
If these processes ever go into production and create cheap fuel, the world will really change. Presumably it will stop oil extraction industries from the top down, i.e. high cost producers first. So tar sands, shale oil and deep water sub-salt are the first to go (Canada, offshore Brazil, ...). Even though Saudi Arabia is the lowest cost producer, it gives a lot of the profits away to the people, in free health serv…
These bacterias still need to be fed with sugar. Like corn oil it means you're diverting arable land to produce that. I'm not sure if it's really cheaper to produce in the end.
Did anyone else looking at the front page of HN jump to the conclusion that if this strain or similar of E. coli could be developed to live of human faeces India could become a future bio-fuel giant
If these processes ever go into production and create cheap fuel, the world will really change. Presumably it will stop oil extraction industries from the top down, i.e. high cost producers first. So tar sands, shale oil and deep water sub-salt are the first to go (Canada, offshore Brazil, ...). Even though Saudi Arabia is the lowest cost producer, it gives a lot of the profits away to the people, in free health serv…
We may gain some use from biofuels, but it will be a small fraction of what we've been used to.
Did anyone else looking at the front page of HN jump to the conclusion that if this strain or similar of E. coli could be developed to live of human faeces India could become a future bio-fuel giant
-Graphene
-AIDS vaccine
-Malaria vaccine
-Fusion reactors
Did anyone else looking at the front page of HN jump to the conclusion that if this strain or similar of E. coli could be developed to live of human faeces India could become a future bio-fuel giant
1.3 billion Indians generating 0.75 kg feces each per day, comprised of 3.8% carbohydrate, containing 4 kcal/g. Assume that the biofuel process is typical of other trophic levels, and roughly 10% efficient.
Fecal energy content is 148,200,000,000 kcal, or 6.2048376e+14 joule, or 172,357 MWh.
One tenth of that is 17,000 MWh.
Diesel fuel has an energy densigy of 46.2 MJ/kg, or about 0.0128 KWh/kg.
17,000 MWh is 1,324,675 kg of diesel. At 0.832 kg/l, that's 1,592,157 liters. OK, that's a couple orders of magnitude higher than I'd anticipated.
It's about 0.0012 liters per person per day. At 5 liters/100km (roughly 50 MPG), it's enough fuel to carry one person 0.026 km.
Used in a 40-seat bus, at half the fuel efficiency (that's a very efficient bus, or there are more than 40 people on it, this is, after all, India), it would be good for about 0.5 km of commute.
The world ain't gonna run on poop. At least not human poop alone. And even if you could boost the feedstock by some reasonable multiple (say, 2-16x) by including livestock waste, the numbers don't change enough to make it effective except for very, very heavily overloaded short-haul mass transit.
References: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_feces_does_one_person_pro... http://www.clinchem.org/content/44/7/1540.full http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities...