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Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles.
People need to get how diffuse solar energy is.
(Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
Unfortunately 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…
The construction costs would be incredible, the only solution would be some sort of von-Neumann type nano-machines that could manufacture copies of themselves and gradually 'seed' the system over a large landmass.
Liquid fuel would be easily tapped from the trunk of these structures - although persuading people to consume a high colorific value syrup type liquid produced by bacteria on their pancakes could be tricky (unless they were Canadian)
Or, you know, you could just use the electricity to convert water to hydrogen (itself a usable fuel). How much of the energy required for this reaction is actually coming from the carbon / atmosphere? I would guess very little.
There are all sorts of storage media under development to get around this hydrogen volumetric density problem, but none are much closer to market than this butanol project. At the very least, an existing vehicle fleet would require significant engine modifications to run on hydrogen (not to mention fuel storage and delivery system modifications).
In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine. Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles. People need to get how diffuse solar energy is. (Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
Of course, at that point, you don't need to futz with bacteria and internal combustion, when batteries store and release that energy much more efficiently.
In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine. Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles. People need to get how diffuse solar energy is. (Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
Suppose you have about 1 square meter of solar cells on the roof of your car. From Wikipedia, a typical solar PV installation in the US or Europe gets 1kWh/sqm/day (depending on latitude, of course). How far will 1kWh take you? Let's see, gasoline contains about 37 kWh/gal (US), which at 40mpg is a little over 1 mile/kWh.
So if your electricity-to-fuel conversion process is 50% efficient, you'll get about half a mile on a day's charge.
Can I get infected with this bacteria? If I get it in my lungs will it poison me with biofuel?
In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine. Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles. People need to get how diffuse solar energy is. (Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
Good point, but it does end up depending on the vehicle. A 6 m^2 15% efficient array parked outside in a desert climate could generate 5.4kWh a day and over 37kWh a week. GM's EV-1 had efficiencies of over 6mi/kWh. As such, a vehicle could be built that could go 32 miles a day off sunlight alone, using ho-hum $1/W solar cells and without any tracking. Of course, at that point, you don't need to futz with bacteria and…
None of this, I hasten to add, is to impugn the idea of using bacteria to fix CO2. It's just that the idea of doing it in your car, driven by solar cells on the roof, is silly. The numbers just don't pencil out.
(And as you point out, it's doubly silly since you would use batteries anyway.)
In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine. Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles. People need to get how diffuse solar energy is. (Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)
The only impact this might possibly have on automobile design would be to try to recuperate the carbon from the exhaust using some of the power generated from the combustion to convert the exhaust CO2 into formic acid, to be exchanged for fuel in the next refueling. My guess is it's not going to pay to do that though.