Lab makes renewable diesel fuel from E. coli poop

Fossil fuels that keep our planet running -- oil, natural gas and coal -- were created from the decomposition of plants, plankton and other organic material over millions of years.

Today, scientists all over the globe are working to create fuels with the same properties but without that pesky 100 million-year wait. And " renewable petroleum" is now a reality, on a small scale, in some laboratories.

The biotech company LS9 Inc. is using single-celled bacteria to create an oil equivalent. These petroleum " production facilities" are so small, you can see them only under a microscope.

" We started in my garage two years ago, and we're producing barrels today, so things are moving pretty quickly, " said biochemist Stephen del Cardayre, LS9 vice president of research and development.

How does it work? A special type of genetically altered bacteria are fed plant material: basically, any type of sugar. They digest it and excrete the equivalent of diesel fuel.

Humans have used bacteria and yeast for centuries to do similar work, creating beer, moonshine and, more recently, ethanol. But scientists' recent strides in genetic engineering now allow them to control the end product.

" So these are bacteria that have been engineered to produce oil, " del Cardayre said. " They started off like regular lab bacteria that didn't produce oil, but we took genes from nature, we engineered them a bit [and] put them into this organism so that we can convert sugar to oil." Don't Miss * Cody's biofuel road trip across America

The company is focusing on diesel fuel, but the microbes can be " programmed" to make gasoline or jet fuel.

The bacteria used are a harmless form of E. coli. And the feedstock, or food for the microbes, can be any type of agricultural product, from sugar cane to waste such as wheat straw and wood chips. Choosing plants with no food value sidesteps one of the biggest criticisms of another synthetic fuel, corn ethanol, because critics say that corn should be used as food, not fuel.

It takes a lot of microbe poop to fill a gas tank, however. Biofuel experts say that processes like those used at LS9 are scientifically viable but that there's still a long way to go before they can address global energy needs.

" Scalability is really the critical issue, " said Robert McCormick, principal engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado. " If you've got something that you can make work in a test tube, that's good, but you've got to be able to make it work on a very large scale to have an impact on our petroleum imports."

But del Cardayre says his product has other benefits over traditional fossil fuels.

" What we've done is make the same molecules from renewable sources, so that it can go into the existing infrastructure, be made domestically and in an environmentally friendly way. That's the goal, " he said.

The LS9 product does not have the cancer-causing benzene that is in other fossil fuels and has far less sulphur, he said. LS9 President Bob Walsh says that using existing petroleum pipelines is crucial. Ethanol, for example, requires its own distribution system because it can corrode oil pipelines.

" You can't put ethanol in a pipeline, [and] even your car needs some adjustments to it; whereas the product we're making is going into the existing system, and that's a big difference, " he said.

LS9 expects to be in large-scale commercial production in three or four years. But del Cardayre is the first to admit that microscopic oil fields are not a silver bullet for the world's energy woes.

" I doubt we're going to completely eliminate our dependence on oil, but we'll certainly be able to supplement the amount of oil we need in the short term, " he said.

Although energy researchers are spending tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, McCormick believes that " just making more" is not enough.

" I think that the answer to reducing our petroleum-import problem and reducing the carbon emissions from transportation is really threefold, " he said. " It involves replacement fuels like biofuels, it involves using much more efficient vehicles than we use today, and it involves driving less."

One thing that McCormick and del Cardayre agree on is that energy research is a great place to be these days if you are a scientist.

" The fun of the challenge from the science perspective is that you do have farmers and biologists and entomologists, and biochemists and chemical engineers, and process engineers and business people and investors all working to solve this, and it ranges anywhere from a political issue to a technical issue, " del Cardayre said. advertisement

" Honestly, I couldn't think of a more exciting thing to work on as a scientist or technologist right now, " said McCormick, a chemical engineer. " Part of the excitement comes from the fact that this is such a complex problem, it can't be solved by a farmer or an ag expert, and it can't be solved by a chemical engineer or a chemist.

" We all have to pool our various talents and training and try to come up with a whole new system of producing energy, " he said. " And the current energy price environment has made literally everyone interested in replacements for petroleum."

The World Can Be Powered by Alternative Energy, Using Today's Technology, In 20-40 Years

A new study – co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi – analysing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy. But converting will be a massive undertaking on the scale of the moon landings. What is needed most is the societal and political will to make it happen.

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today – why wouldn't you do it?

According to a new study co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

" Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources, " said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. " It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 per cent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 per cent in their plan (70 per cent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 per cent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters – no more natural gas or coal – and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water and solar, and by 2050, all pre-existing energy production would be converted as well.

" We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure – for all purposes – with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years, " said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 per cent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

" When you actually account for all the costs to society – including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today, " Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide " base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

" The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle, " he said. " If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

" One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites, " said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

" With a system that is 100 per cent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a super grid, with long-distance transmission and really good management, " he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

" For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch, " Jacobson said. " Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 per cent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 per cent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 per cent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

" Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming, " Jacobson said. " The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 per cent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

" This really involves a large scale transformation, " he said. " It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

" But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies, " Jacobson said. " We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Ответьте на вопросы к тексту:

1. How were fossil fuels created?

2. How do " production facilities" work?

3. What renewable energy sources are used now?

4. What is the criticism of wind power?