The world is saved... yay! And the "Oil 2.0" that comes out is actually carbon negative! And it will ost about $50/barrel.

The main problem is one of scale. Read below.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece

Quote :

"Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol 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.” Power points — Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources — Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs — The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels "

6/20/2008 10:59:52 AM

how much plant matter does this take? would we just start destroying our environment in other ways?

and i fail to see how it's eating "waste". if it could eat our shit and produce crude, THAT would be something.

[Edited on June 20, 2008 at 11:08 AM. Reason : .]

6/20/2008 11:06:57 AM

^scraps mr. boles, scraps.

consider it a mr. fusion of single celled organisms.

6/20/2008 11:15:33 AM

If this works, that'll be great. However, there are always a few concerns. For one thing, if this thing escapes and proves adaptable to our natural environment, then it could go from environmental savior to environmental scourge (remember the Cuyahoga). Also, we have to be careful about feedstock: if all we have to feed it is some yard clippings, hog waste, and Christmas trees, then great, but if it turns out that grinding up trees from national parks and rain forests is the most cost effective feed...

Still, I'm always open to new options and am looking forward to seeing how the demo plant turns out.

6/20/2008 11:16:25 AM

Algae biofuels stand a good chance of being the future of oil production and a very large part of the energy sector, as I've been recently relentlessly posting about.

But this article you posted is complete crap. They will not produce $50 / barrel oil, this is wildly optimistic beyond the best funded and most credible algae biofuel startups that actually have demo plants running. Basically, someone made the mistake of what one researcher said and made a fancy article about it.

whoo hoo.

[Edited on June 20, 2008 at 11:45 AM. Reason : ]

6/20/2008 11:44:48 AM

you must be an industry expert and an insider in this company to know that those prices aren't real. I mean, you obviously have access to information we do not, so we'll take your word for it.

6/20/2008 11:46:21 AM

I have access to the internet. The only difference between us is how much we've read.

Claims are cheap.

6/20/2008 11:53:20 AM

Quote :

"if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel."

This is like one of those waste treatment plants that turns trash into oil, but only if you have the perfect blend of carbon-rich trash and you can get it for free.*

The biggest problem will ultimately be the feedstock. We're not in Brazil. We don't have millions of tons of "agricultural waste" that will be suitable for these bacteria. At least not the kind that you can get for free.

This kind of thing has been tried before, even if the bacteria method adds a new wrinkle to the equation. The numbers never add up when you try to turn waste organic matter into oil. Maybe it'll add up in 5 years if the cost of oil is higher than it is now. But then again, we've heard the same promises about a lot of "waste-derived" oil technologies, and none have come even close to $50 a barrel.

I would have to agree with Mrfrog that algae biofuels hold a lot more promise. At least with algae, you are not reliant on a steady stream of suitable "waste products" that suddenly become very valuable if you can turn them into oil. The only raw materials that algae needs are carbon dioxide, sunlight and water.

[Edited on June 20, 2008 at 12:20 PM. Reason : 2]

6/20/2008 12:18:44 PM

It could be a part of the equation, I don't doubt that, epically since they do have a modest amount of money behind them for this. I'm most interested in parts of these articles like this:

Quote :

"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.”"

So basically we're looking at like modified yeast idea. It's cool, could work.

Quote :

"This is like one of those waste treatment plants that turns trash into oil, but only if you have the perfect blend of carbon-rich trash and you can get it for free.*"

My concern is just a little different:

If successful, this could follow the same road as vegetable oil powered cars. An unexpected problem is: do we make enough trash to make our oil from it? The answer is no. The net amount of energy we consume in food, weather it be from animals that eat plants or just from plants is about 6% of the energy that the industrial world uses. That's one way of explaining how corn ethanol would take half the US to grow all our oil. Now, there could be more energy in the waste of the farm processes out there, and that could be a big dent in our hydrocarbon energy use, but I don't see how it could ever surpass like 30%.

You know, if you could do that it would be great, but combine Prawn Star's concerns, and it looks like a rocky road for this to be listed as a possible oil 2.0.

6/20/2008 12:36:50 PM

Quote :

"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. "

if i were president i'd be like "done" and get the shit built....one plot of land thats only the size of a city to quinch our thirst of middleeastern, venezuelan, and nigerian oil? shit sign me up for that

6/20/2008 12:41:17 PM

More commentary on quality/quantity of waste:



In terms of quality, I'd say they would rank about

Industrial
Farm
Consumer

And the quantity of the waste would probably follow in a similar order. The biggest problem with this kind of manure/fermenting idea is basic physics and energy flow. If you can add sun into the process, you have a better chance at producing huge quantities of energy (but then you have to 'space out' your plant more). And if you can get a steady, completely constant, nearly sterile, high temperature flow of the feed into the process, that's good too. Like from a coal plant.

Furthermore, I don't why why they listed an acreage for their idea at all. Can anyone tell me how this makes sense? If you have a fermenting process, what limits how small you can make the plant?

Quote :

"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. "

[Edited on June 20, 2008 at 12:58 PM. Reason : ]

6/20/2008 12:55:13 PM

At the end of Back to the Future (and iirc the beginning of BttF2) Doc flies his Delorean in and powers it with banana peels and beer

6/20/2008 1:10:17 PM

and with a different gf asleep on the porch between 1 and 2

6/20/2008 1:11:52 PM

1.21 JIGGAWATTS!

6/20/2008 1:25:23 PM

Quote :

"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."

I didn't realize automobiles ran on crude

6/20/2008 2:23:33 PM

It doesn't produce crude, it produces a gasoline type substance. That said, I would still not put it in my tank, the fuel filter can only do so much.

6/20/2008 7:23:38 PM

Quote :

"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. "

Sounds to me like they are talking about oil, not gasoline.

6/20/2008 9:20:56 PM

Quote :

"The company claims"

6/20/2008 11:01:14 PM

i stopped reading when they referred to bacteria as "bugs"

6/21/2008 12:06:49 AM

"Industrial Yeast" Great name for a band.

6/21/2008 12:52:50 AM

These researchers should take an elementary Economics class and find out that if you use a certain kind of food to create the biofuels, then the price for that kind of food will rise sharply and it won't be as cheap to make the fuels at first.

6/21/2008 12:12:14 PM

hypothetically i'd be for this if it actually worked but this guy is probably a left wing loon

6/21/2008 7:23:13 PM

eventually some breakthrough is going to come out of all this experimenting

i mean we had electricity then nuclear power/weapons time for another big breakthrough

6/22/2008 4:44:04 PM

Quote :

"These researchers should take an elementary Economics class and find out that if you use a certain kind of food to create the biofuels, then the price for that kind of food will rise sharply and it won't be as cheap to make the fuels at first."

Based upon elementary Economics I can tell you that you are wrong. It is not automatically true that increased demand produces higher prices in the long term (what you were thinking about was the short term). This is because if I announce that I am going to build a whole industry which consumes food whatever the price then farmers will plant more acres of food in the expectation of higher food prices in the future. If they speculatively plant more food than I actually use then prices will actually fall and some farmers will lose their shirts (ignoring economies of scale).

This is why "Growing Chinese Demand" is a poor answer for higher oil prices. Higher demand from China has been the norm for two decades, everyone knew it was coming. What caused the high prices was the fact that state-run oil companies do not respond to growing demand with speculative production. Instead, state-run oil companies respond only to political incentives which tend to have little to do with current or future market conditions.

[Edited on June 23, 2008 at 1:16 AM. Reason : EOS]

6/23/2008 1:15:20 AM

^The poster wasn't referring to a commodity when talking about "food". Instead, he was referring to the kind of organic waste that the bacteria feeds on. Even here in the US, we don't produce enough suitable waste to come close to supplying our liquid fuel energy needs.

There have been a lot of technologies lately that promise to convert organic waste into fuel. Biodiesel can be made from waste vegetable oils and animal fats. Ethanol may eventually be produced from switchgrass or agricultural byproducts. And there have been numerous ventures that use heat to turn organic waste into fuel via gasification and the Fischer-Tropsch process. But even if you can turn shit into oil economically, that shit will eventually cost money to procure. Waste products don't anticipate future demand.

[Edited on June 23, 2008 at 4:08 AM. Reason : 2]

6/23/2008 4:07:16 AM

heck, we already get methane from landfills

6/23/2008 8:32:29 AM