'Computer-Hacked' Bacteria Make: Crude Oil!

[Sam Or I]

makes you wonder if you can "brew" your own vats of petrol, kind of like beer or moonshine.

[Count Dooku]

Yeah, the United States isn't running at anywhere near capacity in terms of agriculture. Nine percent is nothing. This... this sounds too good to be true.

Indeed it does...We can only wait and see what comes of it.

[Battlehymn Republic]

So... does this mean "Global Mean Temperature" is potentially more realistic than "Global Peak" now?

[J]

So... does this mean "Global Mean Temperature" is potentially more realistic than "Global Peak" now?

There still remains the issue of scale and the real world. Many ideas work amazingly well as small scale lab experiments yet fail to scale up and run into all sorts of difficulties in the real world. It's still too early, we need to wait for the results of some large scale tests to see if this new discovery can produce significant amounts of oil, whether there are any unforeseen snags, and what those issues turn out to be.

[Battlehymn Republic]

It seems that everything humans dream up to solve a problem either contribute to another problem or start a new one entirely.

What problems did the Smallpox Eradication Program cause?

Deep ecologists who hate Norman Borlaug would say that it led to overpopulation.

[His Divine Shadow]

So... does this mean "Global Mean Temperature" is potentially more realistic than "Global Peak" now?

If you are implying this will mean more global warming then no since it will not add CO2 to the atmosphere. I'm not really sure what that refers to however.

[That NOS Guy]

If you are implying this will mean more global warming then no since it will not add CO2 to the atmosphere. I'm not really sure what that refers to however.

Pair of fics up over in Fanfics. One, by Surlethe details global temp gone nuts and it's eventual implications for humanity. The other, by the Duchess, talks about life after peak oil. Both are excellent, and extremely apocalyptic in outlook for both events.

[Molyneux]

As cool as this all sounds, isn't the title a bit misleading? This company says that they will be able to produce oil within 3 to 5 years, not that they have actually accomplished anything now.

I hope that this pans out - but the odds are unfortunately against it, given how many other attempts we've had to free us from oil that have failed.

[Surlethe]

My scribbled notepad calculation says it'll take roughly 80 million acres of land to replace America's crude oil imports with bacteria grown oil if the 2000 gallon per acre claim proves to be true. That's about 9% of total US farmland.

And that will only help things go so far before soil depletion renders the ground barren. Impressive as this discovery is, there is no magic solution that will enable permanent free energy without fucking up the environment.

More pressing than environmental concerns is whether or not this sort of production will be able to take over from conventional oil sources quickly enough to dodge the peak oil bullet, and the eventual competition between this and agriculture for ground space. I'm not sure that we could squeeze more than 10% of US projected consumption out of this technique by 2030, given that the most optimistic projections give only 34% of US consumption replaced by 2030 and several alternative projects are much more developed.

For example, if we could magically meet current US imports right now through this technique, we'd use, as J says, 80 million acres = 10% of total US farmland (rounded for simplicity). Say US domestic conventional oil production declines at 2%/year, US demand grows at 2%/year, and our conventional imports are all gone. This is pretty much equivalent to saying demand unsatisfied by conventional domestic production grows 4%/year.

If we're going to satisfy that demand with grown oil, (8e7 acres)(1.04)^t = 8e8, and t = ln(10)/ln(1.04) = 58.7 years is about sixty years of that sort of growth before we're using all of US farmland for oil production. This is, needless to say, unacceptable; if we want to allocate 50% of US farmland to this, we've got 40 years before growth slows and stops.

This is, of course, a simplistic analysis, but it gets the point across. We may have, at best, a few centuries of this sort of unrestricted oil-driven growth left. Now, it's renewable, so it won't be declining like conventional post-peak production, and it'll all be domestic production, so the shock won't be as bad at that point as the sudden (relatively speaking) drops in supply post-peak, but we'll have to develop alternatives nonetheless.

[FireNexus]

Why make crude oil with this process. Couldn't they as easily, since they can finely control the length of the hydrocarbon chain, have the bacteria simply make gasoline, diesel, etc? That would certainly remove a production step, and since bacteria will gladly make more of themselves ad infinitum, you'll only ever need to lab produce a few of each kind.

[brianeyci]

Surlethe let's not get in the same trap as the other side and claim growth will be the same for several centuries. If US consumption is growing by 4% a year there's no reason to assume it will keep growing for that long just like there's no reason to assume oil will keep growing. Playing statastician is not the right way to look at natural resource consumption. As oil gets more rare the market will step in and make oil unaffordable for more and more people, especially in a situation like this where the cost of oil would be inversely proportional to the cost of food since they're using the same farmland. No artificially low oil prices here, since it appears to be starting from scratch and the prices won't be set by cartels halfway across the world.

And to all, this changes nothing. My emergency plan would have happened regardless of Peak Oil not happening, because anybody with half a brain can see we're in for a major depression in our lives. To put it plainly just like I said in the other thread when I argued with IP, the US owes a lot of people a lot of money. It's a dysfunctional family. Sooner or later the "repo men" will come banging on the doors, and the best the US can hope for is they don't take everything and just cut off giving new shit (this is a metaphor for the financial market of course, I don't actually think that China or India will take our shit, on the contrary they don't want cheap export goods that's why they get rid of useless widgets.) Get into necessary employment, avoid seasonal and trendy things like hospitality, air travel (going to shit since 9/11) or fashion etc., it's all the same whether there's no oil or infinite oil. I hope nobody's being a bandwagon fan.

[Surlethe]

Surlethe let's not get in the same trap as the other side and claim growth will be the same for several centuries. If US consumption is growing by 4% a year there's no reason to assume it will keep growing for that long just like there's no reason to assume oil will keep growing.

Like I said, it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation. If I need to make that clear for you, it does not take into account the following: the business cycle; the existence of alternative fuels; the peak of non-US crude production; inflation; unconventional sources; oil price fluctuations; a reworking of the transportation network a la Duchess; and many other things that would need to be taken into account for an actual forecast. My point was that the finite resource that comes into play first with this will be land, and ceteris paribus it will come into play far more quickly than I think most people were expecting.

Playing statastician is not the right way to look at natural resource consumption. As oil gets more rare the market will step in and make oil unaffordable for more and more people, especially in a situation like this where the cost of oil would be inversely proportional to the cost of food since they're using the same farmland. No artificially low oil prices here, since it appears to be starting from scratch and the prices won't be set by cartels halfway across the world.

Yes, I'm aware fo the basic workings of the free market. The point of my calculation, as I'm sure you know, is to show that we can't maintain our growth for a long time even with this apparently magical source of alternative oil. And why isn't playing statistician the right way to look at natural resource consumption?

[brianeyci]

Well if your only point was to counter the infinite oil claim, then I see why you mentioned it. But it seems obvious that land would be the bottleneck, and I think even the people who claimed infinite oil know this. The speed is debatable.

As for statistics and extrapolation, isn't that what peak oil people are saying, that the IEA is extrapolating too far into the future without regard to geology? My only point is the same people could come back around and say you're extrapolating into the future without regard to free market forces. In fact, the same people would probably come if this pans out, and say this is exactly the kind of thing they meant by "technology will get better."

[J]

Brian, what Surlethe is doing should be familiar as it's what's often done in various Sci-fi related debates on this board; that is, defining the limits, in this case it's the upper limit of how long we can continue to grow at the current rate. It is of course a ballpark figure.

As for the IEA, I don't think anyone really knows what they're doing and where they're pulling their figures from.

[Mr. T]

What's more, LS9's fuels might be produced more efficiently than ethanol. For example, at the end of ethanol fermentation, the mixture has to be distilled to separate ethanol from water. LS9's products would just float to the top of a fermentation tank to be skimmed off. Overall, the LS9 process consumes about 65 percent less energy than today's ethanol production, the company says.

That's taken from a previous article linked to in the original article. Seeing as with Ethanol the EROEI is 1.3 energy units, this tells us that the EROEI for this process will be (assuming it's 65% more efficient) 1.65x1.3= 2.145 energy units

I have no idea how that stacks up against conventional crude oil.

[Pelranius]

Wouldn't growing and harvesting plant material from the oceans be a better idea? It wouldn't hurt agriculture so much.

I expect that the countries which need oil but don't have land to spare (i.e. China and India) will probably continue to research alternative energy sources, since I doubt that any amount of processed hydrocarbons could meet their energy demands for the long term, but it should provide them with some breathing once peak oil bites in, if the idea pans out before them.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

What's more, LS9's fuels might be produced more efficiently than ethanol. For example, at the end of ethanol fermentation, the mixture has to be distilled to separate ethanol from water. LS9's products would just float to the top of a fermentation tank to be skimmed off. Overall, the LS9 process consumes about 65 percent less energy than today's ethanol production, the company says.

That's taken from a previous article linked to in the original article. Seeing as with Ethanol the EROEI is 1.3 energy units, this tells us that the EROEI for this process will be (assuming it's 65% more efficient) 1.65x1.3= 2.145 energy units

I have no idea how that stacks up against conventional crude oil.

The answer is "Not that good." Conventional oil has an EROI of around 5 to 10 to 1 when you take all the assorted issues of extraction and refinement into account. And this is why there are those on this board who snort derisively at the United States' current flirtation with corn-based ethanol and the American belief that ethanol's going to allow them to keep driving their land barges to their McMansions out in the exurbs.

[J]

That's taken from a previous article linked to in the original article. Seeing as with Ethanol the EROEI is 1.3 energy units, this tells us that the EROEI for this process will be (assuming it's 65% more efficient) 1.65x1.3= 2.145 energy units

I have no idea how that stacks up against conventional crude oil.

Depends on where the conventional crude oil is sourced from. Deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico & elsewhere may only net an EROEI of around 5 to 6, while on the other end of the scale we have oil fields in the Middle East where it's as high as 500-600. An EROEI of 2 would be roughly what's seen with the oil sands projects in Alberta, so in the big picture it's rather dismal.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Wouldn't growing and harvesting plant material from the oceans be a better idea? It wouldn't hurt agriculture so much.

Harvesting on that scale from the ocean would be prohibitively expensive. The US could farm twice as much land as it currently does without overextending land use, so the 9% use shouldn't be much to worry about.