Fossil fuels on demand?

[Archaic`]

From the Globe and Mail

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically engineered cyanobacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

All sounds a bit hard to believe, and a bit too good to be true, but given some of the names involved in this (most notably George Church) it seems legit. Oil produced from nothing more than the air, sunshine, and water (brackish, fresh, salt, doesn't matter). I can only imagine the impact this would have in the long term. I imagine more than a few countries which survive on their oil exports may be busy crapping their pants right about now.

[Maj]

Holy crap, this seems pretty cool.

Here is a link to the company's web page, and here is a simplified explanation courtesy of Wikipedia.

[bobalot]

This is not the first claim of renewable fossil fuels from bacteria by some company. I suspect this will shortly be forgotten like the others.

[Broomstick]

It sounds too good to be true. You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true? They almost always are.

Patents have been issued for perpetual motion machines in the past. Clearly, a patent is not proof of feasibility. When they start selling this $30 a barrel on demand bacteria shit fossil fuels, THEN I'll believe it. Until then I say it's bullshit.

[Spectre_nz]

They wouldn't be the first to make a claim like this. Getting hydrocarbons out of microbes isn't revolutionary. Even taking 4-carbon chains as a starting point, its apparently economical to use condensation reactions to make longer chain oils, assuming you start with a pure sample of you 4 carbon chain.

The problems are metabolite yield, metabolite rate and cost of separation.

Take ethanol as an example. To make up for the cost of distillation you need around 45-50g/l ethanol concentration. 4.5 to 5%. This is getting into the toxic limit for some organisms. Then you need to have them maintain that concentration while you flush multiple reactor volumes through the system; so you cycle in media, remove the ethanol, cycle the media back. From this you can work work out your metabolite rate; how much new metabolite they're making at a given metabolite concentration. it's not much good if they oscillate from a low concentration up to a high one and die back, requiring you to wait for them to grow, all the while the concentration is low.

The Algae route often looks better than bacterial ethanol because its much easier to get oils out of water than it is to get ethanol out of water.
Buuuut, algae are much less tolerant to high metabolite concentrations than bacteria are, and often the oils are bound up in your algae, rather than being released out into the media. So you have to lyse the algae to get your oil, which again, means separation cost.

All of these renewable bio-fuel products are on the surface, achievable, at some arbitrary cost.
How much they can produce at what rate and with what separation costs determine how economic the whole thing is in the end, and weather they'll ever be competitive with just pumping oil out of the ground.

[cosmicalstorm]

That entire claim sounds like fucking bullshit which I will not believe until I see it with my own eyes. Also smells like science by press-conference and bullshit to attract stupid investors.

[Sinewmire]

Even if it WAS true, is a plan to turn earth's water into smoke really such a good idea in the long term?

[Singular Intellect]

Even if it WAS true, is a plan to turn earth's water into smoke really such a good idea in the long term?

It would be an enormously beneficial method of making the transition from fossil fuel concepts to our future clean energy supplies less painful in terms of supply and demand.

As for the validity of said claims, I plan to keep tabs on it skeptically, although with great interest.

[Sea Skimmer]

10,000 gallons an acre is considered the threshold of economic viability for alge oil farming, and that’s for straight oil production. If this new creature can make something even close to a refined fuel at even close to 20,000 gallons an acre its an almost revolutionary step forward for the industry.

[adam_grif]

I have no idea if this specific claim is bullshit or not, but someone is going to crack it eventually. People have been trying for the better half of a decade now.

[cosmicalstorm]

I've read about this on other forums now. There is talk that this company has made similar claims in the past and never made good on them, and that their website looks like something you'd expect in a Nigerian scam. The guys at Slashdot also ran the pure energy math and it didn't look very good although I'm not qualified on that subject.

[Ariphaos]

Even if it WAS true, is a plan to turn earth's water into smoke really such a good idea in the long term?

When you burn it it becomes water (and CO2) again. That's basically how fire works.

Direct sunlight is a bit over 1 kilowatt per square meter on average, divide by four IIRC to get the direct daily average total, or ~8 gigajoules per year. At 100% efficiency that would be 60 gallons of gas per square meter per year. You would need 2.5 gallons of gas per square meter per year in order to get 10,000 gallons per year out of an acre. Or about 4-5% sunlight -> gas efficiency.

The raw energy math seems fine for it to at least supplement our oil supply, even if it can't replace it entirely.

[Winston Blake]

I have no idea if this specific claim is bullshit or not, but someone is going to crack it eventually. People have been trying for the better half of a decade now.

Attempts at controlling fusion had already started by this point. Registration of the first patent related to a fusion reactor by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, the inventors being Sir George Paget Thomson and Moses Blackman, dates back to 1946. This was the first detailed examination of the pinch concept, and small efforts to experiment with the pinch concept started at several sites in the UK.

Around the same time, an expatriate German proposed the Huemul Project in Argentina, announcing positive results in 1951.

[Simon_Jester]

One really critical parameter that often gets neglected in the fusion problem is funding. Many optimistic claims about rapid progress in nuclear fusion work were based on the assumption that funding to build large apparatus would show up quickly; it's often taken years just to line up the money. While there's a limit on how much money you can apply to forcing the learning curve, there's often a huge difference between "You want to build a $20 billion tokamak? Here!" and "20 billion dollars? I dunno, guys..." followed by five years of begging and scraping funds together.