Hat tip to Arnold Kling for pointing out this interesting article
about a promising innovation that may help address our "peaky" oil problem.
The article's headline:
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
Sound's great. Add this to a list of creative solutions that keep fighting their way to the forefront to deal with oil supply.
from the article:
“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....
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.
And it's green too!
The company's name is LS9 and is operating with $20 million in start up capital from private investors including Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Micro-Systems.
Granted, the idea is still not without its "bugs" to work out...no pun intended...but the idea could bear fruit in the near future:
“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 [senior director Greg] Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
Says Arnold Kling with some level of justified smugness:
The entrepreneurs are trying to solve our energy problems. What is government doing? Putting a tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, among other things.
---and doing a lot of inept and impotent talking and grand-standing I might add.
This all reminds of those Royal Bank of Scotland commericials. One involves hikers and one of them accidently steps in quicksand. The tour guide notices and then goes on and on about how he thinks they should form a steering committee and do a risk analysis or some other long winding deliberation. While he's going on and on talking to an entralled audience of hikers engrossed in the problem-solving process monologue, one lone hiker throws a rope to the sinking hiker and pulls him out. Another ad along the same lines involves a cable car high off the ground that suddenly stops. Same shtick. Meanwhile, amidst all the chatter, one of the passengers simply hits the reset button and the car starts moving.
The message is clear, less talk, more action. Sadly, I could not find links to the videos.
Good ads.
But I think they convey the image quite well about how are socio-economic challenges involving energy are being handled and will be solved. While politicians in the foreground talk and fill the air waves to a captive audience with empty chatter and stumping, innovators are quietly in the background looking for solutions by building on what we know today to push the limits of what we could know tomorrow. Funny, isn't that how it always works, anyway? ;)
No doubt some president or congressman will be their to cut a ribbon and try and draw the kudos back onto themselves when one of these creative ideas gets put into action and most will saldy remember the president during whose term it happened and the real heroes will be forgotten and made to be some greedy business man at some point when political dogma and machinations butt heads with these entrepreneurs over the business side of things.
Pardon my cycinism. I expect such nonsense...but I'll gladly deal with it as long as progress from the invisble entrepreneurs comes with it.
__________________________
Woah, cool
Very creative idea.
Regarding your closing comments: if the government thought this was a project worth supporting, you'd oppose them funding it?
__________________________Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
My perspective on that is simple:
great ideas like this don't NEED public funding. It doesn't need anything other than a clear path to operate and develop and implement its plan free of meddling or any type of artificial advantage or disadvantage.
It doesn't need "support" from govt. Govt. shouldn't be "supporting" anything like this. As you can see, the real solutions and ideas happen idependent of government behests or mandates.
Who knows? This great idea could be eclipsed by an even BETTER idea before we even know what's happening.
doing the real work
This assertion seems to go against common sense, conventional wisdom, and a bunch of economic theory: just because something is worthwhile to the general public doesn't mean that it is worthwhile to any particular individual.
You seem to deny that there is a problem aligning private interests with the public good--which is typically what people think of when they think of "government".
Similarly, you seem to imagine that good ideas just happen and develop on their own, rather than being the result of a conscious decision to allocate resources to innovation. Based on your critiques of politicians, I don't understand how investors are any different than
__________________________politiciansinvestors--after all, they don't actually "do the work", they just throw money around and take the credit (in the form of profits). If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a communist."You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
Come on Adam
You look like you're really stretching for a rebuttal for its own sake.
Sure. But what you're doing is as if I was saying: "A square is always a rectangle" and then you counter by saying:
"But hey. Not so fast! A rectangle is not always a square!"
To which, I say again: Sure.
Let's not make my point bigger or broader than it really is.
what argument are you attacking?
Maybe I get riled up because I can't see what you're actually criticizing.
Are you criticizing politicians for making speeches and telling people that this is important and then passing laws that try to address the issue? That seems to be what you're criticizing, but that is exactly the job of politicians.
Are you criticizing politicians for inefficiencies and special interest pandering? I don't really see how those can be avoided.
Are you criticizing the "cult of the Presidency"? -- I see a little of that, but you never really establish that there is any "cult" to criticize in this context.
Conversely, are you criticizing our tendency to denigrate and dismiss the people who actually did the work? Again, I don't see any evidence that we actually do dismiss these people.
When I think of important figures in American history off the top of my head, the only Presidents are those who were in office during major wars (the founders and Teddy Roosevelt being the exception...and I guess many people have fond memories of Kennedy). I likewise think of the main Generals of those wars. As for industrialists and innovators, I think Ford and Carnegie and Edison and Westinghouse. For scientists I think of Franklin and Watson and Einstein.
So my point is that Americans don't really give politicians much credit for technological and economic progress--we give them credit for dealing with political issues, and we turn to them to serve our special interests (which sometimes involves immediate problems).
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
You make good points adam
I see your response as more concrete acceptance to practical realities we actually are dealing with, how politics and technology can join, or be in conflict. as opposed to some vague brush off in search of an unstated ideal.
__________________________It is the economy, stupid.
Have to fact check you here.
I think your assumption that something like this came without public funding is a little misinformed - or at least leaves out a key part of the puzzle. The center itself got startup funds from private investors, but its founders did most of their field work in the Department of Energy and/or were heavily funded by the NSF.
The benefit of private investment is in allowing experts in different areas to come together towards projects not covered by their grants, but these people are building from a lot of work done thanks to public funding (just check their individual bios for info on where they got their start - inevitably with government grant money). It's right on their website.
__________________________Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. - Ambrose Bierce
pathetic free market story
This is really a pathetic free-market story, since the basic technology involved was primarily the result of government funded research.
Nobody with any influence claims that private entreprenuership should be banned...so how is it relevant to point out that private entrepreneurship has a role to play. Almost everyone in the West adheres to a "mixed economy" ideology where government creates a basic framework within which private interest is aligned with public interest.
This story illustrates the success of that model.
The only lesson I can possibly get out of this is that politicians should focus on big-picture, long-term issues and leave the details to the private market... but that didn't seem to be what you were saying.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
Again, Adam.
I think you're digging for rebuttals....why you of all people is doing this, I'm not so sure.
Information and know and how come from all over. OK. Fine. But grabbing bits and pieces of that disparate info and producing truly innovative is the make of individuals.
On the contrary, that's usually what I AM saying. And this case is no exception....properly understood.
politicians aren't individuals?
Okay, I'll let it rest. Maybe I just jumped on this because it was a slow day around here.
In contrition, here's my cynical contribution: Will Obama show us the instruction manual for his new kind of politics
?
Maybe I should get back to doing something real...
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
Dueling microbes
Pretty cool. Way back in grad school, the lab I was in was working on developing the opposite - bacteria that eat oil - for use in cleaning up oil spills and that sort of thing. I don't think we were getting a whole lot of entrepreneurial funding, though!
__________________________We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves. —David Suzuki
oil spill cleanup
There was a recent breakthru in using carbon nanofibers to soak up oil from water
like a sponge.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
I have a nice perpetual motion machine as well
Come on. Do you really think this is anything but a scam? If there was sufficient energy in sugar cane to rival oil we'd have switched to biofuels a long time ago.
This article is a great demonstration of the power of capitalism- the ability to separate the credulous and their cash.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
of course there's enough energy
In terms of pure chemistry, there is enough energy if you're willing to use enough sugar cane to make a gallon of oil -- so it comes down to having the right price and the right technology.
We haven't had the right technology until now (if this stuff works). You can't just throw sugar into your gas tank.
Likewise, oil prices haven't been high enough until now. I think these guys said that it was the equivalent of $50/barrel oil---but oil's historical average is about $16 per barrerl.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
enough =/= $50 worth
There's no way in hell you can raise enough sugar cane for less than $50 and get energy out of it equivilent to a barrel of oil.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
numbers?
Since you're so confident, I have to assume that you know how much energy is in a barrel of oil, as well as the energy content and price of some unit of sugar cane....but I don't see the numbers.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
I actually did start
doing the back of the envelope calculations but I ended up throwing it away because I figured nobody was really going to want to get into it.
Apparently I was wrong :)
Let me see if I can find the sources I was using before.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Can't find the sources I looked at last time
but this is probably a better approach anyway.
Okay so start with this.
Crude oil has an energy density of 41.9 MJ/kg. Sugar Cane has an energy density of 19.0 MJ/kg. Pretty much 2:1. So whatever mass of oil we burn we'd need twice that mass of sugar cane, assuming identical efficiency in terms of liberating the stored energy.
A barrel of oil is 0.158987m^3. Crude oil density ranges from ~800-1000 Kg/m^3. So that gives us a range of mass from 127-158 kg of crude oil per barrel. So for $50 we need 250-300 kg of sugar cane (to make up for the disparity in energy density).
Unfortunately I can't find any references for costs worldwide for sugarcane production. Here in the US the 2006 country wide cost appears to be $30.40/a ton. A short ton is ~910 kg. Using these numbers you can get a Barrel-of-Oil equivilent from Sugar cane for about $10.
Now here are the cautions:
1) the possibility of getting identical energy efficiency from sugar cane as from oil is unlikely. It might get there but it has a few things going against it, a big one being that sugarcane is a solid that is highly susceptible to breaking down naturally and to being consumed by organics. Oil on the other hand is a liquid at room temperature and is pretty stable except with regards to a few exotic oil eating microbes or lighting it on fire.
2) I really don't know if cost to raise sugar cane in other countries is higher or lower than the US. In general sugar cane is grown in tropical climates and most tropical countries are not first world. That means cheaper land and labor costs but worse efficiency in terms of growing and harvesting, to generalize.
3) perhaps most importantly worldwide yearly sugar cane production is only 1 billion tons. That works out to about the amount of oil we use in 40 days. And that's assuming you converted the entire world production of sugar over to energy production. Not to mention that as we start drawing on sugar for energy the price will go up- corn farmers haven't been pushing ethanol without a reason.
__________________________I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
good numbers
Thanks for digging those up. I had done a quick googling, but found nothing.
The US has hefty tariffs on sugar imports, so I expect that the international price is lower than the US price.
But it seems that the big issue is how much sugar-based fuel production can be scaled up. Unlikely that it could replace all oil, but perhaps it could still replace 5% of oil consumption (assuming you were keeping the same units in point three above -- global production/consuption, rather than global production and USA consumption ) . It's only a fraction of total consumption, but nothing to sneeze at. Most likely sugar production would rise if there were so much demand for it, such that it would displace other crops or forests...which would be bad for global warming.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas
I think you're getting ahead of yourself here, John
First of all, I find it a bit telling that the entertaining and admittedly good "Less Talk, More Action" ads are created by a company that has written down nearly $12 billion in assets and lost half its market value in just the first six months of this year. So maybe the "Less Talk, More Action" crowd doesn't have it all figured out just yet.
And let's face it: the private investors in the linked story haven't yet "hit the reset button" on our energy gondola car:
They have a promising technology. History is full of promising technologies that were not workable at mass production scale. So let's not wave the Mission Accomplished banner just yet. We don't know whether the next big thing in energy will come from privately funded research or government-funded research.
Also, let me note that private research investment tends to follow the money. During the tech boom, immense amounts of private capital flowed to the dot-coms-- at the expense of other types of investment, I believe. I don't think there was a lot of private investment in these kind of energy solutions when oil was $10 a barrel and the NASDAQ was climbing 10% a month. Sure, now that oil had risen tenfold, you're going to START to have a lot more private business investment in fuels research, but the real-world solutions aren't on time. Government funded research can target key areas where the possibility of near and medium-term profits aren't clear-- such as research into fuel producing microbes when oil is at $10/barrel-- and perhaps technological solutions can already be at hand in some situations where they wouldn't be with only private investment.
Bottom line, I see a clear role for government funded scientific research, if properly done.
Don't worry, Skymutt
I'm grounded right here in the here and now. Like I said in the diary, the technology is promising and still has "bugs to work out....no pun intended". Yes, it would take a massive land scale...BASED ON WHAT THEY KNOW NOW...to be functional. But that's now, not tomorrow. The first computer filled a room and didn't even have the capability of most modern laptops. Remember the brick phone?. Give it time, give it time.
The larger point is that ideas are in the pipeline and here is one that few would ever have a imagined a few years ago...let alone last week. Mission is not accomplished by any means....but tomorrow's problem solvers are not sitting on their hands and my biggest wonder is which solution will dominate and when.....not if.
As for the RBS, I don't know much about them but their woes are not really relevant. The image is illustrative to how progress gets made. Let's not get too literal.
As for government funding, your comments may seem true in a loose "nostrodamus" kinda way but it hardly has the nimble-ness and foresight to "target" anything. It simply grants funding in general to public universities and research centers. That's simply education.
Bottomline is that reality doesn't match the mind set of the general public. You mention energy problems and solutions, and people think of government solving the problem. That's not how it works.
I would dispute is:
Government can and does make policy decisions as to where federal research dollars are allocated in order to try to solve specific areas of need; and this research can (often alongside and in concert with privately funded research) achieve positive results. A good example would be the public and private partnership that worked to develop the very effective AIDS treatments that are available today.
Has anyone else considered
whether these genetically altered bugs could get loose and wreak havoc on the ecosystem?
__________________________qui tacet consentire
I love genetically modified microbes
Short answer: "Yes, and there's no special risk"
Long answer:
- It sounds like all the processing will occur in a contained environment, and waste material will be sterilized (similar to research labs). While some microbes may escape (see below) this is quite different from a situation where we plan to constantly introduce large numbers of modified organisms into the environment (as we do with plant crops).
- Given that some microbes will escape, they most likely will not be suited for the wild, and will quickly die. Remember, these bacteria were engineered to excrete high energy compounds -- that isn't a good strategy for survivial in the wild.
- Even if they do get established somewhere, there's no reason to expect them to establish a large population nor is there are reason to expect them to be damaging. After all, these are just bacteria, just like the millions (billions?) of kinds of bacteria that are already in the environment.
- Finally, gene engineering of bacteria really is nothing special. Bacteria constantly exchange genes with distant relatives (Horizontal Gene Transfer), even with other domains of life. There is effectively no limit to where bacteria can get DNA from, so if we transfer a gene into a bacterium, it is no different than what happens a million times every day.
__________________________"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man." --Frederick Douglas