The Fun Guy Will Save Us All!

[Iason Ouabache]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1103/1

Petroleum geologists normally look for oil underground. Gary Strobel made his strike by pruning a tree. In the current issue of Microbiology, Strobel, a plant pathologist at Montana State University, Bozeman, and colleagues report that Gliocladium roseum--a novel fungus they discovered hidden within a stem from a scraggly tree in northern Patagonia--produces dozens of the same midlength hydrocarbons found in gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel. The fungus may help companies convert the chemical energy stored in plants into liquid fuels capable of replacing fossil fuels.

The discovery is "a really great contribution," says Stephen Del Cardayre, a synthetic biologist and vice president for research and development at LS9, a South San Francisco-based start-up working to use microbes to produce renewable fuels. Even though the new fungus pumps out only small quantities of fuel hydrocarbons, researchers might use its genes to engineer other industrial microbes to do the job more efficiently. "The beauty is that even if the chemical reaction isn't perfect, you can always improve it," he says.

After discovering the new fungus wedged between cells in a stem from an Ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia), Strobel and colleagues cultured the organism, collected the gaseous compounds it produced, and ran the compounds through a mass spectrometer to identify them. When he saw the printout, Strobel says, "every hair on my body stood up." The list included octane, 1-octene, heptane, 2-methyl, and hexadecane--all common components of diesel fuels.

Although other microbes are known to make individual volatile hydrocarbons common in fuels, Strobel says none can match the synthetic repertoire of G. roseum, which makes a staggering 55 volatile hydrocarbons: "No one has ever observed anything like this with any microbe before." He suspects that the fungus produces the hydrocarbon stew to inhibit other organisms from growing nearby.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That's pretty cool, but it's not going to save the world, because it's just another combustible resource. What we really need are more and better ways of generating energy without combustion, or of generating energy more efficiently with lower emissions.

[Vene]

That's pretty cool, but it's not going to save the world, because it's just another combustible resource. What we really need are more and better ways of generating energy without combustion, or of generating energy more efficiently with lower emissions.

This would have zero net emissions.  The CO₂ generated from burning the hydrocarbon would be originally from the CO₂ in the air.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That's pretty cool, but it's not going to save the world, because it's just another combustible resource. What we really need are more and better ways of generating energy without combustion, or of generating energy more efficiently with lower emissions.

This would have zero net emissions.  The CO₂ generated from burning the hydrocarbon would be originally from the CO₂ in the air.

The logic is faulty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html

[Vene]

That's pretty cool, but it's not going to save the world, because it's just another combustible resource. What we really need are more and better ways of generating energy without combustion, or of generating energy more efficiently with lower emissions.

This would have zero net emissions.  The CO₂ generated from burning the hydrocarbon would be originally from the CO₂ in the air.

The logic is faulty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html

Thanks Nigel, I didn't think about land use.  I was just looking at the system in which the hydrocarbons are produced.  But if this is produced with E. coli that may be insignificant (I don't know if it is or not).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If it's actually used for, say, composting garbage, that could work out fine, except that it still doesn't address some of the other environmental problems with being dependent on combustion technology, such as emissions being concentrated in urban areas.

[Kai]

This is cool, but can it be generated on a large scale.

That being said, life never ceases to amaze me.