years ago, GE receievd a patent for a engineered abctirium that would metabolize/eat crude oil. the idea was to spread cultures of this bacteria on oil spills, and the oil would be harmlessly metabolized, thus sparing the environment.
I don’t know how well this worked, but would it be possible to engineer an organism that would make oil as a wasrte product? Preferably something that could eat garbagem, or algae. Then we would have the energy crisis solved-just have this stuff eating our wasttes/garbage, etc., and it turns out high-grade fuel for us!
is this possible?
http://smccd.net/accounts/skyline/NCBC/aboutbiotech.html
Other research is investigating the use of microbes to produce methane gas from waste materials, and hydrogen gas from water.
Methane is a fuel source, and the main component of natural gas. Its not octane though (which is what cars use and which has 8 carbon atoms), methane only has 1 atom. But it is still a good fuel source, just not for automobiles.
In years past used motor oil was disposed of by sprinkling it on gravel/dirt country roads and it was replaced periodically as it dissappeared in a relatively short time. It didn’t wash away into creeks and rivers.
The explanation at the time was that soil bacteria consumed it.
Don’t forget that organisms have been producing oil long before humans ever came along to run it in a car.
It might be more effective to adjust cars to run on oils produced directly by plants rather than the stuff that has to be aged a few million years. It also might be more effective to adjust cars to run on oils produced directly by plants already than to adjust the plants (or bacteria) to produce the oils cars will run on.
Cars don’t use octane. Cars use all sorts of things including LPG and diesel. Most cars run on gasoline which does contain some octane, but the vast majority of of itisn’t octane.
You learn something new every day, apparently its 7-11 carbons.
I remember reading something about the oil-eating microbes. The process is called bio-remediation. The problem with them was that oil in a spill is toxic enough to kill even these microbes. The solution was to mix the oil with some kind of detergent to dilute the concentration of oil, and then to introduce the microbes. The microbes would consume the oil at some rate, and eventually the oil in a spill would be completly cleaned up. This is good in theory, but in practice its benefit is not so apparent. Oil spills present problems immediately, where as bio-remediation takes time. The best way to control spills is not to have them.
Alas, I must have been asleep when my enviromental technologies class talked about oil-producing microbes. There are all kinds of oils though, and it is unlikely that these microbes will be producing the oil that we need.
Yes, and most of that is cyclic: cyclopentanes, cyclohexanes and aromatics. A large chunk of what isn’t cyclic is branched. Of the minority that is linear hydrocarbon only a fraction is octane. There’s bery little actual octane in normal gasoline.