Joule Unlimited Inc. has been on the scene for a little over a year, and has patented a micro-organism that can directly produce ethanol or other fuels, without the need for an intermediate feedstock such as corn or biomass.
In a nutshell… The bacteria (E. coli), takes in sunlight, Carbon Dioxide and water (fresh, brackish or salt), and excretes ethanol or hydrocarbon fuel. They say that the cost is equivalent to $30/barrel oil.
They apparently now have a “library” of genetic organisms, each of which is engineered to produce a different fuel.
The inputs are all cheap - Solar energy, CO2 and water. Land is also required.
They have completed bench testing and are in the middle of a pilot project.
Some downsides:
The process cannot be accomplished with the ambient amount of CO2 in the atmosphere - it requires inputs of highly concentrated CO2. However, CO2 is produced by industrial processes, and it may be possible to site a fuel plant near one of these factories/plants.
The process requires water, so you can’t really stick it out in a desert. However, it can run on brackish or salt water.
They say it is scalable, but is it really?
What about capital costs for construction, plus maintenance costs? Have these truly been factored in?
I’ve searched a bit to see if this is on the up-and-up, and it looks OK so far. It looks like they are privately held and are not seeking investments (which is usually a good sign), and have just recently brought John Podesta onto their board.
So… thoughts?
Some have called this technology a “game-changer”. Is this wildly optimistic? Will this solve our energy and CO2 problems in one fell swoop?
Or 5 years from now, will this technology be in regular but small scale use, with minimal impact on the overall energy picture?
Or will this simply be another pie-in-the-sky bit of dreaming, with no real commercial impact?
Well, any CO2 the bacteria use will be put back into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned. At best I’d call that a wash.
As to solving our energy problems it’d need to be built on a massive scale. The current industry for fuel is well established and been built over a century. To make a dent in the global fuel supply would require production on a staggering level (I am not sure how fast these little buggers can turn out the goods).
The answer to the above question will determine the rest.
If viable I’d say it is worthwhile to build a pipeline from the ocean to Death Valley and let them setup there. Yeah, pipelines are expensive but I imagine Death Valley real estate is cheap, there’s lots of it and they have abundant sun.
You’d need to get the high concentrations of CO2 to Death Valley as well (plus the pipeline from CA would be a nightmare to build and you’d have evaporation problems unless you buried the whole thing…which would be even worse).
My guess is (like Whack-a-Mole) that scale will be the key issue. I’ve heard of processes like this (though this seems more advanced that what I recall reading in the past), but the problem is scaling them up to do more than a pilot or demonstration. Consider the millions of barrels of oil the US uses and what it would take to produce that using bacteria.
Still, as possibly one of many different parts of ‘the solution’ this might make a real contribution. I don’t think there will be just one solution to the problem, but a bunch of smaller solutions that will add up to what we have and our future needs.
Not to mention the billions of barrels we have already borrowed from the earth and should be put back
But all kidding aside we are ready for such a game changer bring it on.
Been awhile since I read it so no cite but IIRC when something like this was being talked about awhile ago you’d need to cover something like 10,000-15,000 square miles to meet the energy needs of the US. That is somewhere around the size of Maryland.
Death Valley is about a quarter of that size but still…I’m hard pressed to think of where else in the US you’d be able to get that much land.
I am not sure about the problems of carting in CO2. I mean, CO2 is pretty common and not hard to come by. I know they said you could not get it out of the atmosphere but I took that to mean just bubbling air from outside through the mixture. I’d think they could concentrate atmospheric CO2 for use here. Death Valley has a lot of sun so could use solar technology to run those machines.
And yeah, a pipeline to pump seawater would be expensive but certainly it’d be doable if there were a huge installation to service. The pipeline would only be about a third of the length of the Alaska Pipeline.
Maybe, but I suspect there are ways to store energy generated by solar cells that have better efficencies then the one out of six ratio you’d need to match the bacteria.
Reading this article and thinking about it more (and assuming it’s on the up and up and feasible), maybe New Mexico would be a perfect place to build a plant. Supposedly we have an ocean of brackish water under us that we’re always trying to figure out what to do with it (I’ve heard ideas about conversion plants for drinkable or usable water).
Assuming I did my math correctly, its pretty similar to sugarcane or bamboo. Its a little sketchy of the website to not give the conversion rate, as gallons of ethanol per acre per year is not exactly a standard unit of solar energy production.
But I used ethanol having an energy content of 20 million joules per liter and average insolation of 200 watts per square meter and converted units. I can post the whole calculation when I get home from work if you want.
Do they actually say they used E. coli as their base organism? It seems an odd choice, given that it isn’t naturally photosynthetic. You’d think it’d be easier to start with some sort of alga.
Yes, that is the one mentioned. I think they have other organisms in the “library”, but they do use E. coli. Perhaps because it’s genome is so well known, and there has been so much experimental work done on it. I would have thought an alga would have made sense too.
ETA: In the future, perhaps we’ll have these in our guts, and we’ll be able to poop diesel into our gas tanks… EWWWWWWWW!
Well, the OP was talking about energy production in general, much of which happens outside of cars.
But even considering just cars, I find it hard to believe that an energy source thats so inefficient and one imagines requires considerable infrastructure to produce and pump the concentrated CO2 is still able to produce fuel at better then half the current price of gasoline. If it were true, then I’d expect solar power to have long since replaced fossil fuels in at least some applications, as even if storage, cell production, etc eat heavily into its efficency, as long as it was able to get one part in twelve of its energy to the consumer, it would apparently be cost effective with oil.
Or to put a shorter way, I think the 30$/barrel is BS. Not the BS I associate with over-enthusiastic marketing, but the level of BS I’d associate with a scam.
Assuming (I really do not know) this is not a scam I think the theoretical potential here is that you can place it in shitty locations (like a desert near an ocean) that is mostly worthless for anything else and produce away.
I do not know the particulars but if it is mostly just having a vat of E. Coli that you feed CO2 and sunlight to and then skim off the gasoline I suspect operation costs are pretty low. So, they may well be able to produce for $30/barrel. Just they won’t be able to make very many barrels so it doesn’t really help much in the scheme of things.
