It seems most remaining fossil fuels have to be left unused to avoid a two degree rise in temperature by 2050. At the same time, oil companies are as thirsty as ever.
If someone like Greenpeace could obtain a batch of oil-eating bacteria, would it be at all possible to deposit these in oil reserves around the world? No doubt an expensive operation—but what if the perpetrators were the US government, trying to sabotage Saudi oil production? Could they pull something like that of?
The ethics of all this of course could make an interesting GD thread, but I’m interested in if it’s at all feasible.
Also, what do the bacteria turn the oil into? The link says “Ideally, the product created by the microorganism after consuming the oil would be harmless to the environment,” but they might just mean non-toxic to the immediate surroundings. I would imagine the bacteria would produce methane, carbon dioxide or some other greenhouse gases. All that carbon has to go somewhere, right?
It has to be, as we know it…wikilink (sorry it’s wiki I’m not a microbiologist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprotrophic
But clearly oxygen is required for all but a few Saprotrophic organisms
I’m fairly sure that there are already naturally occurring oil-eating bacteria in any oil deposit. They consume oil, but it’s only significant on a geological time scale. And they’d necessarily be anaerobes, with a slow metabolism. Injecting more such critters probably wouldn’t do a damn thing.
The engineered bacteria from your cite are probably easy-to-work-with aerobic species, with metabolic pathways transplanted from other species.
Another problem I see: all bacteria need water. Since oil and water don’t mix, the bacteria would be most active on the margins of the oil reserve, and you’d need a reason for the water to move further into the oil reserve to allow the bacteria to digest more than a little around the edges. As an example of this: just think about how products like olive oil are shelf stable even without airtight containers or other methods of preservation. (Heck, oil is often used as the method of preservation for other foods).
The oil companies? Anyone else that you can think of?
But as to your question it seems to me that the fundamental is what is the oil going to be turned into? Without understanding the detail, my general impression is that you are going to have a tough time coming up something that (a) doesn’t release the carbon but (b) magically turns it into something other than an energy source that it is attractive to extract and burn.
About all the oil could be turned into, from a chemistry standpoint, is CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub]O, if there’s a sufficient supply of O[sub]2[/sub] available, in which case you’re burning it, and spewing the “evil greenhouse gasses” into the environment, but not extracting energy for your trouble. Why would you do that? There’s nothing to be gained, and the result is even worse than if you burned it in an energy extraction engine.
Or you’re separating it into C[sub]n[/sub], AKA coal, and spewing the extra H[sub]2[/sub] into the environment, whereupon it will either pressurize the oil deposit, intensely, or more likely, leak, whereupon it will react with the environmental O[sub]2[/sub], giving you the same energy balance problem.
Your proposal is useless. In fact, it’s much worse than useless. It’s counterproductively stupid.
In addition to the points noted by other posters about the technical ineffectiveness of using oil-eating bacteria in this way, real-world politics make this suggested scenario EXTREMELY unlikely.
The US government has absolutely zero interest—make that strongly negative interest—in sabotaging Saudi oil production. Our government and society are still very dependent on (relatively) cheap oil, and if we didn’t have the Saudi supply (which constitutes nearly a quarter of current worldwide oil production) we’d be paying many hundreds if not thousands of dollars per barrel right now.
So if your imagined oil-sabotage scenario needs a deep-pocket sponsor to make it economically feasible (although as pointed out by others, that still wouldn’t make it feasible from a technical standpoint), don’t bother looking to Uncle Sam.
Yeah, you’re right. I was just trying to come up with a crude description, off the top of my head, of turning oil into coal, which would have been useless, even in the OP’s scenario. C[sub]n[/sub] doesn’t really work, since there is no generic formula for “coal”, because it can have lots of values for “what the fuck is this shit made of?”
Your “residual bitumen-like substance” would be “asphalt” or “tar”, which comes closer to, but still doesn’t very much match, my C[sub]n[/sub] approximation.
bacteria ARE already growing in those places, but it takes time because of the lack of even distribution of materials, from what I gather.
I got here via my argument, that the removal of fuels underground was affecting the food chain, and the reason why, was because of the microbes eating the fuels, and how they wouldn’t be anymore. So then, maybe the removal of fuels might cause desert, or make life forms susceptible to disease, like trees. So species might become extinct because they are missing an important link thousands of feet down.
Your second paragraph makes it sound like the H2O generated would act as a greenhouse gas and still cause additional warming. That isn’t so; the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on other greenhouse gasses because water vapor condenses out; if you removed all of the CO2 and methane, water vapor would condense out until a new, much colder, equilibrium temperature is reached (it does act as a powerful feedback though, amplifying temperature changes well beyond what you’d expect from CO2/methane alone).
Do you have a cite as to how something thousands of feet down and effectively isolated from the surface, aside form the occasional natural oil seep, can affect life on the surface? P.S. - note the date of the post prior to yours (we’d prefer that new threads be started unless you have relevant information).