

Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel - rbii
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/124383-bacteria-converts-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel

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uvdiv
Unfortunately The Paper [1] is closed source. I can't find much information;
no comparison with existing, chemical synfuels processes (like methanol via
syngas [CO]).

There's a serious problem with the general idea: "clean" CO2 is hard to get.
You can get concentrated (>10%) CO2 streams from a power plant, which could
work for synfuels, but ultimately that's still transferring fossil carbon into
the air (if more efficiently). The "nice" idea is to capture CO2 from the
atmosphere (I think they are implying this?); this gives you a carbon-neutral
cycle (CO2 => fuel => CO2). This is difficult because CO2 in the air is so
dilute -- 0.04% vol., or 0.8 grams/meter^3.

Can you get CO2 from the air? There's research in this; the APS assessment [2]
thinks it could be done at around $600-800/tCO2, which translates to e.g.
$7/gallon gas equivalent of methanol, just for the carbon. The process uses an
inorganic base (NaOH) to scrub CO2, so maybe you'd think you could
genetically-engineer superbacteria to do better. But the absorbent is not the
bottleneck -- it's the extreme volume and flow of air that needs to be brought
_to_ the absorbent, over an insanely large surface area. The scale is
visualized in [2] figure 1.2 (<http://i.imgur.com/Y0D2f.png>): a very small,
10^6 ton CO2/year capture plant is designed as a 1km * 1km grid of rows of
giant, sucking fans. And the NaOH process isn't particularly inefficient -- it
captures 50% of the CO2 in air.

Some more about atmosperic CO2 capture from David Keith [3] and his startup
[4]; this was featured in the _Economist_ this month [5]. Wikipedia is a
starting point for synfuels in general [6]; George Olah advocates a
methanol/dimethyl ether economy using CO2 recycled from air [7].

[1] <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.abstract>

[2] <http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/dac11.cfm>

[3] <http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/AirCapture.html>

[4] <http://www.carbonengineering.com/>

[5] <http://www.economist.com/node/21550241>

[6] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel>

[7]
[http://wiki.ornl.gov/sites/carboncapture/Shared%20Documents/...](http://wiki.ornl.gov/sites/carboncapture/Shared%20Documents/Background%20Materials/Alternative%20Methods/G.%20Olah.pdf)

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pcowans
Starting from the other end of things, it clearly is possible to synthesise
organic compounds from atmospheric concentrations of CO2 as nature does it
already, the question is what sort of yield you can get.

My understanding is that using algae to do this via photosynthesis is limited
by the fact that with wild strains you need to harvest and extract the biomass
before you can get at the fuel, and you need to spread things out in a very
thin film to get enough sunlight. Using modified strains helps solve the first
problem, using (more efficient) synthetic photovoltaics, or another power
source, with a process like this potentially helps solve the second.

To respond to another reply to this post, I don't think complex structures
that maximise surface area would be necessary - you could just bubble air
through the tank. As mentioned above, bubbling CO2 rich waste gasses from a
power plant would likely be even more efficient.

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pcowans
I'll also add a link to the Google Solve For X talk from Mike Cheiky / Cool
Planet, as it's relevant here and pretty interesting:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYVlZ9v_0o>

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ScottBurson
_In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof,
and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to
power the car’s engine._

Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles.

People need to get how diffuse solar energy is.

(Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)

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WiseWeasel
Exactly right. The premise that this technology would be integrated into cars
is ridiculous, and my guess is it was added by the "journalist". This
technology would most likely be used in places where feeds of concentrated CO2
are already available, such as coal power plants, water treatment, waste
management, compositing, etc., and the fuel would be sent off to be
distributed through fuel stations just as it is now.

The only impact this might possibly have on automobile design would be to try
to recuperate the carbon from the exhaust using some of the power generated
from the combustion to convert the exhaust CO2 into formic acid, to be
exchanged for fuel in the next refueling. My guess is it's not going to pay to
do that though.

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gus_massa
It is difficult to get hard numbers, but probably the limiting resource is the
energy in form of electricity, not the availability of carbon dioxide. So, if
this is a good idea, the producing plant should be near a cheap electricity
plant.

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DanBC
(<http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567>)

{There have been quite a few extremetech articles recently. Any estimate of
how much money they're making from the ads?}

EDIT: Thanks debacle!

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debacle
Your link has a bit of trailing gunk:

<http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567>

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crewtide
Not only a nifty idea for fuel, but a way to deal with our ant overpopulation!
As with other biofuels, it may have the downside of increasing the price of
formic acid as a foodstuff.

And if you've never tried ants over shoe-string potatoes, you should -- they
add a delicious, lemony flavor! Just remember to check your teeth for ant-legs
after dinner. :)

~~~
mrsebastian
Reminds me of a TED talk[0], about how we'll probably have to eat a lot of
lower-trophic-level food in the next few decades, as the population of Earth
increases -- stuff like crickets, and other insects.

[0]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.ht...](http://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects.html)

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mchannon
What's wonderful about the two butanols they are making is that they are near
drop-in replacements for gasoline. If this scales up, this would make an
excellent alternative to expensive fuel deliveries for isolated places.

Yet another encouraging bridge between the grid and the internal combustion
engine.

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JoeAltmaier
tl;dr:carbon-neutral conversion of CO2 to fuel and back again. Essentially a
chemical battery.

~~~
mrsebastian
Well, liquid fuel, not chemical -- and its power isn't a function of the size
of its electrodes.

More like a 'liquid fuel energy storage device', I guess.

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achy
Or, you know, you could just use the electricity to convert water to hydrogen
(itself a usable fuel). How much of the energy required for this reaction is
actually coming from the carbon / atmosphere? I would guess very little.

~~~
mchannon
The thing is that hydrogen has very limited utility as a fuel. Compressing it
is as energy-intensive as producing it in the first place, and even
compressed, it takes up a very large amount of volume. A pressure vessel
identical in volume to a standard 15gal gas tank would hold less than 2.5 gge
(gasoline gallon equivalents) of 700bar compressed hydrogen.

There are all sorts of storage media under development to get around this
hydrogen volumetric density problem, but none are much closer to market than
this butanol project. At the very least, an existing vehicle fleet would
require significant engine modifications to run on hydrogen (not to mention
fuel storage and delivery system modifications).

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sitkack
Can I get infected with this bacteria? If I get it in my lungs will it poison
me with biofuel?

~~~
WiseWeasel
I have never heard of this organism as a human pathogen in my bacterial
pathology classes, so it's at least not a common one. My guess is if it likes
a liquid environment rich in formic acid, it might be more at home in your gut
than in your lungs, but it would likely be out-competed by your existing
intestinal flora, unless maybe you just killed them all off with an antibiotic
regimen or some-such.

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droithomme
What could possibly go wrong.

edit: since I am being downvoted, I will state it explicitly. We are creating
a simple, resiliant lifeform that grows and reproduces as long as it can eat
carbon dioxide, of which there are essentially unlimited supplies on earth. We
know from observing complex fragile invasive species that are brought in to
new environments with unlimited food and no controls on growth what happens.
They reproduce and grow until they run out of their food source. For example,
bringing cats to australia to control rodents. Releasing this bacteria, which
is neither complex nor fragile, into the wild has a reasonable chance of
consuming vast amounts of CO2, producing petrochemicals as a waste product.
The easily predictable outcome of this release is the elimination of nearly
all life on the planet and creation of a toxic atmosphere similar to that on
Titan.

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Dylan16807
What makes you think it's resilient? And it doesn't feed on CO2, it feeds on
electricity. You do not find supplies of electricity sitting around in the
wild.

