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The Men of the Mind Strike Again: Oil 2.0

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By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I just love to learn about how people are using their brains and turning important problems inside out to slam-dunk in some novel way.

Try this on for size: they have produced genetically-modified organisms that "feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw [...and] excrete crude oil." Isn't that outrageously cool? So much for the "finite supply of fossil fuels."

Oh, and the guys pulling this off have a nice angle aimed at those who are out to destroy industrial civilization:

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy -- as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel - they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this "Oil 2.0" will not only be renewable but also carbon negative -- meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

So if they go big with this, we get to enjoy the resulting cognitive dissonance in the guys who consider the invention of the internal combustion engine the low point of human history. Sweet.315611653

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003732.html

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Wow that's amazing, and the article was wonderful up until this point:

We have a collective responsibility to do this.

Those damn collectivists know how to put a damper on everything. I wonder how far away they are from production of sizable quantities. Also, I wonder if it will still be economically feasible when the oil bubble bursts.

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By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I just love to learn about how people are using their brains and turning important problems inside out to slam-dunk in some novel way.

Try this on for size: they have produced genetically-modified organisms that "feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw [...and] excrete crude oil." Isn't that outrageously cool? So much for the "finite supply of fossil fuels."

A Good Thing that can happen to the human race is to meet a race aliens who will eat our garbage and piss out gasoline.

ruveyn

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I just sent this link to a friend and co-worker of mine who is currently taking his masters in Oil and Gas engineering. While he admits that the article is short on information on the chemistry his initial reaction was to call the claimants "snake oil salesmen" and to speculate that this press release had more to do with driving up stock value than anything else.

I reserve comment either way, but the way it was explained to me by my friend, the claim that "Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli" is a gross oversimplification, and that for a product to be "almost pump ready" it would have to contain significant amounts of octane, a poisonous hydrocarbon.

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Of course, the viros will scream bloody murder as soon as they find out.

Like Zip I too reserve judgement.

But if anything near useful turns up, particularly useful in an industrial scale, the viros will begin the bacterial-rights moevement. Maybe I should start stockpiling PETB T-shirts (People for the Ethical Treatment of Bacteria), and cuddly stuffed amoebae, and Y pestis key-chains, and "Down With Antibiotics!" hoodies, and write a book on why infection is the weak life-form's asymetrical means of survival against the strong life-forms.

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This is amazing if true, because it will revolutionize the industry. Oil rigs will become obsolete. I love it.

However, I noticed some of the comments on that article's page, many of them are negative on the whole project, because they don't want to "hurt" the environment. Spiteful people, environmentalists. Even when there is a potentially awesome achievement they have nothing but negative anti-industry things to say.

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The environmentalists don't want to save the environment, they want to destroy modern industrial civilisation. They are self-hating anachists that want us to die-off, as they consider us a plague upon the face of the earth. They are deluded fools.

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The company claims that this "Oil 2.0" will not only be renewable but also carbon negative -- meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

If this research actually becomes ubiquitous, the radical environmentalists will eventually start shrieking about how this bacteria is sucking a dangerous amount of carbon dioxide out of the air, possibly destroying plantlife that requires CO2 to perform its basic biological functions.

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Yeah this is very early stage technology, and the article is very confusing. "Identical to crude oil" is a very poorly worded statement. If you search other versions of this news, you'll see "identical to crude oil in terms of automobile emissions" which is hardly the same thing. I suspect that the bugs could certainly produce a version of "biodiesel" which would be only one step further (an esterification) than the natural product, a fatty acid. Also the comparisons to ethanol are nice, but the real comparison is with seed oils.

A. seed oils -> extraction -> esterification -> biodiesel

B. cellulosic plant material -> fermentation -> ethanol

C. cellulosic plant material -> fermentation -> biodiesel

C is what they are talking about and it certainly could be feasible. A is cheapest because it is direct, but of course it competes with the food supply directly. B does not since it uses waste plant materials. However, fermentation economics are not there yet, and the final separation, a distillation, is very energy intensive. C eliminates the energy intensity, but the problem of fermentation ecnomics remains. I doubt that they have something that would be even close to cost competitive, especially at large enough scale to be a sizable portion of the oil supply. That is the big kicker. Fermentation does not have the same economy of scale profile as say petroleum refining, and that is what must exist to ever make a bio process competitive at such large scales. The size and quantity of the fermenters necessary to make a sizable dent in the fuel supply would boggle the mind. I think anything like this is still 30 yrs off, if ever.

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