Researchers Close in on Technology for Making Renewable Petroleum

[Techne]

Researchers Close in on Technology for Making Renewable Petroleum

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2011) — University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide

Graduate student Janice Frias, who earned her doctorate in January, made the critical step by figuring out how to use a protein to transform fatty acids produced by the bacteria into ketones, which can be cracked to make hydrocarbon fuels. The university is filing patents on the process.

The research is published in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Frias, whose advisor was Larry Wackett, Distinguished McKnight Professor of Biochemistry, is lead author. Other team members include organic chemist Jack Richman, a researcher in the College of Biological Sciences' Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, and undergraduate Jasmine Erickson, a junior in the College of Biological Sciences. Wackett, who is senior author, is a faculty member in the College of Biological Sciences and the university's BioTechnology Institute.

Aditya Bhan and Lanny Schmidt, chemical engineering professors in the College of Science and Engineering, are turning the ketones into diesel fuel using catalytic technology they have developed. The ability to produce ketones opens the door to making petroleum-like hydrocarbon fuels using only bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.

"There is enormous interest in using carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbon fuels," Wackett says. "CO2 is the major greenhouse gas mediating global climate change, so removing it from the atmosphere is good for the environment. It's also free. And we can use the same infrastructure to process and transport this new hydrocarbon fuel that we use for fossil fuels."

The research is funded by a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-energy (ARPA-e) program, created to stimulate American leadership in renewable energy technology.

Wackett is principal investigator for the ARPA-e grant. His team of co-investigators includes Jeffrey Gralnick, assistant professor of microbiology and Marc von Keitz, chief technical officer of BioCee, as well as Bhan and Schmidt. They are the only group using a photosynthetic bacterium and a hydrocarbon-producing bacterium together to make hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide.

The U of M team is using Synechococcus, a bacterium that fixes carbon dioxide in sunlight and converts CO2 to sugars. Next, they feed the sugars to Shewanella, a bacterium that produces hydrocarbons. This turns CO2, a greenhouse gas produced by combustion of fossil fuel petroleum, into hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons (made from carbon and hydrogen) are the main component of fossil fuels. It took hundreds of millions of years of heat and compression to produce fossil fuels, which experts expect to be largely depleted within 50 years.

Don't sell that SUV yet .

 

[Ono'rach]

Woohoo! I'm gonna buy my V8 then

I wonder what the oil companies think of this?

 

[Techne]

Woohoo! I'm gonna buy my V8 then

I wonder what the oil companies think of this?

Nothing much once the public get hold of these bacteria and start growing them in their houses. No more need to drill the for oil to make petrol, just make a plan with the truck companies to swap fuel for bacteria at people's houses...

 

[agerbon]

That's just lovely now we going to have the ability to possibly suffocate all plants.

 

[spiderz]

That's just lovely now we going to have the ability to possibly suffocate all plants.

Lol...only if you kill all carbon dioxide producing animals & humans...

 

[agerbon]

Lol...only if you kill all carbon dioxide producing animals & humans...

The thing is that we going to get an exponential growth on the demand of the new oil source! The higher the demand gets the lower the quantity of CO2 in the air. In other words there will be an infinite growth potential in regards to the demand of CO2 which we only have a finite amount of in the planet.

 

[Techne]

Many plants grow optimally with around 1000-1500ppm CO2 in the air (hundreds of studies confirm this). We are currently at around 400ppm and at around 200ppm C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis in plants begins to shut down. So yes, there is a worry that we might remove too much CO2 from the atmosphere and completely shut down all plant life on earth.
Of course we can always buy bigger SUVs and make more coal stations if that happens .

 

[agerbon]

Many plants grow optimally with around 1000-1500ppm CO2 in the air (hundreds of studies confirm this). We are currently at around 400ppm and at around 200ppm C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis in plants begins to shut down. So yes, there is a worry that we might remove too much CO2 from the atmosphere and completely shut down all plant life on earth.

Plant life goes we go. This technology shouldn't be used.

Of course we can always buy bigger SUVs and make more coal stations if that happens.

Rofl

 

[henkc]

The thing is that we going to get an exponential growth on the demand of the new oil source! The higher the demand gets the lower the quantity of CO2 in the air. In other words there will be an infinite growth potential in regards to the demand of CO2 which we only have a finite amount of in the planet.

Actually not as much of a problem as it sounds. As with any renewable hydrocarbon fuel, the plants or bacteria use atmospheric CO2 as a carbon source which they then turn into a hydrocarbon. We use this as fuel in some or other processed form, burn it and put the CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Just one little semantic niggle. Petroleum (by definition) must come from rocks.