Over at the University of Texas, they're breeding bugs. Buuuugs.
Well, actually cyanobacteria, but "bugs" sounds better.
Anyway, what they're breeding for is bacteria that excrete sugars and easily processed forms of cellulose. Ones that can be readily converted to fuels.
What this means is more fuel created per acre, fuel created without using either land or fresh water that would otherwise be used for growing crops, and, let's not forget, a fuel creation means that can be done, at least on a small scale, in any frackin' wet place that can take the load and gets any sun. Not a lot of sun. Any sun. After all, Fresnel lenses and mirrors really are pretty cheap. So concentrating a whole bunch of sun on, say, squares of a Louisiana parking lot that is kept flooded with brackish water should work just fine. And, in some cases, it may even make sense to provide artificial or piped in supplementary light to areas that get lots of waste heat and will "feed" the microorganisms partially on that. Say, the area on top of a bakery.
It will take some expertise and effort and there will be lots of trial and error involved, but you get the idea.
Another factor is that this looks like it will create yet another round of plantation agriculture. Look to see horrific worker abuses in the future from massive, corporate owned pond farms and tank complexes destroying human lives to cut that last tenth of a penny off their production costs.
I've written about related research before, most notably my note about gliocladium roseum. Now that microbiologists understand what to look for and breed I suspect that we'll be seeing hundreds of species of microorganism being put forward, which is wonderful.
In fact, I wonder if the best solution for most people will turn out to be some "cocktail" of several microorganisms so as to keep the tanks more resistant to changing conditions and better able to fight off unwanted "intruder" microorganisms coming in and bullying out the desired ones. After all, we're seeing folks breed bugs for maximum energy retention, which, by definition means that that they're, shall we say, kinda fat, and therefore, not up to fighting off less aggressive energy burners.
A tank of the organisms we want are kinda like a village full of couchpotatoes who just sit around and eat steak and cheesecake all day. Steak and cheesecake that we provide. People chosen precisely because they were the ones who moved around least and got the fattest. So what happens when a bunch of Mike Tyson and Bad Xena bugs decide that they want some of that steak and cheesecake?
So I'm guessing that corporations will go for their usual monoculture bullshit, complete with expensive and resource hungry "narrow range" control while homebrewers will discover a community of various bugs that may not yield as high (in theory) as the "pure" cultures of the corporate tanks but will be a lot more tolerant of the occasional intrusion of uncleaned air, water, and food.
But what's the bottom line? In about five years we can expect to see significant fuel production coming from tailored microorganisms. In about another three it should be enough to have a significant economic and international policy impact. In fifteen (if we all survive that long as a society), we should see petrochemical producers getting caught moving beyond disinformation (like the recent Exxon takeover of a biofuels study group such that it then announced that biofuels just weren't practical) to flat out sabotage.
Because by then they should be running scared.
-Rustin
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.