GMO bacteria that crap crude oil

sicophiliac · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 9:10 pm Post subject: GMO bacteria that crap crude oil

link

Just found this article to be kind of interesting and thought id post it here. Cant say if it'll ever come to anything useful but its certainly an entertaining possibility for some sort of sustainable liquid fuel source.

129shot · Coal Joined: Mar 25, 2008 Posts: 6

I wonder, if only for a moment, what the world would be like if this worked on a large scale.

Cashmere · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Mar 27, 2008 Posts: 1971

This is not substantially different that ethanol, including the same hurdles.

If it was easy to break down cellulose in a fermentation process, then ethanol would be something to consider - you could literally feed wood in and get alcohol out.

This is the same deal, except instead of CCOH out you get CCCCCCCC out.

Call me in 50 years when they get the bugs worked out. Crying or Very sad

_________________
Massive Human Dieoff must occur as a result of Peak Oil. Many more than half will die. It will occur everywhere, including where you live. If you fail to recognize this, then your odds of living move toward the "going to die" group.

thylacine · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 120

There are some interesting comments from the public at the end of the article (and some really stupid ones).

mos6507

canis_lupus

It'd be fun if they put together systems that homeowners could put their own grass clippings in get 25 gallons per month out of it.

Certainly is pretty neat. Beats the hell out of standing behind a restaurant in the rain (or snow) pumping waste veggie oil out of a dumpster in the middle of the night to make biodiesel, that's for sure.

Electric_Economy_2025 · Heavy Crude Joined: Apr 01, 2008 Posts: 143

grampybone · Tar Sands Joined: May 31, 2008 Posts: 82

Very interesting article.

jdumars

I wonder if anyone ever thinks about the endgame of these technologies. What have we used our abundance of energy for so far? Pretty much the single-minded destruction of the Earth and ourselves. So if this solution works on a large scale, we can fark things up even longer and faster and cheaper.
_________________
Dismantle globally, renew locally!

quizz

I'm not sure of the credibility of this story, but it raises the usual concerns of GMO's: Klebsiella planticola--The Gene-Altered Monster That Almost Got Away

mos6507

sicophiliac

Quizz makes a valid point that any sort of serious GMO research and utilization must be approached with extreme caution. However I think its unlikely for evolutionary reasons that these organisms would survive in the natural environment and devastate the ecosystem. Say we have a bacteria that produces crude oil or extra alcohol as a metabolic waste product. More alcohol which has chemical energy would imply a less efficient metabolism and thus make the microorganism less fit to compete with its counter parts which squeeze out as much chemical energy as they can from decomposition and then excrete not much more than CO2 and a little methane. Likewise with the bacteria that produce crude oil, the article stated it was not that hard to manipulate the genetics to get them to produce crude oil vs the fatty oils the bacteria already produce. Is it not reasonable to assume that perhaps nature had already tried this through random genetic mutation and for reasons of metabolic inefficiency it was sorted out through natural selection?

CharlieCHC · Coal Joined: Jun 17, 2008 Posts: 1

Aaron

Treebeard sighs in frustration... picks up boulder... eyes humanity with thinly veiled contempt...

Why stop at trees?

Oxygen burns ya know... and it's everywhere man... I mean everywhere.

Let's burn it.

I'll look around here and see what else we can burn after the O₂ runs out.

Do whales or baby seals burn?

I bet they do...
_________________
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.

Praise HawkMan

hiperhiper · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 44