University of Rochester Press Releases — Good news indeed, if true.
Waste products such as grass clippings and wood chips—once thought too difficult to turn into ethanol—may soon be fodder for hungry, gene-tweaked bacteria.
The findings in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may empower scientists to engineer ethanol-producing super-organisms that can make clean-burning fuel from the nation’s one billion unused tons of yearly biomass production.
“This is the first revelation of how a bacterium chooses from its more than 100 enzymes to break down a particular biomass,” says David H. Wu, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester. “Once we know how a bacterium targets a particular type of biomass, we should be able to boost that process to draw ethanol from biomass far more efficiently that we can today.”
Ethanol holds the promise of a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels, but deriving it from plants is difficult. Producing it from corn is the easiest method, but doing so on a large scale would drive up the price of corn, corn starch, and even tangential foods like beef, since cows are fed on corn—not to mention all the energy spent fertilizing, maintaining, and harvesting a crop like corn.
They’ve sexed (guess this post won’t make it to the Conservapaedia) it up with “high efficiency” and genetic engineering, but economic amounts of fuel have been extracted from garbage for decades. It’s a win-win situation, because garbage is going to give off those gasses anyway, and guess what, they’re stronger greenhouse agents than the CO2 plus H2O which would arise after they are burnt.
Ooooh.. Nice!
I wonder if they will ever be able to recover the energy required to haul the garbage to the landfills in the first place. Garbage trucks are not known for their fuel efficiency, and then when it’s trucked or barged long distances then the fuel equation goes off the goofball end of the scale.
And no, I ain’t no damned cowboy, and the fifteen second rule is irrevelant ’cause this is my first time tonight
Bury your head in the sand and wake up to your front room flooded by rising sea levels?
There are going to be lots of winners and losers in the race to break the link between food and fuel to replace biofuels. But if half as much energy and cash had already been spent on breaking this link as on searching for new sources of oil we wouldn’t be in this mess
Just Great. Wait until it gets out in the environment and starts chewing on wooden houses, fences, barns, tree bark, etc. I’m sure they’ll say, “Oops, we’re sorry.” It’s about time for our first environmental disaster from bioengineering.
#5. Not to worry, the agribiz lobby will kill it because it could compete with their precious (and heavily subsidized) corn ethanol, just like they want to block the import of Brazilian sugar ethanol.
So long as Iowa has the first caucus, they will get their way.
Wood-eating ethanol-producing bacteria loose in the environment. Reminds me of Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine in a way. The real trouble would start when it got loose in congress and began eating the members’ heads left and right. Would it metabolize plastic? Look out Hollywood.
This is going to put a lot of people out of work in india & south east asia & mexico & africa – ya know, the ones that pick through the garbage like some kinda 3rd world easter egg hunt – they’re gonna be pissed off