The Four-eyed Journal » Renewable energy

A step towards creating renewable petroleum

jhay — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:25:37 +0000

In the vampire vs werewolves sci-fi movie Underworld, vampires have developed the technology to create artificial blood, thus eliminated or minimized their need to go after humans whenever they needed to feed.

Humans and vampires had managed to live in a peaceful co-existence. Or so it appeared.

The same thing could arise once the US has fully developed the technology to create artificial petroleum. Such a technology has now taken root from the study of researchers from the University of Minnesota in the US, led by graduate student Janice Frias whose team has just figured out how to create ketones using bacteria, sunlight and 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.

Their study funded by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-energy will appear in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

And even as this news is spread in print and on the Internet, the University of Minnesota is filing patents on the process.

If the study would progress as it is envisioned, perhaps within a decade or two, the US would now have a technology to produce its own petroleum thanks, again, to bacteria, sunlight and CO2.

Perhaps by then, the American thirst for oil would be tamed. This would then minimize the need for their active involvement in the Middle East, assuming by that time that the region’s oil reserves have not yet run dry.

Though I am uncertain how OPEC members would react to such a situation that the US with its artificial petroleum technology would become one of their competitors. I am also uncertain as to whether the US would be willing to share such a technology (wishful thinking, I know) with the rest of the world but since a patent for it has already been filed, then it would become another way for them to maintain their global economic dominance.

Nevertheless, it’s still good news that renewable petroleum is much closer to becoming a reality than fiction. As more sources of alternative energy become available, the more chances we have of saving our plant from destruction while we continue on with our civilization.

3Tier Group’s Map of Solar and Wind Energy hot-spots

jhay — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:34:26 +0000

We’ve seen many maps about global forest cover, or what’s left of it, glacial maps, but now a new world map has just been completed that will help push the adoption of renewable energy systems world wide.

The new world map shows the best spots in the world to build solar or wind power plants or systems and is the product of Seattle-based 3Tier Group two-year work of taking satellite snapshots of sun patterns on every part of the Earth’s surface.

It shows how much sunlight or solar radiation a portion of the Earth’s surface received over the past 10 13 years indicating where the best places are to build solar or wind power plants.

The newly released global solar map and dataset is based on 10 to 13 years of half-hourly, high-resolution visible satellite imagery collected from nine different satellites, dispersed across the globe and covering the entire surface of the earth. Satellite imagery was processed using a uniform methodology based upon a combination of in-house and peer-reviewed research documents supported by the global atmospheric science community.

3Tier Group will now market this dataset to renewable energy developers, financiers, and governments in order to help them in deciding whether to build a solar or wind power facility in an area inside their territory. It helps in decision-making and planning for the future of renewable energy.

Hopefully this initiative would really help in pushing for the adoption of renewable energy world wide.

E. coli strain engineered to produce biodiesel directly from biomass

jhay — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:11:57 +0000

We commonly know the E. coli (Escherichia coli) as the bacteria that can cause serious food poisonings and a PR and marketing disaster for food manufacturers. But this only caused by a strain of E. coli called O157:H7, the rest of other strains are harmless and in fact have been living inside the intestines of warm-blooded organisms like cattle and humans.

Just recently, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered a strain of E. coli to produce bio diesel fuel directly from biomass without the aid of additional chemical modifications.

“Biosynthesis of microbial fatty acids produces fatty acids bound to a carrier protein, the accumulation of which inhibits the making of additional fatty acids,” Steen says. “Normally E. coli doesn’t waste energy making excess fat, but by cleaving fatty acids from their carrier proteins, we’re able to unlock the natural regulation and make an abundance of fatty acids that can be converted into a number of valuable products. Further, we engineered our E. coli to no longer eat fatty acids or use them for energy.”

After successfully diverting fatty acid metabolism toward the production of fuels and other chemicals from glucose, the JBEI researchers engineered their new strain of E. coli to produce hemicellulases — enzymes that are able to ferment hemicellulose, the complex sugars that are a major constituent of cellulosic biomass and a prime repository for the energy locked within plant cell walls.

Plant waste, such as those from the food industry can now be a source of bio diesel fuel thanks to this engineered strain of E. coli. Another use would be to directly farm plant matter, the kind that we humans don’t use for food, and we have ourselves a source of bio diesel that is renewable, sustainable and potentially cheaper.

Hopefully, this would not lead into a genetic nightmare or be used by the West to retain control over the fuel-producing industry. Then again this might be just another exercise in wishful thinking.