New Bacteria Replaces Need For Gasoline

[Mike Kayatta]

New Bacteria Replaces Need For Gasoline

Researchers at Tulane University have discovered a strain of bacteria that turns waste into car fuel.

If there's one word that has dominated the past ten years, it's "oil." Everyone needs it, and everyone has an opinion about where we should get it, how we should sell it, what we should do to get it, and when we'll run out of it. What if we could throw all of those questions in the trashcan and then use the paper they were written on to replace it? Well, in the words of my favorite mad scientist: Good news, everyone! Researchers at Tulane University have discovered a new bacterium with the ability to break down waste and plant matter into butanol.

"Butanol?" you ask in a condescending voice. "Surely you mean ethanol, my good man."

"Ho, ho!" I reply. "Take a seat and let me teach you a little something about the magical world of biofuels. And don't call me Shirley."

The first thing that comes to most people's minds when you're talking about biofuels is ethanol. Ethanol has worked wonders as a fuel component (there's some in your tank right now), but can't quite make the leap to an actual gasoline replacement. For one, ethanol has a very high miscibility with water, meaning that when the two interact, they blend uselessly together. This creates all sorts of issues with long-range pipe transportation, which, incidentally, is how gas gets to the pumps. Even if we had less trouble getting ethanol to where it needs to go, it still doesn't work well by itself, and definitely not in that grass-green 1995 Pontiac Bonneville you unsuccessfully try to get dates with.

Butanol, on the other hand, is amazingly similar to gasoline, giving it two major advantages over its better-known brother. Firstly, butanol can be used in your Bonneville (though it still won't get you any dates) and any other car currently on the road. Secondly, it's convenient to produce and easy to transport.

Now for the million-dollar question: Where the heck can we get it? Animal feces, obviously. David Mullin of Tulane University and his crack squad of science-loving henchmen discovered a new strain of Clostridium bacteria that can produce butanol directly and efficiently. They've named it TU-103, and it eats anything containing cellulose. That puts green plant matter and that old copy of the New York Times your mom left on the coffee table at the top of its menu.

According to Harshad Velankar, a post-doc whiz-kid working with Mullin: "In the United States alone, at least 323 million tons of cellulosic materials that could be used to produce butanol are thrown out each year." So, this stuff is essentially free? This can't possibly get any better, right? Wrong! Butanol is also more energy efficient than gasoline and less corrosive. Plus, its ability to be produced in oxygen rich environments means that mass production and distribution would be a cakewalk. Okay, now it just sounds like someone is making this up.

There you have it, folks, Mr. Strickland was officially wrong about Doc Brown. Maybe it's not crazy to think that some day soon we can just hook up a specialized garbage disposal to our gas tanks and power our cars. Now if we could only get our hands on that flux capacitor I've been hearing about...

Source: Geek.com [http://tulane.edu/news/releases/pr_082511.cfm]


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[Exterminas]

There probably is some catch to it.
Like with Soylent Green.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?

Done something pretty good.

By the way Mike, you're a really entertaining news writer.

 

[Stammer]

The thing that sucks is you see all sorts of really cool, new, inventive ways to give us new technologies. And it's always some really legit thing.

But after you hear about it once you never hear about it again and it's dropped off the radar for eternity.

I remember this one guy discovered if you mix microwaves with salt water it creates energy that surpasses that of even gasoline. That means you could power your car with salt water. They even showed a working model of a piston being driven by the new energy source.

That was like 6 or 7 years ago. Where the hell is it now?

 

[ImprovizoR]

Until every single drop of oil is gone there will be no replacement. There's too much money involved and those oil pricks don't give a shit about anything other than oil. There are already a lot of better and safer oil replacements. You can make fuel from marijuana. Henry Ford did it. And he said that it's so easy anyone can do it. It's probably why they banned that plant in the first place.

Humanity is stupid, and that's why I despise it. We still fight wars over oil, KNOWING that oil won't last forever. Smart people would embrace all of these oil replacements and push humanity into a new era of unlimited energy.

 

[Yopaz]

There probably is some catch to it.
Like with Soylent Green.

Of course. Burning butanol smells very similar to barf. No kidding.

OT: Whoopie doo. More gases to destroy our environment.

 

[AngryMongoose]

I was gonna rip a number of holes into this with that title and opening paragraph but... this actually seems pretty good.

One sec, lemme see if Goldacre has said anything about it...

Not yet.

Now to wait 4 or 5 years for this technology to begin to appear occasionally in some pumps in some proactive countries, with considerably more drawbacks than expected; assuming Big Oil don't kill it as soon as they can.

Until every single drop of oil is gone there will be no replacement. There's too much money involved and those oil pricks don't give a shit about anything other than oil. There are already a lot of better and safer oil replacements. You can make fuel from marijuana. Henry Ford did it. And he said that it's so easy anyone can do it. It's probably why they banned that plant in the first place.

That wasn't the Oil lobbyists, it was the linen and lumber lobbyists. Fucking Big Linen.

 

[uppitycracker]

Until every single drop of oil is gone there will be no replacement. There's too much money involved and those oil pricks don't give a shit about anything other than oil. There are already a lot of better and safer oil replacements. You can make fuel from marijuana. Henry Ford did it. And he said that it's so easy anyone can do it. It's probably why they banned that plant in the first place.

nah, that had more to do with the lumber industry, and the politicians involved being heavily funded by them. same basic thing, just different circumstances. but yeah, until they find a potential replacement that they can control and profit from the same way they do with oil, we won't see anything really take shape.

 

[USSR]

You know, I hear stuff like this every once in a while.
And I always have.

Why are so little being put to use..

 

[XMark]

I remember this one guy discovered if you mix microwaves with salt water it creates energy that surpasses that of even gasoline. That means you could power your car with salt water. They even showed a working model of a piston being driven by the new energy source.

That was like 6 or 7 years ago. Where the hell is it now?

That guy was either confused about thermodynamics or an outright fraud. It takes more energy to shoot it with microwaves than you can get from the burning reaction. The whole salt+microwaves thing was just a fancy wiggle around basic electrolysis of the water.

It's impossible to power anything that way because separating the oxygen and hydrogen will ALWAYS take more energy than you get from burning it.

 

[Fasckira]

You know, I hear stuff like this every once in a while.
And I always have.

Why are so little being put to use..

Yeah, keep hearing about "the next big thing" with regards to fuel but there always seems to be some catch like you'd need to carry around a swimming pool of the stuff to get you down the street or, in some cases, some of the materials dont actually exist.

I remember reading somewhere ages ago that the problem we have (I use we to refer to Society/Them/The human race, not directly you and I) is that we're unwilling to let go of the idea of the combustion engine. In reality we need to start rethinking the whole concept but theres just not enough funding into this field.

 

[vrbtny]

Take a Number 2..... for Science! Oh, and to fuel your car for a bit.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I'd like to think that every time someone comes up with an eco friendly power alternative, this happens.

Skip to 3:15

 

[Jonci]

Could always find its start in replacing ethanol. Ethanol is just a waste of good corn that could be used as food. Instead, keep the corn and toss the leftover stalks to the bacteria for some good ol' butanol.

 

[noobface]

Umm...

Sounds like its still gonna produce CO2 when burnt, so its still no good for solving the more important greenhouse gas problem. This just means we're gonna be able to warm up the planet without oil.

 

[Marik2]

You know, I hear stuff like this every once in a while.
And I always have.

Why are so little being put to use..

Cuz dem gas corporations are not gonna let another fuel source take their money away.

 

[zehydra]

And of course it will patented and purchased by the oil companies and never see the light of day.

(hopefully not)

 

[Fbuh]

There probably is some catch to it.
Like with Soylent Green.

No, what will happen is that the bacterium will get out of an enclosed facility and propagate all over the world, breaking down anything with cellulose and turning it into flammable materials. Pretty soon, the world will be a giant fiery desert. That would be a fitting apocalypse: we killed ourselves in order to drive cars.

Now, onto my big question: what about carbon emissions? Whatever you believe about global warming, it's still a fact that gasoline use results in carbon emissions which are bad for the planet.

 

[zehydra]

Umm...

Sounds like its still gonna produce CO2 when burnt, so its still no good for solving the more important greenhouse gas problem. This just means we're gonna be able to warm up the planet without oil.

right. This isn't really about addressing the issue of greenhouse gases, so much as it is about the issue of the rarity of oil. See, this could be a HUGE lifesaver to the US, because so much of the US depends on foreign oil, and without the need for foreign oil, that majorly cuts dependence on places like Saudi Arabia.