CO2 consuming bacteria produces fuel

forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2016/05/29/harvard-scientist-engineers-a-superbug-that-inhales-co2-produces-energy/#4ff2faf05a9d

his month at the University of Chicago, he announced his bug converts sunlight ten times more efficiently than plants.

“Right now we’re making isopropanol, isobutanol, isopentanol,” he said in a lecture to the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. “These are all alcohols you can burn directly. And it’s coming from hydrogen from split water, and it’s breathing in CO2. That’s what this bug’s doing.”
So over the last 18 months, Nocera worked with biologists from Harvard Medical School to engineer a bacteria called Ralston eutropha to consume hydrogen and CO2 and convert them into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy molecule used by natural organisms. Building on discoveries made earlier by Anthony Sinskey, a professor of microbiology at MIT, they inserted more genes to convert the ATP into alcohol and cause the bacteria to excrete it.
“The proofs just came in yesterday. So you guys are getting it hot off the press,” he said on May 18. “And it’s going to be embargoed in Science, and two weeks from now you’re going to hear a lot.”
A one-liter reactor full of Nocera’s bacteria can capture 500 liters of atmospheric CO2 per day, he said. For every kilowatt hour of energy they produce, they’ll remove 237 liters of CO2 from the air.

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>inb4 another oxygen catastrophe

This shit is super exciting if it ever became commercially viable.

Just like solar panels but instead of electricity, it would produce storable fuels.

There's other approaches too, like e-diesel and the US Navy's work on synthetic gasoline.

what do they do with the alcohol when they're done? burn it and put CO2 right back where they got it

why can't they make a bacteria that makes solid bricks of carbon?

this shit is always scams from departments begging for more money

It's still CO2-neutral gasoline, assuming CO2 neutral sources of energy to grow the bacteria, which would be amazing.

>Hurr I don't care about the energy, just fix the carbon
Well don't burn it then, fuck.

Or crack and pyrolyze it if you want a chunk of carbon so goddamn bad.

Sure, but consider the alternative: you use energy (and generate CO2) to get oil out of the ground which needs to be refined (and generate CO2) before it's ultimately burned for fuel, which releases CO2.

Here, at the very least, you can make something that's more or less redox neutral. The problem will be scaling the process.

And what do they do with a brick of carbon? Burn it, and CO2 goes right back.

It's not about removing CO2 completely, but recycling it

>The problem will be scaling the process.
Also the cheap, CO2 neutral energy source to manufacture, power, maintain, etc.

Don't worry jews make sure it will not spread. So they can keep sell you expensive oil

>jews
>oil

It's not really CO2 neutral, since it requires fucking hydrogen.

I know that most H2 is currently obtained as a byproduct of fossil fuels. However, H2 can be obtained in a CO2 neutral way via electrolysis.

>However, H2 can be obtained in a CO2 neutral way via electrolysis.
Electrolysis requires shitloads of electrical power. Most places are a very long way away from carbon-neutral electricity.

Indeed. Which is why the hydrogen economy was always just a diversion. We need clean CO2 neutral electricity first.

Is this a meme discovery?

or better we could become space faring and liberate ourselves from these backwards terrestrial problems.

yes

>Which is why the hydrogen economy was always just a diversion.
Not really.
The efficiency of Oil -> petrol -> ICE -> Work is godawful. If you're in a situation where battery electric vehicles don't work (no charging, long trips, etc), it makes sense to use a fuel that can be produced from electricity. The issues with the hydrogen economy are transport and handling issues.

>We need clean CO2 neutral electricity first.
We need CO2 neutral electricity, but it doesn't have to come first; we shouldn't try to solve our problems one at a time.

>We need CO2 neutral electricity, but it doesn't have to come first; we shouldn't try to solve our problems one at a time.
True.

>implying any space exploration won't just be temporary colonies until they can get back to Eartj

Could you elaborate?

not if we master artificial environments. fuck coming back to this dirt ball.

literally nobel prize incoming

It's fine. You'll probably live long to see your silly notion refuted.

this might mitigate the co2 problem slightly but it's not gonna change the o2 depletion dilemma. we all die in 2500 mark my words

plant more weed

nonsense, there is no reason to believe we cannot bottle environmental processes that exist on earth. see: esa's melissa project.

...

Paper isn't out yet. It's not commercially viable yet though. It has interesting science to it though.

plant more seaweed

Earlier PNAS article

pnas.org/content/112/8/2337

I haven't read it yet, just linking.

This seems like it has more potential for carbon sequestration than for energy storage. Not sure how cheap it would have to be compared to batteries to ever be used at such a lower efficiency.

Trees are basically solid bricks of carbon...

It's more like 50%~

Also the trees don't really sequester it that effectively. If humanity had access to a lot of energy, through fusion/major advances in solar, we could sequester a lot of carbon and get Earth back to a more stable environment.

It's why global warming fears are stupid. Progress is more important than caution when it comes to energy. Keeping the economy going and growing helps fund the switch to cleaner sources.

your mom is a solid brick of carbon

Actually, she's mostly CO2 by now...

RIP mom

posting popsci should be a bannable offense desu

How is it popsci?

It's being published in science this week

I bet you're a newfag who doesn't know what popsci is, based on your post, and you are just trying to fit in.

rip in pieces

Atheism is pseudoscience nigga

It's totally dumbed down, which is expected since most people don't know shit about how algae use sunlight and CO2 for energy. But they leave out a lot of important details, like how you often have to put more energy in to these things than you get out.

AFAIK, the limestome / lime method with high water pressure injection into basalt has more promise.