Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol - Times Online

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â??Ten years ago I could never have imagined Iâ??d be doing this,â?� says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. â??I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to â?? especially the ones coming out of business school â?? this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.â?�

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs â?? very, very small ones â?? so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

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Any growers looking to invest profits this company looks pretty promising.

I think using microbes to "ferment" waste products into fuels is going to be one of the most important sources of energy in the future, especially for transportation fuels.

There are already a few ways to do this with different kinds of microbes, and the cool thing is that most of them involve turning waste into fuel, so it solves two problems at once.

My local sewage treatment plant has a bunch of "methane digesters" for processing sewage sludge. The sludge goes into huge tanks that are inoculated with microbes and heated up a bit, and about half the waste that goes in is converted to methane gas, which is that same stuff as "natural gas" that comes from the utiltiy company. The plant burns the methane to heat the tanks and also runs an electrictiy generator. They generate enough electricity for 80% to 90% of the treatment plant's energy usage. They actually have more digester capacity than what they need for the sludge they get from water treatment, so they truck in crap from dairies and blood from slaughterhouses in order to boost their methane production. Soon they will have enough gas production to meet all of their own needs and sell electricity back to the utility company.

Another thing happening in my local area is that the landfill is being built with a methane recovery system in place. As microbes slowly break down organic matter in a landfill, they release methane. The landfill operators are capturing it and using it for electricity generation. They are adding a liquification facility, and the plan is that they will soon run their enitre fleet of garbage trucks on liquified natural gas that comes out of the landfill.

And then there is always the ethanol fermentation process that turns sugars into ethanol fuel. That one has been problematic because it is disrupting the food suply by diverting food crops for fuel production. But eventually they should either be able to engineer a bug or create an enzyme that will convert the non-food cellulose in corn stocks or other fiberous, woody waste into sugars that can be fermented into ethanol. I'm all about turning waste into fuel and other valueable things, not so much about taking food and turnig that into fuel.

This idea of making microbes that convert waste material directly into oil or other fuels is interesting. My only concern with this is that it be done safely. The microbes used now for methane and ethanol are all naturally occuring in the environment. I would hope that these guys would not engineer an oil-producing bacterium that could survive in the environment --- wouldn't want some rampant engineered oil-bug to escape and digest the whole biospehere into oil.

This whole concept just screams b-movie creature feature.

Interesting and promising though if it is done right and they keep it in check.

"Oh No! One of them got a taste of human flesh! RUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNN!!!!"

Ever seen a movie where we take bio-genetics to far and everything goes to hell and zombis walk the earth or people become insane. Why keep fucking with things, I don't understand it. Why do we play god without knowledge of what we are going to create for sure. We should leave things the way they are untill something, SAFE can be created. We keep taking the easy way out everytime, look what happenes, unintended consequences. Its great they came out with this idea but we should really consider what we are doing.