Greenenvironmental's Blog

Producing fuel with biology, a renewable alternative to petroleum.

The Energy crises has been going on for decades, and the spilling of massive amounts of petroleum has been happening for over a hundred years.  Our addiction to petroleum is like Heroin addiction, it makes us to forget the problems it causes while we are using;  from the pollution we create using it, to the pollution we create extracting,  refining,  and transporting it all over the world.   The advertising of automobile fuel efficiency standards is a good measure of the price of oil;  efficiency is ignored when oil is cheap, and only given lip service in car commercials when the price goes up.  If we wait too long to develop an alternative, the human race is done, and we may be done  anyway because of all the pollution we have already created.

The good news is that a lot of progress has been made to develop biologically based fuels and chemicals.   The production of  Ethanol, Butanol, and other alcohols through fermentation has been around since early in the last century, but besides moonshine, these processes were never developed adequately because petroleum was much cheaper.  However, we might  finally be realizing that it is better to provide jobs making fuel ourselves, than it is extracting this ‘premade’ material from the ground.   We have the ability to ‘grow’  the fuel and the other chemicals we need, or we can keep digging this hazardous substance out of the ground like grave-robbers dining on bones of the dead.

There are many groups working on utilizing bio-technology to produce a wide range of products, from genetically engineered crops, to motor fuels, specialty chemicals, and pharmaceutical products.  Biotechnology has been developed by medical companies, hazardous waste cleanup companies, and agriculture companies in order to produce valuable, and therefore profitable, products.  And we can now provide a method to clean up our pollution as well as generate useful products from it, like liquid fuels.  For instance, we must clear canals and waterways of seaweed and algae to keep them clear for boats and barges, but we can now turn this material into motor fuel; almost two for the price of one.

These developments are giving us the ability grow practically anything, and NASA is working on using bio-technology to allow people to live sustainably in space through a symbiosis with other organisms, like using human waste to help grow food, which in turn generates oxygen and consumes carbon dioxide.  The advancements produced by this research can lead to a symbiosis between ourselves and our planet, which will allow us to sustainably produce the products we require, while at the same time preserving the integrity of the only home we are ever likely to have.

Biotechnology gives us the opportunity to usher in a new age of human existence; one where we can create a world that is like a giant greenhouse, or national park, that we manage not only for our own profit, but for the long term viability of our environment.  This is what I have always believed  ‘dominion’ means, it is  like being a parent, not a slave owner.

Unfortunately, Biotechnology can also be used for evil purposes.  Round-up ready crops are genetically modified to allow them to tolerate more herbicides, and this not only kills non-modified crops, but allow us humans to be poisoned to an even greater degree.  Monsanto has also used this patent process to monopolize the seed market, and they have their own army of inspectors to ensure no one uses ‘their’ seeds; even when those patented genes are present through contamination from neighboring fields.  Farmers must buy their seeds from Monsanto, or else! (see movie: Food Inc.)

Until this point, we have relied on the resources our planet provides through millions, if not billions, of years of accumulation.  For example, the Ogallala aquifer is the main source of ‘geologic water’ that farms in the center of the United States rely upon, but when this resource is depleted, farming in the ‘bread basket’ is over(see movie: Blue Gold:water wars) .  Many areas resort to pipes to bring water in from other locations, but it is unlikely such a vast supply of water can be found or utilized to replace this resource.

We have become reliant on our ability to extract resources, and this has lead the concepts of sustainable or renewable, versus non-renewable or unsustainable.  For instance, Petroleum is a non-renewable resource because it has taken millions, if not billions, of years to accumulate.  This resource will ‘run out’ eventually, because at some point it will take more energy to extract the oil from the ground than the oil gives us in return; not because there is no more petroleum to be had.  Already we see signs of this happening as deep ocean drilling has a much higher energy cost than drilling on dry land in Texas or Saudi Arabia.  These costs have never included the environmental damage from our oil use, or the constant spilling of crude oil everywhere because companies like ExxonMobile and BP are too cheap to prepare for unforeseen events (at least unforeseen by their own corporate executives and ‘bean counters’).  The costs of oil use are socialized while the profits are privatized.

Floods, droughts, volcanoes, earthquakes, solar flares, wars, revolutions, and political upheavals all disrupt our ability to efficiently utilize resources, and this disruption often leads to starvation, diseases, and squaller.  What is worse than this disruption, is the destruction of renewable resources due to nonrenewable activities such as Chernobyl, Times Beach, Mo., or the Aral Sea.  The main threat to the existence of the human race is our dependence on our ability to ‘safely’ extract resources, and not our ability to create them in the first place.  ‘Be prepared’ is a motto for scouts and hazardous materials managers, but obviously not for the ‘extraction industries’.

Researchers have been able to isolated organisms that produce compounds similar to those found in crude oil, and this is helping to give us the ability to ‘grow’ these chemicals sustainably.  Further, newly developed chemical methods are allowing us to process harvested material, like algae and cellulose, to create high value products through ‘bioforming’, or the catalytic transformation of biomass into useful products.  Also, processes like Fermentation can be used to transform existing biomass into more useful products like butanol.

For many years these processes have been used to produce nuetraceutics, pharmaceuticals, and other biobased chemicals, but now genetic engineering has been able to transfer useful traits from one organism to another.  For example, some organisms can ferment cellulose into ethanol and butanol, while others are easily grown, and by combining these traits, we get easily grown organisms that produce the chemicals we want.  For example, a pulp mill in Taylor county Florida uses genetically engineered E coli to transform wood waste into ‘cellulostic ethanol’.

Selective Breeding and genetic engineering are being used to develop many different ‘biochemicals’.   Organisms can be used to produce compounds such as bio-acrylic for use in paints, adhesives, diapers and detergents [BFD: 2-18-10],  and polyethylene,and  ammonia can be produced biologically to replace fossil fuel based products [BFD 3-2-10].   Also, fermentation derived polyacetic acids(PLA) can replace petroleum based plastics[CEN 2-15-10], and  cellulose can be biologically converted into lactic acid, and furfural [CEN7-6-9],  as well as producing succinic acid from biomass for the aviation de-icing industry [BFD3-26-10].   Further, researchers  have found a way to convert apple and orange sugars into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF), a fuel with a 40 percent higher energy density than ethanol, and Biodiesel can be produced by using a biphasic acid/solvent reactor to convert sugars or cellulose into 5-(chlormethyl) fufural (CMF) (2-33-10CEN).  ( CEN = Chemical and Engineering news, and BFD = Biofuels Digest).

We can utilize organisms to directly manufacture products like olive oil, or we can use the transformative nature of organisms to convert naturally grown products into resources like ethanol.  Further, we can use the unique growth characteristics of various organisms to our advantage.  For instance, lichen grow on rock, and we can utilize lichen as a means to produce useful products without interfering with land needed for agriculture.  Phytoremediation is used to remove pollutants from impacted soils, like metals from mine  waste, and these organisms can then be turned into fuels while cleaning up areas that can’t be used for other purposes.

NASA is working on methods to produce fuels and other useful products in space while treating the wastes produced by humans, and this could allow people to live sustainably off of the Earth.  We have the potential to live in space without support from the Earth, therefore, we should be able to make the Earth itself sustainable for our own lives.  Like the bumper sticker says: ‘save the humans’

All of this depends on our ability to force our leaders to think about human survival rather than their own bank accounts.  While bankers and other ‘bean counters’ may believe that ‘derivatives’ are a ‘real’ thing,  some people also think that ‘pet rocks’ are a real thing.   The question is, what does it produce?   Short term gain has always comes at the expense of long term viability; consider the national debt which is based on the concept of buy now, pay later (and pay with interest).   However I have seen in my work with hazardous materials that the longer you wait to deal with a problem, like a leaking underground storage tank, the more expensive that problem is to deal with.

Before this latest oil spill, our leaders told us that off-shore oil drilling was going to end our dependence on foreign oil; as if these companies would not have been drilling there in the seventies if there was that  much oil to begin with.   Technology has improved, and has has allowed oil extraction in previously inaccessible areas, however, how many oil fields can there possibly be remaining on the planet that have we have not already exploited?  Some estimates are that the total amount of oil in the Alaskan arctic would allow us to drive around for a week based on our current usage.

Politicians, particularly republicans, thought that giving private companies the OK to ‘drill early, and drill often’ was going to be the answer to our energy problems.  But will Sarah Pallin help clean up the spilled oil, or help the people around the Gulf  recover from a disaster that she and her party encouraged?  This is a disaster we environmentalists warned them would happen, but as usual they laughed at us, with people like Bill O’Reilly calling us stupid tree huggers.  These people are trying to prevent us from interfering with the rights of corporate executives to extract profit from our nation, and isn’t that what Benedict Arnold did?  ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ is a concept that needs to be reborn, otherwise us ‘regular guys’ must ‘eat cake’ with a ‘trickling down’ of crude oil for the icing- Bon a petite.