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Stories filed under: "biofuels"

DailyDirt: Magic Mushrooms

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fungus is everywhere. One of the largest organisms in the world is actually a huge fungus over 2 miles across, growing in Oregon. Fungi might have even been the first organisms to live on land, and mushrooms covered the earth’s surface after the world’s worst mass extinction event — feeding off all the dead plants and animals. So it might not be cockroaches that inherit the earth, but fungus. And if we ever find alien life, it could look more like mushrooms than humanoid life.

• Mushrooms are often overlooked, but they’re vitally important to the earth’s ecosystem — helping to decompose all kinds of organic (and some inorganic) matter, creating the soils for plants to grow in, as well as providing a source for numerous life-saving drugs for us. Fungi might help us clean up pollution and get rid of various toxic wastes, so someday there might be another meaning for the term “magic mushrooms.” [url]
• White truffles are a rare delicacy — only found in the wild — with prices higher than gold. Other kinds of these edible mushrooms are expensive but not as rare, and the industry supplying these delicacies is a secretive and sometimes shady business. [url]
• Fungus isn’t just for eating anymore. Certain fungus species can be used to produce jet fuel. It’s still a challenge to scale up biofuel production using fungus, but it could be easier to get biofuels from fungus than from microorganisms like algae or from plants that need more resources for cultivation. [url]

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Filed Under: biofuels, delicacies, ecosystem, food, fungus, life, mass extinction event, mushrooms, organisms, white truffles

DailyDirt: Fuel From The Sun

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Solar energy is actually extremely abundant (obviously not at night). The problem is capturing it all without covering huge areas of land (or sea) in an economical way and then storing the energy efficiently so that we can use it when we need it (ahem, like at night). Nature has developed photosynthesis, but if we’re going to rely more heavily on solar energy, we’re going to need to improve on plants or come up with other ways to create and store solar energy. Here are just a few projects that rely on the sun to make fuel.

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is working on an artificial photosynthesis process that could produce hydrogen as a fuel. These scientists are looking at molecules designed to absorb sunlight and create an electrical current that can break water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. [url]
• Natural photosynthesis isn’t all that efficient, so maybe researchers can augment plants with nanomaterials to give photosynthesis a little boost. Adding carbon nanotubes to chloroplasts can enhance photosynthesis by a measurable amount, but scaling this augmentation up might be tricky. Also, we should probably figure out how this actually works before we introduce this grey-green goo into the environment…. [url]
• The SOLAR-JET project is working on a chemical reactor that uses sunlight to power the production of syngas from just water and carbon dioxide. The syngas will be further reacted using the Fischer-Tropsch process to make a form of jet fuel (hence the name of the project). [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biofuels, carbon dioxide, chemistry, energy, fischer-tropsch, fuel, hydrogen, lawrence berkeley national laboratory, lbnl, nanomaterials, nanotech, nanotubes, photosynthesis, solar, solar-jet, syngas

DailyDirt: Microorganisms For Biofuel Production

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in biofuels due to growing concerns about global warming and rising oil prices. Biofuels are generally made by using chemicals, fermentation, and heat to break down the starches, sugars, and other molecules in plants to produce a fuel that can be used by vehicles. However, growing crops, making fertilizers and pesticides, and processing the plants into biofuel requires so much energy that it’s questionable whether biofuels are really as environmentally friendly as they might seem on the surface. Plenty of research is already under way to figure out ways to make biofuel production more efficient with the help of microorganisms. Here are just a few examples.

• Companies like Luca Technologies and Next Fuel are investigating the potential for microbial methane production from coal. Their approach is to stimulate native microorganisms that feed on underground hydrocarbon deposits to produce more methane. This could make it possible to extract fuel from coal reserves that have been too expensive to mine. [url]
• Researchers at Purdue University are studying how termite digestion could help improve biofuel production. They found that protists, which live in the termite’s gut, may play an important role in the insect’s digestion of woody material. Further research could lead to finding enzymes that could one day be used to help improve biofuel production. [url]
• Researchers at UC Berkeley have created a biodiesel fuel using a fermentation process that was once used to make explosives in World War I. The process uses a bacterium called Clostridium acetobutylicum (also known as the “Weizmann Organism”) to ferment sugar from various sources — including corn, sugar cane, molasses, woody biomass, or plant biomass — and produces acetone, butanol, and ethanol. The fermentation products are then converted into a mix of hydrocarbons that are similar to those in diesel fuel. The resulting fuel burns as well as petroleum-based fuel and has more energy per gallon than ethanol. [url]
• Researchers at UC San Diego have demonstrated for the first time that marine algae can also be used to produce biofuels like fresh water algae. They genetically engineered the marine alga Dunaliella tertiolecta to produce five different enzymes that could be used to convert biomass to fuel. Their finding suggests that algal biofuels could also be produced in the ocean, in the brackish water of tidelands, or even on otherwise unusable agricultural land with high salt content in the soil. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: algae, biofuels, biology, biotech, chemistry, energy, enzymes, fermentation, hydrocarbons, microorganisms
Companies: luca technologies, next fuel, purdue university, u+c

DailyDirt: If Only We Had A 'Mr. Fusion' Generator Handy…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Nuclear power seems to have gotten more intense scrutiny recently, so taking a look at other alternative energy technologies makes sense. There’s no silver bullet to solve the world’s energy problems, but exploring the diversity of ways to generate electricity and fuels is probably a good strategy. Here are some interesting discoveries that might help wean us off burning non-renewable hydrocarbons.

• MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor is experimenting with a new mode of operation for a tokamak-style reactor design. Scientists still don’t quite understand why it works, but it could help make fusion reactors operate more predictably and actually generate more energy than they consume. [url]
• Making biofuels from algae has received some significant funding, but the process of growing the right kind of algae and separating out the fuel is still at least 5-10 years away. A few hundred million bucks should be able to screen a few thousand varieties of algae for optimum biofuel production, though. [url]
• There’s also a type of fungus that can produce hydrocarbons similar to diesel fuel. This kind of fungus could also have been originally responsible for creating fossil fuels from ancient organic plant matter. [url]
• To discover more stuff on alternative energy, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: algae, biofuels, fungus, fusion, tokamak

DailyDirt: Biofuels From Tiny Organisms

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fossil fuels presumably came from decaying animal and plant matter, so it seems reasonable that there might be a way to replace old oils with freshly-grown biofuels. The trick is getting biological organisms to step up and start churning out fuels on a massive scale. Growing fuel from solar power, water and carbon dioxide would be a great solution, if the process didn’t require huge swaths of land and wasn’t insanely expensive. Here are just a few links on some ways to grow instead of drill for oil.

• The widespread use of algae to produce biofuels seems like a possibility to directly grow fuel from solar power. We just need about 10 million acres of algae vats that can soak up some sun and spit out fuel (in a cost-effective process). [url]
• Yet another strain of yeast can convert xylose to ethanol. But growing the sugar in the first place seems like an extra step… and ethanol doesn’t sound like the best biofuel available. [url]
• Algaes aren’t the only microorganisms that can grow biofuels — cyanobacteria can do it, too. But this super-secret process claimed by a small biotech firm sounds a bit too good to be true. [url]
• To discover more stuff on alternative energy, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: algae, biofuels, cyanobacteria, ethanol, fossil fuels