Renewable Fuel Straight Out of Sci-Fi
Professor Pengchen (Patrick) Fu is using cyanobacteria to produce ethanol from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. I got to see this first-hand at Wired NextFest. This is exceedingly cool since ethanol, a useful fuel, burns cleanly to produce energy, carbon dioxide, and water. See the pattern? It’s a sustainable cycle, essentially storing solar energy in a fuel that we already know and love. There is very little waste in this process, and it’s quite harmless, in the form of oxygen and some dead bacteria at the end of their natural life cycles. This is already cool enough that I think I need to sit down for a while and take it all in, but there is more! In case the photo didn’t make things amply evident, let me state clearly: Pengchen (Patrick) Fu has come up with a possible solution for renewable energy using large, glowing cylinders full of bubbling green liquid. These things look like they came straight off the set of a science fiction movie. You know, the good kind, with lots of explosions.
[update]
Some more details: The tubes shown in the pic each yield about 5 grams of ethanol per day. Fu expects improvements to this yield after more research into the process. He also talked about setting up kiloliter-sized tanks of this stuff for larger output.
[speculations]
5 grams of ethanol contains about 134 kilojoules of energy. If we had solar panels instead, assuming about 8 kWh/m^2/day, and 40% efficient solar panels, we would need about 116 square centimeters of solar panel to get the same yield (an 11 cm x 11 cm patch would do). I would estimate that Fu’s process is therefore less than one order of magnitude less efficient than the best solar cells at the moment. That’s not shabby, considering that the energy is stored in a fuel instead of a (costly) battery. Deeper vats of the stuff would mean more sunlight gets absorbed by the cyanobacteria, so the kiloliter tanks would probably have much better efficiency.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
I’ll believe it when I see it and when it works.
I’m sceptical but if the guy can actually make it work using an easy process to create a useful fuel, kudos to him
We will probably see a big oil company buy this and put it in the fridge for the next 50 years. I’ll be surprised to see this being launched as a substitute for oil in my lifetime.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
I agree fully, jack. Very sceptical, but in theory its very interesting. If it is possible to realize on a grand industrial scale, where the production is greater than the consumtion, and it is economical… then it will work. As for now, ethanol is a dead a dead and the insane promotion of it is actually destroying the very environment its supposed to “save”.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Not to mention that Ethanol is not as great as governments and media would like us to believe. It is less pollutant, but it’s not as fuel-efficient as standard gasoline, thereby requiring more of it to produce the same result, which could potentially make it more polluting in the end since you have to burn so much more.
Now this would make it a lot easier to produce…current production methods would make it highly inadvisable and would really make it cost you more than gasoline does when at the pump.
I don’t know the figures for how much current Ethanol drivers have to spend, but one has to remember that’s on a relatively small-scale using what ethanol is currently produced at normal levels. Ramping up to replace all oil dependency for the entire country would cause those prices to soar. So it burns faster-meaning you have to buy it more often, and it would end up costing more per gallon to buy = bad alternate fuel choice.
Now I do agree that we need to nix our dependency on fossil fuels and search for less-polluting alternatives, I just do not think that Ethanol - in regards to it’s issues today - is the way to go. I personally feel that we should look at moving beyond internal combustion for transportation entirely, but too many fuel companies have too much to lose dollar-wise to ever allow that to happen.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
The main problems with these kinds of systems is that most of the energy from the sunlight ends up keeping the living bits alive, so the efficiency at producing useful stuff is normally only about 1-2%
Solar cells are actually a lot more efficient (5-40+%), but unfortunately solar cells don’t self-assemble!
September 17th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Pure ethanol burns 100% clean. When mixed with gasoline and other elements (a-la E85) it produces formaldahyde when combusted, which is a worse pollutant than lone gasoline produces.
Ethanol from corn is a highly inefficient and frankly laughable source of renewable energy. The only reason it’s gaining so much traction is because it’s subsidised highly by idiots who are buying into the farm lobby.
It is discouraging that the article, and others I’ve read, don’t allude to exactly how much can feasibly be produced by this process. The raw materials are, of course, so cheap they might as well be free. However, what is the efficiency turnaround from whatever sunlight analog they use, to the end product?
One encouraging part is the CO2 created in the generation of energy for the sunlight analog can be used to create the end product, making fossil fuels much more environmentally sound. However, if there’s more than a 40% loss of energy when using fossil fuels and their byproducts to fuel the process detailed above, then the system needs development. I suspect that the loss will be much greater than 40%.
September 17th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
[…] but it’s really hard to see it happening to me. But you can see a picture and the source at Refactor Reality Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
September 17th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
The more I cruse the internet, the more energy breakthroughes I see! I love it! Keep it up smarties and smartesses!
September 17th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Has anyone see the movie “Rare Bird” with William Hurt.
There are similar objects to these in that movie in a tunnel next to the restaurant.
If Hollywood can do it, we can too!
Looks great to me.
PS- Don’t miss this movie; it is a little sleeper.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:57 am
I am keen on any new approaches - it keeps me sane! Thought this might be interesting on practical applications on new technologies: http://wattwatt.com/pulses/92/large-scale-fuel-cells/
September 18th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
it’s a miracle! another energy breakthrough!!! hooray..
now what?
September 19th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I read an article (in Pop Sci i think) about a company trying to do this same thing. It sounds good but in reality the number of those tubes it would require to run a car on ethanol is incredible. That tube there would probably make about a drop of ethanol. The said company has been in operation for a couple of years and has only produced enough to fill the bottom of a beaker.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:08 am
All nice and dandy, but this technology will never be adopted until the world runs out of oil. As long as there is oil left, there is profit to be made from selling oil as long as no alternative is allowed to prosper.
Big oil companies control our government through a system of open bribery. So there are only several ways to get off of carbon fuels:
1. Use up the world’s supply of oil. This is what we are doing now. As the supply diminishes, prices will skyrocket. Our economies will fail. The rich oil execs will become even more obscenely wealthy, and the middle class will become impoverished.
2. Violently overthrow the government. Replace all the politicians currently in office with people who actually care about the well-being of the citizens. As elections are well-controlled by the two dominate parties, this can only be accomplished with a violent revolution. Given how fat, lazy, and cowardly Americans are, this is extremely unlikely.
3. Kill all the oil execs and their families. If the oil execs can’t make a profit or leave the companies to their heirs, then the head of the beast is effectively severed. Then many smaller businesses could find niches in the power vacuum created.
Almost certainly, option 1 will play out and we all will get screwed in the end.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:58 am
Presumably, these bacteria need energy to reproduce? I’m not saying it can’t be done, but what are the inputs to this system? Are there any further details?
September 24th, 2007 at 9:36 am
there is a company called green star products that is doing this with algae farms now, except I think they are turning it into biodiesel instead of ethanol, and they have some plants running, I think in south africa. They are a publicly traded company. Also, there is talk of farming the algae out of lakes or oceans, instead of using tubes on land.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Great post!
If the economics don’t work, recycling efforts won’t either.
As our little contribution to make this economics of recycling more appealing, http://LivePaths.com blogs about people and companies that make money selling recycled or reused items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources.
October 7th, 2007 at 2:56 am
I just have to have a quick say on the ethanol subject.
The single worst thing about ethanol is that people are using valuable land that was growing food to grow fuel, which has in fact led to a rise in grain prices all over the world. Seeing as this planet is getting pretty close to it’s maximum food output anyway, it seems like the single most stupid thing we can do is to grow fuel instead of food.
Makes me angry enough to train to be a speacial forces OP just so I can go kill certain people…
October 9th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Niger delta i mean southern Nigeria is suffering,they cannot even go fishing,cultivate etc and i am from that region
October 15th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] Pengchen Fu is using cyano-bacteria to produce ethanol from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide! This ethanol can then be burned cleanly to produce energy, […]
January 24th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
None…
None…
June 10th, 2008 at 6:10 am
double your gas mileage…
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September 23rd, 2008 at 11:41 am
This is idea, although in its infancy is absolutely fantastic.
Yes we are all thinking right now “ethanol is not the way to go” but that is not because it is not a good fuel, it is because of the way we are harvesting it. As others mentioned, corn is a horrible way to produce ethanol and only makes sense to people who don’t understand how our $5billion corn subsidies work(or rather, don’t work).
What needs to be done is a blitzkrieg of research into the genetics of these cyanobacteria and engineer their genetic make-up to produce as much ethanol as possible.
Think of bacteria as little biochemical factories that can self replicate, if we can hijack their operating system to do our bidding it becomes a form of biological nanotechnology.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
ETHANOL-PRODUCTION WITH BLUE-GREEN-ALGAE
A SOLUTION AFTER PEAK-OIL AND OIL-CRASH
University of Hawai’i Professor Pengchen “Patrick” Fu developed an innovative technology, to produce high amounts of ethanol with modified cyanobacterias, as a new feedstock for ethanol, without entering in conflict with the food and feed-production .
Fu has developed strains of cyanobacteria — one of the components of pond scum — that feed on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and produce ethanol as a waste product.
He has done it both in his laboratory under fluorescent light and with sunlight on the roof of his building. Sunlight works better, he said.
It has a lot of appeal and potential. Turning waste into something useful is a good thing. And the blue-green-algae needs only sun and wast- recycled from the sugar-cane-industry, to grow and to produce directly more and more ethanol. With this solution, the sugarcane-based ethanol-industry in Brazil and other tropical regions will get a second way, to produce more biocombustible for the worldmarket.
The technique may need adjusting to increase how much ethanol it yields, but it may be a new technology-challenge in the near future.
The process was patented by Fu and UH in January, but there’s still plenty of work to do to bring it to a commercial level. The team of Fu foundet just the start-up LA WAHIE BIOTECH INC. with headquarter in Hawaii and branch-office in Brazil.
PLAN FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ETHANOL PLANT
Fu figures his team is two to three years from being able to build a full-scale
ethanol plant, and they are looking for investors or industry-partners (jointventure).
He is fine-tuning his research to find different strains of blue-green algae that will produce even more ethanol, and that are more tolerant of high levels of ethanol. The system permits, to “harvest” continuously ethanol – using a membrane-system- and to pump than the blue-green-algae-solution in the Photo-Bio-Reactor again.
Fu started out in chemical engineering, and then began the study of biology. He has studied in China, Australia, Japan and the United States, and came to UH in 2002 after a stint as scientist for a private company in California.
He is working also with NASA on the potential of cyanobacteria in future lunar and Mars colonization, and is also proceeding to take his ethanol technology into the marketplace. A business plan using his system, under the name La Wahie Biotech, won third place — and a $5,000 award — in the Business Plan Competition at UH’s Shidler College of Business.
Daniel Dean and Donavan Kealoha, both UH law and business students, are Fu’s partners. So they are in the process of turning the business plan into an operating business.
The production of ethanol for fuel is one of the nation’s and the world’s major initiatives, partly because its production takes as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it dumps into the atmosphere. That’s different from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which take stored carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, for a net increase in greenhouse gas.
Most current and planned ethanol production methods depend on farming, and in the case of corn and sugar, take food crops and divert them into energy.
Fu said crop-based ethanol production is slow and resource-costly. He decided to work with cyanobacteria, some of which convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into their own food and release oxygen as a waste product.
Other scientists also are researching using cyanobacteria to make ethanol, using different strains, but Fu’s technique is unique, he said. He inserted genetic material into one type of freshwater cyanobacterium, causing it to produce ethanol as its waste product. It works, and is an amazingly efficient system.
The technology is fairly simple. It involves a photobioreactor, which is a
fancy term for a clear glass or plastic container full of something alive, in which light promotes a biological reaction. Carbon dioxide gas is bubbled through the green mixture of water and cyanobacteria. The liquid is then passed through a specialized membrane that removes the
ethanol, allowing the water, nutrients and cyanobacteria to return to the
photobioreactor.
Solar energy drives the conversion of the carbon dioxide into ethanol. The partner of Prof. Fu in Brazil in the branch-office of La Wahie Biotech Inc. in Aracaju - Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke - is developing a low-cost photo-bio-reactor-system. Prof. Franke want´s soon creat a pilot-project with Prof. Fu in Brazil.
The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol.
La Wahie Biotech Inc. believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.
Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system could even pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers. That would prevent carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it has been implicated as a
major cause of global warming.
Honolulo – Hawaii/USA and Aracaju – Sergipe/Brasil - 15/09/2008
Prof. Pengcheng Fu – E-Mail: pengchen2008@gmail.com
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: lawahiebiotech.brasil@gmail.com
Tel.: 00-55-79-3243-2209
Link in Europe :
http://www.umweltdienstleister.de/index.phtml?read=1152
October 11th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I was going to say that these “dead bacteria” cells that he talks about are really algae, but it looks like the previous comm enters have beaten me to it. Looks like he is trying to use media spin “ethanol from water” for publicity.
Algae is the answer (take it from an environmental writer), but people shouldnt try to spin it.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I to want to be positive about algae. Unless we can really do it in the volume we can do crude….on to the next idea. It has to be able to displace crude or it isn’t worth it.
November 21st, 2008 at 2:59 am
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December 7th, 2008 at 9:41 am
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February 24th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I’ll believe it when I see it. But I know that won’t happen any time soon. Big oil will pay the guy just to keep him from releasing this to the public.
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