Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
forbes.com
forbes.com
In itself, it's not surprising that sunlight, hydrogen from water and CO2 could be put together to make biomass. That's pretty much what plants (and many natural bacteria) do already.
The novel aspect of these bacteria is that they apparently do the job 10x more efficiently than natural organisms.
This makes me wonder why this solution was not found by evolution directly.
In nature we see a lot of "good enough" because there are other costs and higher-priority bottlenecks.
> Evolutionary changes occur by random mutation and, in sexual reproduction, by random genetic mixing
The genetic changes of evolution are due to random mutation, but the ones that don't survive are not "evolution". Evolution is the subset of random mutations that increase reproduction/survival rates. If, at some point, a chimp was born with two heads, we wouldn't say that "chimps evolved to have two heads" because that two-headed chimp didn't pass on its genes. We'd say "a chimp randomly had two heads one time" and wouldn't bring it up in a discussion of evolution at all.
> governed by survival, but it's not directed by survival
To be directed by something does not always imply intentionality. Of course the most common usage of "direct" indicates something intentional, but that wasn't how I meant it. I meant "direct" in the sense that a particular landscape will direct the course of a river.
Which is also the answer to everybody else wondering about what happens if this gets into the biosphere. Well, have you ever been walking in a relatively natural forest area and come across the sad sight of a natural clearing being totally dominated by wild broccoli plants? No, you never have, because broccoli is completely incapable of outcompeting any natural plant. Broccoli's genes put way too much energy into producing that big beautiful edible bit that all of its competition puts into offense and defense. Similarly, the answer to the question of what happens to bacteria that pours its energy into producing alcohol while its competition is pouring its energy into producing offspring is that if you blink, you'll miss the death of the alcohol-producing bacteria. They're not going to take over the ecosystem. In energy terms you probably stand a better chance of seeing broccoli sweep the meadows of the world than having this bacteria survive in the wild.
(And when I say broccoli, I mean something like what you'd buy in the store. Not merely a rapid reversion to its historical ancestor, which could actually happen, but actual proper broccoli.)
http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/5-invasive-species-you-should...
You don't seem to understand natural selection. The idea of evolution producing something that an organism "needs" is akin to saying that God decided that the organism "needed" it and changed its genes.
The theory of natural selection is a completely passive process. For every generation of an organism, the genes are naturally randomized, producing various expressions of genes, and once there is selecting event, those that are not selected for will go extinct. That's what natural selection means. The idea that a giraffe "needed" a long neck is preposterous because it implies that the animal willed itself to have a longer neck. Instead, the giraffe's ancestors had a variable length neck, but given its particular circumstances, those with longer necks survived, and passed those genes on.
So there very well might be naturally occurring bacteria that produce 10x efficiently, but they haven't been selected for, yet.
I'm pretty sure he understands it fine, and is just using shorthand that makes it easier to describe.
There exists no approximation of a fitness function in nature that selects for this output because it's not efficient for survival, until we come along and create custom environments and select for survival based on energy output.
(I've decided which is the most annoying: Meta-pedants like me.)
I suppose I could #include<evolution_isnt_anthropomorphic> up front and then carry on.
The article is very interesting, but the headline makes it sound like a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics.
I think it's more a difference between technical vocabulary and colloquial vocabulary. I think a lot of people use the word "energy" to to refer to something more like "fuel." That's how you get terms like "energy production" which include activities like drilling for oil.
“This isn’t solving your CO2 problem,” he said. ”I’m taking CO2 out of the air, you burn it and you put the CO2 back. So it’s carbon neutral. I’m not going to reverse 400 ppm of CO2. But you’re not going to use any more stuff out of the ground.”
(A Brazilian chemical company markets it as a green product http://www.braskem.com/site.aspx/Im-greenTM-Polyethylene )
I don't know enough chemistry or climate science to estimate whether the amount of carbon in ~5 billion gallons of alcohol-based fuel, when removed from the atmosphere, would have a significant effect on climate change. But it sure seems like a lot of carbon.
And probably won't be for transportation because battery tech is improving. But if this proves to be an effective way to produce liquid biofuel that can replace gasoline/diesel with simple engine conversions, then we can repurpose our existing liquid fuel infrastructure and existing cars instead of building a whole new hydrogen based system.
(And still, casualties came mostly from people jumping off the ship. The people that stayed on mostly survived.)
I wonder how far I'd get before people realized I was planting trees.
Fwiw, it took me to the third sentence.
He's probably going to India probably because there is more political will there to allow this thing to continue.
What is missing is an assessment of cost. If this is economically feasible at some point in time in the future, then goodbye oil and coal.
Open question is how to ensure these bio-engineered organisms don't seep into the environment and trigger some unintended consequences. There needs to be some kill switch in there as well.
I'm not actually worried about bugs taking over the world. But we ought to avoid hand-waving away possible unintended consequences, because that tends to be how we get ourselves into environmental problems in the first place.
That's approximately as much CO2 as a person breathes out in a day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Human_physiolog... says about 1 kg, which works out to about 560L CO2 http://www.umsl.edu/~biofuels/Energy%20Meter%20labs/How%20mu...)
So yes, it provides a little bit of power, and no, it isn't likely to scale up to planet-wide CO2 reductions - one per person on the planet just to cover the CO2 we breathe?
It depends first on what is done with the ~1kg of CO2 captured.
If humans get their carbon from sources that are removed from the air, we don't have a net addition.
"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."
By my reckoning that works out to about 80 watts, continuous. Solar irradiance is roughly a kilowatt per square meter, so to get 80 watts at 10% efficiency you need nearly a square meter, which leaves your 1-liter reactor stretched to a millimeter thick. Hard to imagine a 1mm thick mat of bacteria absorbing 10% of the light.
The limiting factor really is area, not volume. By that metric, solar panels are still twice as efficient. Still, it would be good to have solar panels that grow themselves!
That way you can store some fuel for cold and rainy days / months :)
In any case there are a few important questions re feasibility. Do these bacteria work at atmospheric partial pressures of CO2? Do they perform at the advertised rate at the ~0.0015g/L of hydrogen you'd be lucky to get in solution from his leaf?
Nocera is a blow hard, so pending the full paper I expect the answers aren't encouraging.
SKINNER Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Hmmmm....so bacteria breathes in CO2 to make fuel....so we can burn the fuel and release the CO2 back in the atmosphere?
Not to take away anything from this impressive scientific achievement but this application is just depressing.
This is carbon recycling, basically. Recycling is better than producing/discarding/producing, right?
Carbon dioxide is a normal element in our atmosphere. Burning biofuels isn't a problem because the world's ecosystem is used to processing the levels of carbon dioxide that exist in current circulation.
The problems that come from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere happen when you alter the levels of carbon dioxide faster than the ecosystem can react. This happens when burning fossil fuels on a large scale because it leads to adding more carbon dioxide into standard circulation. As there isn't a proportional increase in plant life ready to absorb this increase the carbon dioxide can have negative impacts on our environment, such as ocean acidification.
The problem is that we pump CO2 from outside the biosphere (from deep underground) into the biosphere.
This technology could eliminate the need to move CO2 from underground into the biosphere, without having to completely revamp our existing infrastructure. If this is possible, it would be a gigantic win for the environment.
Human energy use will have a zero net effect on CO2 levels, meanwhile, the oceans and rocks and the world's flora will gradually bring the concentration back down to a more desirable level.
Problem is, while the bacteria can reproduce on their own, the leafs won't. They are made from silicon so probably similar tech to regular solar cells. This can be likely a limiting factor here.
Still interesting news.
I wonder how they tackle the problem of monoculture.
The issue with biofuel from algae is that once the container is contaminated with fungae, it reqires expensive draining and bleaching.
This increase in efficiency is presumably the novel part of Nocera's latest announcement and upcoming paper.