But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.

(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)

A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?

There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.

A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.

One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”

That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.

The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.

E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.

The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.

Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.

Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.

There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.

There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.

Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.

Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.

As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”

What do you think?

Fermenting the sugars found in corn or other grains into ethanol has been around for a long time, of course, and it’s pretty much a proven technology. On the other hand, do we really want to be turning food into fuel?

More promising have been recent advances in turning lignocellulose, the stuff that makes up the cell walls in plants, into ethanol and other fuels: that would allow us to use grasses, wood chips, straw and other non-food as biomass.

Now comes word of a fuel-producing technology that doesn’t require biomass of any sort: just carbon dioxide and sunlight. And no, I’m not talking about trees.

On Monday, a Massachussetts company called Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has the technology to convert carbon dioxide directly into transportation fuels and chemicals. Not only that, they say, “this eco-friendly, direct-to-fuel conversion requires no agricultural land or fresh water.”

The company was founded in 2007, and relies on something it calls “Helioculture” technology, mixing, as the New York Times’s article on the announcement puts it, “CO2, Slime and Sunshine.”

More specifically, the company grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed bioreactors. The microorganisms are photosynthetic, able to use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels.

The process works well in the laboratory, so the real question is if it can be scaled up to an industrial-sized plant. To find out, Joule plans to break ground on a modular pilot plant early in 2010 that will produce ethanol (trademarked as SolarEthanol), and the following year hopes to begin construction on a commercial-scale operation that can also produce hydrocarbons and associated chemicals, “several of which have already been demonstrated at laboratory scale.

It’s looking for sites near CO2 producers such as coal-fired power plants and cement kilns, with locations in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, places with lots of sun and lots of space, under consideration

Open spaces are needed because a large plant would look a lot like a solar array: a huge field covered with panels, except these panels, rather than producing electricity, would produce liquid fuels

The company estimates that a single acre covered with its “SolarConverter” panels (flat, transparent, and about the size of a sheet of plywood) could produce 20,000 gallons of ethanol at a cost of $50 a barrel. (That makes it competitive with oil, although it’s worth noting that that price includes existing subsidies: what the unsubsidized cost would be, I don’t know.)

At that level of production, if you built enough plants to cover, in total, an area the size of the Texas panhandle, you could meet all of the United States’ transportation fuel needs.

In Technology Review, writer Kevin Bullis notes that the company’s technology sounds similar to that of biofuels produced by algae—but the company says it is not using algae, and its stated production estimates are an order of magnitude greater than algae-based biofuels, which are estimated to have potential yields of only 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre.

Its estimated cost of production is also only a fraction of that of algae-based biofuels, which currently would require crude oil to rise to $800 a barrel in order to be competitive.

Besides, algae produces oils that have to be refined, whereas Joule says its microorganisms will produce ethanol or hydrocarbons directly. The Joule microorganisms also excrete the fuels, whereas algae has to be harvested and processed to extract oil.

Too good to be true? Maybe. But there are other companies in the race to develop the same kinds of technology. And with the push to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and move away from fossil fuels, that race is only going to get hotter.

So remember the name: Joule Biotechnologies.

Someday, its genetically modified critters could be cheerfully churning out the fuel that powers your car.

We can and do recycle all sorts of things. Paper, plastic, glass (OK, that last one not so much right now), Christmas fruitcakes…the list goes on and on.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could also recycle the hydrocarbons we burn as fuel? Imagine if you could somehow take the carbon dioxide out of the air, recombine it with hydrogen, and produce new fuels. You could lessen the need for oil and slow the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the same time.

It sounds like wishful thinking—but scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory say they can do it.

Called Green Freedom, their technology is built on a new process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Combine that carbon dioxide with hydrogen created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you can create sulfur-free synthetic fuels and organic chemicals.

The technology involved is new, but it’s not radical. According to the researchers, led by Dr. F. Jeffrey Martin and Dr. William L. Kubic, Jr., it’s based on “modest, but novel, extensions of current technologies that are in wide use.”

It’s not hard to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As Martin and Kubic point out in their concept paper (which is freely available online) carbon dioxide is readily absorbed into a potassium carbonate solution. However, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is very dilute, at about 370 parts per million, so capturing and recovering it in commercially significant quantities is a challenge. That’s the challenge that the Green Freedom scientists say they’ve overcome.

Their new process also drastically reduces the energy required, key to making the whole scheme practical. “The new stripping process requires (approximately) 96 percent less energy than a conventional thermal-stripping process,” they note, and add that new materials are emerging that would reduce the capital cost of the necessary equipment below what they assumed in their analysis.

The hydrogen that must then be combined with the carbon dioxide to produce fuel can come from any existing hydrogen-producing process. The concept paper refers to the water electrolysis process because that’s the lowest risk technologically: we already know how to get hydrogen by passing an electrical current through water.

Note that you’re not getting something for nothing here. All of this technology requires energy. To keep the whole process carbon-neutral, that energy has to come from a power source that doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide itself. The researchers being from Los Alamos, it’s probably not surprising they suggest using nuclear power. However, they note that wind power, hydroelectric power or solar power could also be used if they’re economically competitive.

Of course, there’s not much point in producing fuel if that fuel costs so much no one will buy it. Martin and Kubic attempt to calculate the cost of a U.S. gallon of methanol produced by a Green Freedom plant and a U.S. gallon of gasoline, both produced using existing and well-established fuel synthesis methods.

They figured in estimated capital costs, assumed the plant would be nuclear powered, figured in a profit margin, and came up with an at-the-pump price for their synthesized gasoline of $4.60 a gallon (that’s $1.21 a litre in Canadian terms, if you figure the U.S. and Canadian dollars at par, and these days, you can!), and the price of synthesized methanol at $1.65 a gallon.

Expected improvements in technology could reduce the price of gasoline at the pump to just $3.40 a gallon (89.5 cents a litre) and the price of methanol to just $1.14 a gallon, and that could fall further with additional technological achievements.

The researchers know this sound almost too good to be true. They conclude: “Making gasoline from air and water sounds exotic, but now practical technology has been developed to implement known chemical pathways for producing fuel from these abundant raw materials.”

There are uncertainties about capital and operating costs, of course, and further research is planned.

But it Green Freedom pans out, it will certainly be, as Los Alamos National Laboratory calls it, “transformational.”

My own modest suggestion: paint the plants bright blue, with a recycling symbol in white on the side.

…the new device captures carbon dioxide molecules that are already in the air and releases them as a pure carbon dioxide stream. This stream can be sequestered or used to enhance oil recovery.

“We are trapping carbon dioxide about 1,000 times faster than a tree does,” said study leader Klaus Lackner of Columbia University.

I find it interesting how many of these old ads try to connect something that would seem to be merely a matter of simple preference–cooking with gas or oil–and try to convince you that had a connection to your health. Although, come to think of it, that’s not exactly an unknown approach to advertising products today, is it?

Interestingly enough, there is an Anglo-American Oil Co. Ltd. today, but it doesn’t seem to go in for cookstoves–the current version is much, much newer:

Anglo American Oil Company Ltd was founded in June 1999 by former racer Anders Hildebrand…

Our main business is built on a dedicated customer base of over 3,000 racers and high performance garages that buy products on a daily basis.

The original company referenced in the ad was apparently the UK arm of Standard Oil.

Naturally occurring oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that died in the oceans, settled to the floor, decomposed, and were eventually crushed underneath the planet’s sliding tectonic plates. The pressure and heat far underground broke down the creatures’ long chains of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon-bearing molecules, called polymers, turning them into petroleum hydrocarbons, which have much shorter molecular chains.

Scientists have tried to recreate this process for years. The usual approach has been to superheat organic feedstock in an attempt to drive off any water it contains and break down the molecular chains at the same time. This takes so much energy that you almost burn a barrel of oil for every barrel produced.

In the late 1980s Paul Baskis, an Illinois microbiologist and inventor, suddenly realized how to improve the process. TDP doesn’t drive off water; it uses it. In fact, it adds more. The water conveys heat throughout the feedstock, causing its molecules to begin to break down at a much lower temperature (about 260 degrees C) and pressure (about 45 atmospheres) than with previous methods. Then the slurry is quickly dropped to a lower pressure, causing 90 percent of its free water to flash off as steam (which is then used to heat the incoming feedstock).

Minerals settle out and are shunted to storage tanks, while the remaining liquid pours into a reactor similar to that used in an ordinary refinery. The liquid is heated up to 480 degrees C to further break down the long molecular chains, and the resulting hot vapour rises up into a tall distillation column. Different substances condense at different heights: gas is captured at the top, light oil flows out of the upper middle, heavier oil out of the middle, water out of the lower middle part, and powdered carbon collects at the bottom.

With a little tweaking, the process can turn waste into other things besides oil. Polyvinal chloride (PVC) can be turned into the valuable chemical hydrochloric acid, for example. TDP can also destroy hazardous waste such as PCBs, dioxins, heavy metals and medical infectious waste, process agricultural waste and human sewage, process the noxious discharges from pulp and paper making, and recycle tires, among other things.

TDP is being championed by Changing World Technologies (www.changingworldtech.com) which has been running a pilot plant at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in partnership with the Gas Research Institute since 1996. Now a $20 million commercial facility is coming online in Carthage, Missouri, where every day it will turn 200 tons of turkey-processing waste–feathers, organs, blood, etc.–from a Butterball Turkey plant into 600 barrels of high-quality oil, 21,000 gallons of water, and 11 tons of minerals, mostly from bones, which make excellent fertilizer.

The oil should cost only $15 U.S. a barrel to make; in three to five years, that’s expected to drop to a very competitive $10 a barrel; it should get even cheaper after that. The U.S. government provided some funding for the Butterball plant and has also provided grants for demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. There are also plans for plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese waste in Italy.

Oil companies, despite the potential competition, like TDP too: it can convert heavy crude oil, shale and tar sands into light oils, gases and carbon, and convert the heavy solid waste produced by refining petroleum into natural gas, oil and carbon. TDP can also clean up coal, extracting stuff like sulfur and mercury–which are valuable, but bad for the environment when burned–leaving coal that burns hotter and cleaner and can be more easily crushed for use in electricity-generating plants.

Turning the U.S.’s annual production of agricultural waste into oil and gas via TDP would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil–within spitting distance of the amount of oil the U.S. imports every year. Or imagine a local plant that turns your garbage into the fuel that eats your home. The possibilities are mind-boggling.

As more and more TDP plants come on line, we’ll soon know if this technology is really too good to be true–or maybe, this time, both good and true.

A coal bed starts out (we think–very few people have the patience to directly observe a process that takes millions of years) as a silted-over peat bog. As the layer of sediment over the bog increases, it forces water out of the peat. The peat becomes richer in carbon and deficient in oxygen, until eventually hydrogen stops combining with oxygen to form water and instead starts combining with carbon to form hydrocarbons. Spongy, fibrous peat becomes hard, brittle coal: vegetable matter turns into rock.

Similarly, petroleum (Latin for “rock oil”) starts out as layers of marine plankton–microscopic plants and animals–at the bottom of the sea. Sediments build up over these layers, and as in coal, the pressure and heat force out water and oxygen, leading to the formation of a variety of hydrocarbons, from tar to gas.

Humans used coal as a fuel as early as 1100 B.C. in China. Petroleum has also been used for millenia, but not as a fuel. Though usually found deep underground, in some places it seeps to the surface, which enabled our ancestors to use it to caulk boats, to mend roads, as a medicine and liniment, in torches and lamps, and, people being what they are, as an incendiary weapon of war.

The modern age of petroleum began in the 1850s, when overhunting of whales caused the price of the whale oil used in lamps to skyrocket. Starting in Romania, people turned to kerosene, refined from petroleum collected from surface seeps. It quickly became the illuminant of choice (to the relief of whales), which made petroleum valuable, which led to the first oil well, completed on August 27, 1859, in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

All those first oil-drillers wanted was kerosene: they burned off “useless by-products” like gasoline. But then along came the internal combustion engine, and Henry Ford. Today, gasoline accounts for 30 percent of all oil use.

The fact you can get both kerosene and gasoline out of petroleum is what makes it so valuable. Crude oil is made up of many different hydrocarbons, and through the skillful use of heat, technology and chemistry, you can convert any hydrocarbon into any other.

The basic method of separating the various hydrocarbons is to pump hot crude oil into the bottom of a tall steel tower. The lighter (and most valuable) compounds, those with the smallest molecules and the lowest ratio of carbon to hydrogen, vaporize and rise to the top of the tower, where they condense and drop back down to be vaporized again. Since the different compounds condense at different heights, you can draw off what you want: gasoline from the top, kerosene from the middle, and fuel oil from the bottom.

Further refining techniques involving vacuum, heat and catalysts, collectively called “cracking,” can break the big molecules of the less valuable hydrocarbons into small, more valuable molecules: valuable not only as fuel, but as raw material for plastics, synthetic fibers, paints, fertilizers, insecticides, soaps, synthetic rubber and more. Without petroleum, modern industry couldn’t function–more’s the pity, because the use of fossil fuels carries a pretty high cost, starting with the degradation of land during the creation and operation of coal mines and oil fields.

But that’s small potatoes compared to the pollution caused by actually burning the stuff. Coal smoke is an unpleasant pollutant in its own right–the source of London’s infamous 19th-century pea-soup fogs–and the sulfur compounds in coal are the direct cause of acid rain. Burning petroleum, particularly in automobiles, contributes to low-level ozone pollution: smog. Then there are oil spills, from minor losses from truck and car accidents to the Exxon Valdez and oil-well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico. And finally, there’s the concern about global warming due to the heat-trapping effect of the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

These concerns have sparked research into cleaner ways of using fossil fuels (and ways to avoid using them at all), but don’t dump your oil company shares just yet.

We’re addicted to the stuff, and it’s going to be a hard habit to break.