Making Crude Oil from Pig Manure

[waltky]

Making energy from the wind...

Oil Man Champions Wind Power
July 08, 2008 - T. Boone Pickens: Oil is "one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

Nobody can accuse T. Boone Pickens of being some wild-eyed environmentalist. He calls himself "a Texas oil man," the chair of a private equity fund called BP Capital Management. He puts his net worth at $4 billion, and he's often at the top of various lists of investment gurus. But he's been all over the media -- his name was the ninth-most-searched term on Google -- because of this: PickensPlan.

He's out to get America free of imported oil, he says, and he wants to do it with the things environmentalists dream about -- wind turbines for electricity, which would free up natural gas to run cars and trucks. He'd throw in nuclear power too, but only in the long term. "I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of," he says on the website. "But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil. "On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we're organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources."

He has some unlikely allies -- for instance, Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club. "I certainly never expected to be inspecting wind operations with Pickens or to be hearing his scorn for the current political notion that we can somehow drill our way out of the oil-price crisis," writes Pope on his blog. "He's certainly likely to draw an audience that a green wind-power advocate from the Sierra Club could never command." Pickens gives a simple-looking chalk-talk in a video on the Pickens Plan website, but there's nothing simple going on here. Pickens subscribes to the idea of "peak oil," the notion that our ability to find enough will dwindle. He says the peak passed in 2005.

More Science and Society

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The latest poop on diesel fuel...

Lab makes diesel fuel from E. coli poop
Tue August 12, 2008 - Some biotech laboratories are using bacteria to create a form of diesel fuel; "Production facilities" are so small, you can see them only under a microscope; Bacteria are fed plant material, or sugar, and excrete the equivalent of diesel; Experts say the process is still too small-scale to be a viable energy alternative

Fossil fuels that keep our planet running -- oil, natural gas and coal -- were created from the decomposition of plants, plankton and other organic material over millions of years. Today, scientists all over the globe are working to create fuels with the same properties but without that pesky 100 million-year wait. And "renewable petroleum" is now a reality, on a small scale, in some laboratories. The biotech company LS9 Inc. is using single-celled bacteria to create an oil equivalent. These petroleum "production facilities" are so small, you can see them only under a microscope.

"We started in my garage two years ago, and we're producing barrels today, so things are moving pretty quickly," said biochemist Stephen del Cardayre, LS9 vice president of research and development. How does it work? A special type of genetically altered bacteria are fed plant material: basically, any type of sugar. They digest it and excrete the equivalent of diesel fuel. Humans have used bacteria and yeast for centuries to do similar work, creating beer, moonshine and, more recently, ethanol. But scientists' recent strides in genetic engineering now allow them to control the end product.

"So these are bacteria that have been engineered to produce oil," del Cardayre said. "They started off like regular lab bacteria that didn't produce oil, but we took genes from nature, we engineered them a bit [and] put them into this organism so that we can convert sugar to oil." The company is focusing on diesel fuel, but the microbes can be "programmed" to make gasoline or jet fuel. The bacteria used are a harmless form of E. coli. And the feedstock, or food for the microbes, can be any type of agricultural product, from sugar cane to waste such as wheat straw and wood chips. Choosing plants with no food value sidesteps one of the biggest criticisms of another synthetic fuel, corn ethanol, because critics say that corn should be used as food, not fuel.

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A Toxic Spew?...

Worries grow about 'fracking' for oil
Aug 20, 2008 | Officials worry about impact of 'fracking' of oil and gas.

Cathy Behr says she won't forget the smell that nearly killed her. An emergency-room nurse in Durango, Colo.'s Mercy Regional Medical Center, Behr was working the April 17 day shift when Clinton Marshall arrived complaining of nausea and headaches. An employee at an energy-services company, Weatherford International, Marshall, according to Behr, said that he was caught in a "fracturing-fluid" spill. [Fracturing chemicals are routinely used on oil and gas wells where they are pumped deep into the ground to crack rock seams and increase production.] The chemical stench coming off Marshall's boots was buckling, says Behr. Mercy officials took no chances. They evacuated and locked down the ER, and its staff was instructed to don protective masks and gowns. But by the time those precautions were enacted, Behr had been nursing Marshall for 10 minutes--unprotected. "I honestly thought the response was a little overkill, but good practice," says Behr, 54, a 20-year veteran at Mercy.

A few days later, Behr's skin turned yellow. She began vomiting and retaining fluid. Her husband rushed her to Mercy where Behr was admitted to the ICU with a swollen liver, erratic blood counts and lungs filling with fluid. "I couldn't breath," she recalls. "I was drowning from the inside out." The diagnosis: chemical poisoning. The makers of the suspected chemical, Weatherford, tell NEWSWEEK that they aren't sure if their brand of fracking fluid can be blamed for her illness.

Throughout the Rocky Mountain states, Behr's run-in with fracturing fluid is getting a lot of attention and exacerbating already frayed nerves. After nearly eight years of some of the most intense oil and gas development ever recorded in the American West, concerns over the environmental and health impacts are bubbling over. On Tuesday, Colorado's top oil and gas regulatory authority—the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC)—endorsed a sweeping set of rules that environmentalists call long overdue; industry warns of dire economic impacts.

More Oil & Gas Exploration: Is ?Fracking? Safe? | Newsweek Project Green | Newsweek.com

[waltky]

How about recycling plastics?...

Plastic-Munching Bugs Turn Waste Bottles Into Cash
Sept. 21, 2008 : New Bacteria-Driven Process Could Make Recycling Plastic Bottles More Attractive

Newly discovered bacterial alchemists could help save billions of plastic bottles from landfill. The Pseudomonas strains can convert the low-grade PET plastic used in drinks bottles into a more valuable and biodegradable plastic called PHA. PHA is already used in medical applications, from artery-supporting tubes called stents to wound dressings. The plastic can be processed to have a range of physical properties. However, one of the barriers to PHA reaching wider use is the absence of a way to make it in large quantities. The new bacteria-driven process – termed upcycling – could address that, and make recycling PET bottles more economically attractive.

PET bugs. Although billions of plastic bottles are made each year, few are ultimately recycled. Just 23.5% of US bottles were recycled in 2006. This is because the recycling process simply converts the low value PET bottles into more PET, says Kevin O'Connor at University College Dublin, Ireland. "We wanted to see if we could turn the plastic into something of higher value in an environmentally friendly way," he says. O'Connor and colleagues knew that heating PET in the absence of oxygen – a process called pyrolysis – breaks it down into terephthalic acid (TA) and a small amount of oil and gas. They also knew that some bacteria can grow and thrive on TA, and that other bacteria produce a high-value plastic PHA when stressed. So they wondered whether any bacteria could both feed on TA and convert it into PHA.

Bacteria hunt. "It was a long shot to be honest," says O'Connor. His team studied cultures from around the world known to grow on TA, but none produced PHA. So they decided to look for undiscovered strains, in environments that naturally contain TA. Analysing soil bacteria from a PET bottle processing plant, which are likely to be exposed to small quantities of TA, yielded 32 colonies that could survive in the lab using TA as their only energy source.

More ABC News: Plastic-Munching Bugs Turn Waste Bottles Into Cash

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Makin' biofuel from algae...

It's pond scum, but algae could be green fuel
Sept. 28, 2008 : Cost-efficient process expected that would also curb warming emissions

Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics — and with increasing interest, biofuel. In a warehouse 120 miles southwest, a bioreactor of clear plastic tubes is producing algae in pressure-cooker fashion that its manufacturer hopes will one day power jet aircraft.

Experts say it will be years, maybe a decade, before this simplest of all plants can be efficiently processed for fuel. But when that day comes, it could go a long way toward easing the world's energy needs and responding to global warming. Algae is the slimy stuff that clouds your home aquarium and gets tangled in your feet in a lake or ocean. It can grow almost everywhere there is water and sunlight, and under the right conditions it can double its volume within hours. Scientists and industrialists agree that the potential is huge.

"This is the ultimate fast-growing organism," says Peter van den Dorpel, chief operating officer of AlgaeLink, which makes bioreactors for speeding reproduction. "Algae is lazy. It eats carbon dioxide and produces oxygen." It has no roots, no leaves, no shoots. "It grows so fast because it has nothing else to do. It just swims in the water." Farming algae doesn't require much space or good cropland, so it avoids the fuel-for-food dilemma that has plagued first and second generation biofuels like corn, rapeseed and palm oil. It can grow in fresh water, polluted water, sea water or farm runoff. It can purify a city's sewage while feeding on the nitrogen and phosphates in human waste.

Oil-content is high