WASHINGTON — The federal Energy Department will make good on a pledge for a bolder technology strategy on Monday, awarding research grants for ideas like bacteria that will make gasoline, enzymes that will capture carbon dioxide to counter global warming and batteries so cheap that they will allow the use of solar power all night long...
A new agency within the department will nurture these and other radical proposals, most of which will probably fail but a few of which could have “a transformative impact,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in an interview on Friday. The money will go for projects at all stages of development, including some that exist simply as a smart idea, Dr. Chu said.
The department will announce 37 grants totaling $151 million, mostly going to small businesses and educational institutions but also to a few corporations. Some of the ideas may be supported until they are picked up by venture capitalists or major companies, he said.
The new effort, directed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or Arpa-e, is modeled on a Defense Department program known as Darpa that helped commercialize microchips and the Internet and helped develop body armor and other high-tech products. Darpa is known for quick decisions and long-shot bets, an approach seldom associated with the Energy Department...
Dr. Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, was a co-author of a 2006 paper for the National Academy of Sciences that called for the creation of the Arpa-e program.
In the initial round, the grants average $4 million. One is going to researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus who are working on developing an organism that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and another that converts the sugars to gasoline and diesel. The two can live in a “co-culture” in a thin latex film, according to Lawrence P. Wackett, a professor of biochemistry, although much research remains to be done to make the organisms work as a system.
“A venture capital group might say it’s a little early for them,” Dr. Wackett said...
Well that's one radical idea alrighty. They had best not try to get that funded in the no-nonsense private sector. The Company boys would laugh it right out the door. Absolutely if anyone funded by the oil companies sat on the board.
If anyone from Cheneyburton was around, that proposal would quickly be marked "Classified" and the computers of the researchers would be seized.
Especially if someone bothered to point out every green plant already converts carbon dioxide and water into sugars using sunlight.
It's called photosynthesis.
In fact, this kind of thing keeps coming out- and just as quickly disappearing on the intertubes. For example, this link from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations seems to be getting continuously reset (denial of service bots?) but appears in cache:
...6.3.1 Liquid fuels from microalgal biomass
It is well known that microalgae can assimilate CO2 gas as a carbon source for growth. However, if the resulting cell mass is not suitably treated, CO2 will be evolved and diluted into the environment by decomposition, thus preventing CO2 fixation from contributing to a reduction in atmospheric CO2.
Petroleum is widely believed to have its origins in kerogen, which is easily converted to an oily substance under conditions of high pressure and temperature (15-17). Kerogen is formed from algae, biodegraded organic compounds, plankton, bacteria, plant material, etc., by biochemical and/or chemical reactions such as diagenesis and catagenesis. Several studies have been conducted to simulate petroleum formation by pyrolysis, some of which used the marine alga Fucus sp. as the base material. Recently, activated sludge and fungi were converted to oily substances at relatively low temperatures as compared with those used in previous experimental simulations. On the basis of these findings, it is assumed that algae grown in CO2-enriched air can be converted to oily substances, and that such an approach can contribute to solving two major problems: air pollution resulting from CO2 evolution, and future crises due to a shortage of energy sources. Use of thermochemical liquefaction of organisms in the production of alternative fuels, would reduce CO2 evolution into the atmosphere since such fuels would indeed be produced from CO2.
Apart from the experimental simulation discussed above, other work has also been conducted with the objective of producing fuel from microalgae. Feinberg (18) reported that diesel fuel and gasoline were produced through the transesterification and catalytic cracking of lipids accumulated in algal cells. However, the raw material utilized in their work was restricted to microalgae of high lipid content. A process for the production of fuel oil from microalgae by pyrolysis has been proposed. The pyrolysis usually requires a drying procedure in which large amounts of energy are required to vaporize water. An alternative technique involving the direct thermochemical liquefaction of biomass of high moisture content, such as wood and sewage sludge, has been proposed and applied to the production of fuel oils from microalgae.
This liquefaction is carried out in an aqueous solution of either alkali or NaCl at a temperature of about 300 C and pressure of 10 MPa in the absence of reducing gases such as hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide. Since drying is not required, energy consumption for water vaporization is avoided. Microalgal cell precipitates derived from centrifugation, which are of a high moisture content, are thus good raw materials for liquefaction...
References
...15. Ishiwatari, R. et al., Nature, 264, 347-349 (1976).
16. Espitalie, J. et al., Amer. Ass. Petrol. Geolog. Bull., 64, 59-66 (1980).
17. Takeda, N. and Asakawa, T., Appl. Geochem., 3, 441-453 (1988).
18. Feinberg, D.A., In "Energy from Biomass and Wastes IX", 1225-1244 (1985) Elsevier, London.
...
Just a quick scan of the reference list will tell you none of this information is exactly news. Nor does it surprise anyone with a rudimentary education in biochemistry. So ARPA-E and Dr. Chu, the best of luck to you in funding such research. You're going to find getting the results out and applied will get your industrial reviewers saying it's "a little early ".
These types of findings aren't on the schedule to be implemented for another 50 years or so when the masses of humanity are well harnessed by the Right sort of people in a post-industrial world.
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