The oil is running out. I talked about this on my blog before. Oil has thousands of uses, but one dominates all the others – petroleum manufacture for our vehicles. Because of this, it’s commonly assumed that leaving behind oil means leaving behind petroleum too … and perhaps even cars. But does it?
New technology currently in the R&D labs suggests another idea – manufacturing our own petroleum in a speeded up, industrial scale version of the same process that nature uses.
Question is, how?
German researchers are working on replicating photosynthesis, with the goal of converting atmospheric CO2 into CO. CO and hydrogen are the main components of syngas which can be used to manufacture gasoline. They’ve managed it too, but their current reaction uses energy from benzene and has low yield. They need to replace that energy input with something else and increase the efficiency for it to be a viable building block for manufacturing gasoline.
Another approach is being pushed by VC firms in the Valley: LS9 is a company genetically engineering microbes to create petrol from biomass. It’s a bit like ethanol manufacture, except that ethanol isn’t backwards compatible with our existing infrastructure (pipelines and engines all need modifications). LS9 claim they have been able to build microbes that eat sugar and expel gasoline … a remarkable feat if true. But like all biofuels, it’ll be constrained by the size of the biomass input. Their website is pretty vague about what sort of inputs the process can take. Even if it can eat more or less anything, there’ll still be huge issues with scaling up such an approach – just moving the biomass to the refineries is as yet an open question, viability wise. They think they’ll be competitive by 2010.
Why it matters
The fact that both techniques can (in theory) produce petroleum is a huge deal. Other than the fact that using it shifts huge quantities of carbon from the ground into the air, petroleum is a really great fuel. It’s amazingly energy dense, easy to transport, and we have a lot of infrastructure built to handle it.
Of both, the German approach appeals to me more. Photosynthesis isn’t particularly efficient and the LS9 approach still relies on it. Although making petroleum instead of ethanol is a big leap forward, as it solves the sticky backwards compatibility issue, the other problems with biofuels (land use, etc) are still open.
Sucking CO2 straight from the air using mechanized, optimized and industrial-scale processes seems like a better way forward. Whilst the air doesn’t contain a whole lot of CO2 proportionally, and using plants lets you cover large areas of land with ease, the ability to build sun-powered carbon-neutral gasoline factories is a very tempting prospect. I need to run the numbers some time on how much air you’d need to process to create a gallon of gasoline, to see how feasible such a scheme might be.
