Aug

Gasoline: the newest biofuel? possibly, whether LS9 is successful.

Posted by admin Published in Emerging Technologies

What whether we could speed up the process of making petroleum for use in our automobiles? Even better: what whether we could just produce all of the hydrocarbons we need when we need them? Would we next have “renewable petroleum“? That is what a company known as LS9 is working on. They are “coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum.” How? It seems that they are genetically engineering bacteria such as E. coli to compose hydrocarbon chains. These bacteria manufacture “fatty acids” which are stripped of the acid, leaving “hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel.” The crude oil can soon after be refined into any of the standard petroleum based fuels that we commonly use, meaning that no changes would be essential to our vehicles or any other processes that we use to transport them etc. These fuels would be just like what we use now.

One question that brings up is the emissions of the fuel. Obviously,

increasingly research is mandatory on the subject, but that could be carbon-neutral, like other biofuels. You may be reminded of a similar operation which we covered before from a group known as Amyris. The difference amoung the two is that LS9 is attempting to manufacture crude oil while Amyris is attempting to produce fuels ready to be used. Is there something out there better than gasoline? Could the LS9 system be used to manufacture that fuel too? Interesting times most certainly lie ahead in the biofuel market.

Completely unrelated: how distant until GM releases their LS9 engine in the Corvette? At the rate they are going at now, not enlarged… but what fuel will it run on?

[Source: Technology Review]

Original post by Jeremy Korzeniewski