CO2 --(bacteria)--> Methane

[AquaShrimp]

Wastewater treatment plants already utilize methane forming bacteria in their big anaerobic digesters.  I believe those bacteria utilize organic acids to produce the methane.

[kamilyun]

Many bacteria contain photopigments.

e.g. Cyanobacteria

[TalonX]

Originally posted by Lumpy
Nope I don't, but considering humanity's track record for screwing up science projects and killing people my worries are well founded.

Another throw away line.   Man has advanced medicine and science at a pace unpredicted, and unprecedented.   The mistakes are few, and the loss of life has been minimal from error.   To those that die, and their loved ones, it's a disaster.  For the rest of humanity, it's a god send.

Luddites - make me smile.

[moot]

Originally posted by AquaShrimp
Bio-algae has a proposed efficiency of 100,000 gallons of oil per acre.  Right now they are getting 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre.

Yeah so what I'd be curious to see is a detailed in/out quantification.  How much expense is it to raise those crops vs. how much energy and waste product do they yield.  And the same for these bacteria.  
At this point I don't think the latter info will be available on the net yet.  But I think it'll be more efficient if only because of the reduced scale of manufacture.  Burning algae just seems pretty inefficient to me, the same way steam or internal combustion engines are compared to fusion or fission, or solar cells.

[lazs2]

digesters at wastewater treatment plants mimic the intestines of men.  They are heated even.   They, like us, produce methane.   it is very dirty methane tho.  it destroys internal combustion engines but is good for boilers and such.   The expense of scrubbing it is hardly worth it at this point.

lazs

[Angus]

Originally posted by AquaShrimp
Bio-algae has a proposed efficiency of 100,000 gallons of oil per acre.  Right now they are getting 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre.

I am not sure to what kind of "growing" you are referring to, nor the time and other input in question, but that quantity for the square with the gravity of oil would be a layer of almost 4 inches of oil all over the acre.

Care to bring more on this?

[AquaShrimp]

Bio-reactors.  The algae are grown in special bags so that they don't have to compete with other organisms.

[thrila]

Lumpy, i wouldn't lose any sleep over the likelyhood of the microorganisms becoming pathogenic.  It just doesn't work like that.  It's as likely as a yeast used for brewing acquiring pathogenicity- becoming pathogenic provides no advantage   for survival in the environment they're in.

By all means stop drinking beer if you're still worried.

[Lumpy]

Heh, none of the bacteria you guys are mentioning are genetically engineered lifeforms. The bacteria in the yeast are naturally occurring and doing what evolution has thought them to do over a course of millions of years. Considering how many bugs (no pun intended ) there are in the software we humans write I have to believe that these little critters he's trying to make will have a rather buggy genetic code. If that only results in the occasional "blue screen of death" then there's no problem. Otoh if it does not...

[Holden McGroin]

Originally posted by thrila
It's as likely as a yeast used for brewing acquiring pathogenicity- becoming pathogenic

Brewers yeast has been known to cause liver damage.

[moot]

Lumpy you mean like the bugs in software comparable to these bacteria, like space shuttle and satellites or Formula 1 software?
Mass-produced software shipped out in a hurry like Windows isn't a good comparison.

[Lumpy]

"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."

Seems like these guys ARE in a hurry. And we have satellites falling out of the sky and advanced fighter jets crashing to the ground or shutting down their computers when crossing the international date line etc.

[moot]

Nah.

[moot]

Well well well..  He answers those two exact questions (synthetic bacterial CO2 production efficiency and grey goo-ish/weaponisation risks) in person, in a pretty layman-clear presentation:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/227

And it looks like I guessed right, almost exactly.. I didn't expect to, considering i've always slept thru organic chemistry and never paid anywhere as much attention to botanics and animal/micro biology as much as engineering and neural sim/application oriented classes...

And btw, he doesn't look like an ego maniac at all.  Even if he were... Fritz Zwicky certainly was more of one (calling people he thought stood in his way limp wristed eggheads or something like that) and that didn't stop him from making some very significant advances for astronomy.  Do you remember his egomania? 
But you do remember what his work discovered. 

We now, from our discoveries from around the world, have about 20 million genes.  And I'd like to think of these as the design components of the future. The electronics industry only had about a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that.
We're limited, here, primarily by biological reality and our imagination.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Lumpy you mean like the bugs in software comparable to these bacteria, like space shuttle and satellites or Formula 1 software?
Mass-produced software shipped out in a hurry like Windows isn't a good comparison.

Umm the space shuttle DID go down due to a $2 sealing with a design time error.