Bacteria converts carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Unfortunately The Paper [1] is closed source. I can't find much information; no comparison with existing, chemical synfuels processes (like methanol via syngas [CO]).<p>There's a serious problem with the general idea: "clean" CO2 is hard to get. You can get concentrated (&#62;10%) CO2 streams from a power plant, which could work for synfuels, but ultimately that's still transferring fossil carbon into the air (if more efficiently). The "nice" idea is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere (I think they are implying this?); this gives you a carbon-neutral cycle (CO2 =&#62; fuel =&#62; CO2). This is difficult because CO2 in the air is so dilute -- 0.04% vol., or 0.8 grams/meter^3.<p>Can you get CO2 from the air? There's research in this; the APS assessment [2] thinks it could be done at around $600-800/tCO2, which translates to e.g. $7/gallon gas equivalent of methanol, just for the carbon. The process uses an inorganic base (NaOH) to scrub CO2, so maybe you'd think you could genetically-engineer superbacteria to do better. But the absorbent is not the bottleneck -- it's the extreme volume and flow of air that needs to be brought <i>to</i> the absorbent, over an insanely large surface area. The scale is visualized in [2] figure 1.2 (<a href="http://i.imgur.com/Y0D2f.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Y0D2f.png</a>): a very small, 10^6 ton CO2/year capture plant is designed as a 1km * 1km grid of rows of giant, sucking fans. And the NaOH process isn't particularly inefficient -- it captures 50% of the CO2 in air.<p>Some more about atmosperic CO2 capture from David Keith [3] and his startup [4]; this was featured in the <i>Economist</i> this month [5]. Wikipedia is a starting point for synfuels in general [6]; George Olah advocates a methanol/dimethyl ether economy using CO2 recycled from air [7].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.abstract</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/dac11.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://www.aps.org/about/pressreleases/dac11.cfm</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/AirCapture.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/AirCapture.html</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.carbonengineering.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.carbonengineering.com/</a><p>[5] <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21550241" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/node/21550241</a><p>[6] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel</a><p>[7] <a href="http://wiki.ornl.gov/sites/carboncapture/Shared%20Documents/Background%20Materials/Alternative%20Methods/G.%20Olah.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.ornl.gov/sites/carboncapture/Shared%20Documents/...</a>

<i>In short, it sounds like you could have a car with solar panels on the roof, and they could drive the creation of liquid fuel that could then be used to power the car’s engine.</i><p>Sure. Leave your car in the sun for a week and you can drive it three miles.<p>People need to get how diffuse solar energy is.<p>(Oh, and could someone fix the title? "Bacteria" is plural.)

(<a href="http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567" rel="nofollow">http://www1.cnsi.ucla.edu/news/item?item_id=2046567</a>)<p>{There have been quite a few extremetech articles recently. Any estimate of how much money they're making from the ads?}<p>EDIT: Thanks debacle!

Not only a nifty idea for fuel, but a way to deal with our ant overpopulation! As with other biofuels, it may have the downside of increasing the price of formic acid as a foodstuff.<p>And if you've never tried ants over shoe-string potatoes, you should -- they add a delicious, lemony flavor! Just remember to check your teeth for ant-legs after dinner. :)

What's wonderful about the two butanols they are making is that they are near drop-in replacements for gasoline. If this scales up, this would make an excellent alternative to expensive fuel deliveries for isolated places.<p>Yet another encouraging bridge between the grid and the internal combustion engine.

tl;dr:carbon-neutral conversion of CO2 to fuel and back again. Essentially a chemical battery.

Or, you know, you could just use the electricity to convert water to hydrogen (itself a usable fuel). How much of the energy required for this reaction is actually coming from the carbon / atmosphere? I would guess very little.

Can I get infected with this bacteria? If I get it in my lungs will it poison me with biofuel?

What could possibly go wrong.<p>edit: since I am being downvoted, I will state it explicitly. We are creating a simple, resiliant lifeform that grows and reproduces as long as it can eat carbon dioxide, of which there are essentially unlimited supplies on earth. We know from observing complex fragile invasive species that are brought in to new environments with unlimited food and no controls on growth what happens. They reproduce and grow until they run out of their food source. For example, bringing cats to australia to control rodents. Releasing this bacteria, which is neither complex nor fragile, into the wild has a reasonable chance of consuming vast amounts of CO2, producing petrochemicals as a waste product. The easily predictable outcome of this release is the elimination of nearly all life on the planet and creation of a toxic atmosphere similar to that on Titan.