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Oil Plants

Johnny Pneumatic

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J
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I also have a thread of the same title over on www.physicsforums.com , I'm wanting to get the most input I can.:)

An idea I had some weeks ago is genetically engineered plants that synthesize petroleum oil from hydrogen and carbon. If the need for such a thing was upon us in the next few years, how hard would it be to create oil-gourds, bamboo, algae in aquaculture ponds etc.? Also to what level could huge fields of such plants cope with the world's oil needs?
 
Current total world oil production is ~80 million barrels per day.
3.36 billion U.S. gallons.

Assume a spherical gourd...
 
I don't think it is as simple as that. You need to analyze the different uses for oil. For example, much oil is used for heating. If you grow oil-producing plants, after extracting the oil, you would have the rest of the plant that could be used for fuel.

However, there are serious environmental implications from growing large crops of oil plants. Plus, such a large production would compete with food production for farmable land.

Then again, non-food crops could utilize polluted ground and use sewage sludge fertilizers not deemed suitable for food crops.

Very complex issue.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
However, there are serious environmental implications from growing large crops of oil plants. Plus, such a large production would compete with food production for farmable land.
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Such as? They'd take so much CO2 from the air they'd be good for the environment.

Sure, but there's enough food already grown to feed everybody, if only it were given to them.

How hard would such a thing be to engineer with current biotech? It's not impossible given advanced enough obviously. Lifeforms are chemical building-up machines after all. Silk anyone?
 
Huntsman said:
With regards to CO2, they wouldn't really help. The CO2 they pulled out of the air would be put right back in when they were harvested and the oil was burned, and when the stalks and other chaff are burned or allowed to decompose.
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True, but oil-plants wouldn't make the CO2 level go up any higher, unlike fossil fuels.

A link I got on the Physics Forum: http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/0007.Tao.biofuels.html


What's the difference between plant oils and petroleum oil that they can't be built up using the same methods that are used on petroleum oil to produce plastic of the type that's used in computers? Why can't polystyrene foam be created from plants, or paraffin wax, or anything else that needs petroleum oil to create? Hydrocarbons are hydrocarbons aren't they?
 
SkepticJ said:
True, but oil-plants wouldn't make the CO2 level go up any higher, unlike fossil fuels.

A link I got on the Physics Forum: http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/0007.Tao.biofuels.html


What's the difference between plant oils and petroleum oil that they can't be built up using the same methods that are used on petroleum oil to produce plastic of the type that's used in computers? Why can't polystyrene foam be created from plants, or paraffin wax, or anything else that needs petroleum oil to create? Hydrocarbons are hydrocarbons aren't they?
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The problem isn't that people haven't thought of alternative ways to get energy/feedstocks, it's just that none of these alternatives are economic compared to using oil which is in a readily accessible state. We do have the inherent problem of underestimating the costs of oil production because of extreme difficulty in quantifying environmental costs.

Eventually, either technology will make alternative energy/feedstocks economic or the planet will undergo catastrophic failure in it's ability to support human life. I present these as the only two options because alternatives, such as a planet-wide shift in values that allows for zero/negative economic growth seems extremely unlikely.
 
SkepticJ said:
Such as? They'd take so much CO2 from the air they'd be good for the environment.

(On environment problems.) Yes, fuel crops are CO2 neutral because because uptake and release is balanced. That is the whole idea. However, farming any crop presents a pressure on the local environment from fertilizers, pesticides, etc. After all, if fuel crops are to have any chance of being cost-effective, we are looking at highly intensitive farming methods

Sure, but there's enough food already grown to feed everybody, if only it were given to them.

(On competition with food crops.) Yes, but to supply enough for even a reduced energy consumption, the fuel crop output would must be much greater than the present production of food crops (you eat far less calories than you car and house use), so this will put a serious strain on world-wide production capacity. It is a question of farmable land, transport capacity, labor availability, etc.

How hard would such a thing be to engineer with current biotech? It's not impossible given advanced enough obviously. Lifeforms are chemical building-up machines after all. Silk anyone?

I don't think developing suitable crops, with one method or the other, is any big problem.

.... But silk is derived from animals, not plants ;).
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Hans
 
Former Greenpeace leader-type-guy Patrick Moore has some interesting points about agriculture and energy in his assorted speeches. He make sense and appealsto me (because I like the perversity of the idea that cutting down trees and making furniture and paper out of them, and even burning them, can be good for the environment).
 
SkepticJ said:
What's the difference between plant oils and petroleum oil that they can't be built up using the same methods that are used on petroleum oil to produce plastic of the type that's used in computers? Why can't polystyrene foam be created from plants, or paraffin wax, or anything else that needs petroleum oil to create? Hydrocarbons are hydrocarbons aren't they?
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I'm bumping this because I still need to know. Thanks to anyone who gives me an answer .:)

In light of the problem with ethanol would the oil plants I linked here give a positive energy return? If so, how much? Where can I find out?
 
Apparently the 1961 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, Melvin Calvin, was working on having plants create petroleum or a very similar substance. He died in 1997 and I could not find any thing about this from the last decade. Most of the references were from the 70s and 80s. But petroleum (or petroleum-like substances) from plants is reasonable.

Melvin Calvin has worked with Euphorbia lathyrus (Euphorbiaceae). This makes about 4 barrels of petroleum like stuff per acre. Chinese tallow tree (Sapium sebiferum, Euphorbiaceae) grows well in low marginal areas in the southeastern U.S. and yields about 12 barrels per acre.
Sunflower, soybean, and similar crops yield about 1 barrel per acre. Crambe, peanut, safflower all yield about 2 barrels per acre. African oil palm yields about 7-10 barrels per acre.
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http://www.life.uiuc.edu/ib/363/BOTANO.html

Gasoline is liquid sunlight. This was demonstrated when the fundamentals of our energy supply were radically reconsidered many decades ago by Melvin Calvin, Berkeley's 1961 Nobel Laureate in chemistry. He set up a pilot project that extracted a petroleum-like substance from a bush which grows wild in the southwest. The cost turned out to be around $100 a barrel which, given the low cost of petroleum in the days before OPEC, doomed any attempts to continue the work.
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http://www.salon.com/people/letters/2001/06/01/paglia/index2.html

I think most people have decided it is easier to change engines to take ethanol or vegetable seed oil rather than to change plants.

CBL
 
CBL4 said:
ut petroleum (or petroleum-like substances) from plants is reasonable.
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As long as people make sure that there isn't any soil depletion.
 
AWPrime said:
As long as people make sure that there isn't any soil depletion.
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I'm now banned at the GL so can't reply in that thread any more. However I'm still reading the thread as it goes on. There's a new poster on there called ScalyKumar. This poster had the idea of plants that float on oceans' surfaces that produce oil. From his description of his idea they sound like a giant version of the aquatic plants called water hyacinth. How hard would it be to genetically engineer water hyacinths to be huge, survive and thrive in salt water and fill their lift bladders with the petrolium-like oil instead of the gas that natural water hyacinth do to float?
Adding to Scaly's idea; the plants would need to be durable to survive storms and not cause an ecological disaster. How hard would it be to give them cell walls composed of spider silk and silky runners linking them together and to the ocean floor(where the ocean is shallow)? I should PM him on the FF forum, where he's also a member, to tell him what a good idea he has. :)
 
Suppose you could grow them. You'd have acres full of combustible material. Not very safe.

But who doesn't want synthetic petrochemicals that could be produced quickly and easily in mass quantities?
 
Don't forget about the potential problems of introducing new, manufactured, genetic material into the environment. It could cause genetic changes in other organisms, couldn't it?

All in all, I would expect that the better solution would be to change what we use for fuel, along the lines of biodiesel and similar projects. Not to mention things like solar, wind, and geothermal power.
 
SkepticJ said:
I'm now banned at the GL so can't reply in that thread any more. However I'm still reading the thread as it goes on. There's a new poster on there called ScalyKumar. This poster had the idea of plants that float on oceans' surfaces that produce oil. From his description of his idea they sound like a giant version of the aquatic plants called water hyacinth. How hard would it be to genetically engineer water hyacinths to be huge, survive and thrive in salt water and fill their lift bladders with the petrolium-like oil instead of the gas that natural water hyacinth do to float?
Adding to Scaly's idea; the plants would need to be durable to survive storms and not cause an ecological disaster. How hard would it be to give them cell walls composed of spider silk and silky runners linking them together and to the ocean floor(where the ocean is shallow)? I should PM him on the FF forum, where he's also a member, to tell him what a good idea he has. :)
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He just registered here.
 
SkepticJ said:
I'm bumping this because I still need to know. Thanks to anyone who gives me an answer .:)

In light of the problem with ethanol would the oil plants I linked here give a positive energy return? If so, how much? Where can I find out?
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It would be very very hard hard (beyond our current technical ability) to create oil as we know it. Many of the hydocarbon chanins are not found in living organisms we the result that would have to desighn protiens from scratch on orer to synersize them. This is well beyond anything we can do a pressent.
 
SkepticJ said:
How hard would it be to genetically engineer water hyacinths to be huge, survive and thrive in salt water and fill their lift bladders with the petrolium-like oil instead of the gas that natural water hyacinth do to float?
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Gah! The St. John's river is bad enough as it is! Imagine if it were choked with highly flammable plants.


But, on another note, I was thinking about the current jump in gasoline prices. Is the problem really our ability to obtain crude oil, or does it have to do with our ability to refine enough of it into gasoline?
 
c4ts said:
Gah! The St. John's river is bad enough as it is! Imagine if it were choked with highly flammable plants.
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It wouldn't be choked, because we'd have a reason to harvest the plants out. I think SK is talking about in the ocean much more than in rivers anyway. Rivers are needed for shipping, without explosive plants being everywhere.

How hard to make Scaly's idea with my improvements added?
 
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