New Zealand firm says it can make ethanol from carbon monoxide

NOw THIS is interesting. Making ethanol out of carbon monoxide - one of the very GHGs we need to reduce (in addition to cutting emmissions we will have to come up with ways of taking GHGs out of the atmosphere too. this technology has the promise to provide a clean alternative renewable fuel for gasoline and also take CO out of the atmosheree - of course growing corn or sugar cane or switch grass also takes CO2 out of the atmosphere - that's why true renewables (not ethanol made from fossil fuel sources) are such a powerful idea.__JW)

This technology looks promising enough that Vinod Khosla is investing in it.


http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/24/business/carbon.php

SAN FRANCISCO: A New Zealand company said it had secured financing from an investor in Silicon Valley to produce ethanol from an untapped source: carbon monoxide gas.

The company, LanzaTech, based in Auckland, said it had developed a fermentation process in which bacteria consume carbon monoxide and produce ethanol. Ethanol can be used as an alternative fuel or an octane-enhancing, pollution-reducing additive to gasoline.

Sean Simpson, LanzaTech's co-founder and chief scientific officer, said Monday that the company would use the $3.5 million investment from the venture firm, Khosla Ventures, to establish a pilot plant and perform the engineering work to prepare for commercial-scale ethanol production.

Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who formed Khosla Ventures in 2004, has invested in more than a dozen start-ups involved in "clean fuel" technologies. He said in a telephone interview that LanzaTech stood out from the scores of proposals he sees each day for both its ability to scale up to industrial proportions and the credibility of the company's founding scientists.
(MORE)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_Tropsch

There's not much CO in the atmosphere -- or we'd all be dead -- and it takes energy to convert CO2 to CO. This is potentially one piece of a larger puzzle, but probably not a huge breakthrough by itself.

Well, it isn't as neat as a perpetual motion machine or making energy out of nothing, but unless I missed something nobody has proposed any way of accomplishing those miracles yet - you have any ideas??

The idea of turning something that is waste material and a GHG into something useful really appeals to me.

I think heavy industry generates much of it but for obvious reasons is mum about the amount. of course automobiles generate quite a bit of it.


http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg99rpt/halocarbons.html

"Total emissions of carbon monoxide in 1997 amounted to 79.2 million metric tons (Table 30)."

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/87-92rpt/chap1.html


"Many gases are chemically active, and they may react in the atmosphere in ways that promote the formation of greenhouse gases. For example, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide combine to promote the formation of ozone, which is a potent greenhouse gas,"


To describe a technology that can consume CO AND provide us with a better alternative fuel than gasoline as "probably (okay , big hedge there) not a huge breakthrough by itself" seems a fairly blase reaction. Of course it's probably not going to solve the entire global warming problem by itself (a fairly tall order before one gets interested, wouldn't you say???) but converting a pollutant (CO) into a useful renewable fuel is hardly a bore either.

based on CO/H2 (so-called water gas, or synthesis gas). Check out that Wiki on Fischer-Tropsch, which dates back to WWII. Problem is, the most economically viable source of CO in pure form is from coal and natural gas; recovering it from the atmosphere would require processing so much mass it would be a net energy loser. So industry actually makes its own CO for use in fuel/chemicals prod'n.

Methanol and acetic acid have been made from CO + H2 for years, so this really is just a slight variation on established technology. In fact, the more I try to figure out what's going on here (business journos often miss the important details), the more it seems to me the CO is just providing an alternative source of carbon. The hydrogen to make ethanol (C2H6O) still has to come from somewhere. The only likely candidates seem to be that the bacteria are using other substances as food (like carbohydrates) and transferring the H to the CO. Really, there's no advantage in that -- the more usual fermentation process makes ethanol without any other carbon source but the carbohydrate. The other possibility is that somehow the bacterium is causing a disproportionation of CO into reduced carbon (ethanol) and CO2 -- a GHG. The net balance just doesn't seem to offer any advantage over established processes, and that's not considering the fact that ethanol has a lower energy density than hydrocarbon fuels anyway.

I can see why you would find the idea of converting toxic waste to fuel interesting, but this particular "breakthrough" really isn't much of an improvement, if any, over stuff that's well-established already. I think when the thermodynamic and mass balance accountants are done with this, that will be clearer. You can't blame the discoverers for seeking funding, or the investors for being interested -- entrepeneurs are expected to take some risks. But the more you think about what has to be involved here, the less promising it looks.

And for comparison, industrial production of CO2 is about 5.5 billion tons per year, expressed as carbon (that would be about 20 billion tons as CO2), which dwarfs CO production. CO2 conc'n in air is about 375 ppm, too low for industrial recovery. CO is even lower, thank goodness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning
from which: "In the past, motor car exhaust may have contained up to 25% carbon monoxide. However, newer cars have catalytic converters, which can eliminate over 99% of carbon monoxide produced.<10>"

consuming CO.

REferring to my original post, the quote from the article:

"The company, LanzaTech, based in Auckland, said it had developed a fermentation process in which bacteria consume carbon monoxide and produce ethanol."

The company, LanzaTech, based in Auckland, said it had developed a fermentation process in which bacteria consume carbon monoxide and produce ethanol. Ethanol can be used as an alternative fuel or an octane-enhancing, pollution-reducing additive to gasoline.

is required to break the bond of CO.

Anyone know?

needed to perform the fermentation but apparantly the technical people Khosla sent to evaluate the process were impressed enough that they thought it had a realistic potential to be made profitable on a industrial scale - thus energy in is less than energy out.


from my post of the article:

"The company, LanzaTech, based in Auckland, said it had developed a fermentation process in which bacteria consume carbon monoxide and produce ethanol. Ethanol can be used as an alternative fuel or an octane-enhancing, pollution-reducing additive to gasoline."

This is the sort of thing that should be covered in high school chemistry.

The primary means of making carbon monoxide on this planet is fossil fuels. Another shell game.

There's a different story at that link,
but it's reported elsewhere, including the NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/business/worldbusiness/24ethanol.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

<snip>

"People have been using yeast to turn sugar into alcohol for thousands of years. Corn, the main source of ethanol in this country, provides carbohydrates that are easily broken into sugars.

"LanzaTech’s innovation lies in using a bacterium to produce ethanol not from a carbohydrate, but from a gas, carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is a waste product of a number of industrial processes, including the production of steel.

<snip>