Stories tagged oil
Science and Politics: Oil
Where will we get the energy we need for the future?: Some people would like to see more oil drilling in the US.
Courtesy L. Gnome
(With the Republican National Convention literally across the street, the Science Museum of Minnesota will be closed starting Friday, August 29. But Science Buzz marches on! To honor our convention guests, I’ll be posting entries focusing on issues where science and politics overlap. Hopefully this will spur some discussion. Or at least tick some people off. This is the last entry in this series. Previous entries here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Energy is one of the big issues in this election cycle. With gasoline at record high prices, and much of the world’s oil lying in politically unstable regions, there is a lot of pressure to do more drilling in the US, open up more areas to exploration, and build more refineries.
Meanwhile, many conservation groups oppose more drilling, especially offshore or in ecologically sensitive regions of the Arctic. Some call for conservation measures to help reduce oil consumption.
(While the Science Museum of Minnesota does not endorse any candidate or platform, I personally like this energy plan.)
The Bureau of Land Management has announced that a major source of oil is sitting right below our feet: oil shale. Shale is a fine-grained rock made of compressed clay or mud. In some place, oil seeps into the rock. This oil is much more difficult to extract than free-flowing liquid petroleum. But with gas at $4 a gallon, it is becoming feasible to squeeze oil from the rock.
The government estimates there could be up to 800 billion barrels of oil sitting beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. This is equivalent to our current oil imports for, roughly, 219 years. So, tapping this resource would go a long way toward meeting our energy needs until other, greener sources (wind, cheap solar, non-food ethanol) come on-line.
The Bureau of Land Management has produced preliminary guidelines for regulating commercial oil shale production. They are prohibited by law from producing final guidelines. The President has asked Congress to lift the ban so that this effort may go forward.
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It's an important job I've got for you...: That's right: pump my gas. I'm not getting out of the car.
Courtesy thefiveten77Using microorganisms to do our dirty work is all the rage these days. And, you know, they deserve it—they’ve spent so much time making us sick that they’re due for a little bit of productive action (and don’t bring up gut microbes, water treatment, or natural decomposition. I’m just not interested in anything that contradicts me).
It’s encouraging, then, to see that scientists in California have genetically engineered microorganisms (like yeast and strains of e. coli that eat organic garbage and poop crude oil. Is “poop” the right verb? It is? It’s exactly the right verb? Oh, good.
Currently the process requires a lot of equipment for a pretty small output. A room-sized computer and fermenting machine produces about a barrel of oil a week—America consumes about 143 million barrels of oil each week. And, at the moment, the process isn’t super cheap.
However, the scientists involved are hopeful that the necessary equipment can be shrunk, and the product can be produced more efficiently. With a commercial-scale facility (planned construction in 2011), using Brazilian sugarcane as feedstock (not the best crop, but that’s another post), oil could be produced at a cost of about $50 a barrel. Not bad, compared to the current price of oil hovering around $140 a barrel.
The process should be carbon neutral or negative too. That is to say, the CO2 produced by burning the fuel produced should be less than that pulled from the air by the feedstock materials.
It’s all very interesting, but I’m afraid that this sort of technology is forcing biotechnology away from its true purpose—microorganisms working for us in the very literal sense. The day e. coli wanders out into my yard and mows my lawn is the day I’ll get excited. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Pond scum to the rescue: Researchers are looking at ways to produce fuel from algae. Photo from NOAA.
If some researchers in Colorado have their way, you may one day be driving a car powered by pond scum. Solix Biofuels is one of a handful of companies trying to produce biodiesel from algae.
May people consider biodeisel fuels, like ethanol, a preferable alternative to gasoline for powering. It is renewable (we’ll never run out; we just grow some more); it pollutes less; it is non-toxic and biodegradable; and we can grow it in the US, and not have to import oil from overseas.
One of the big problems with biofuels, though, is they are made from plants. Some of those plants, like corn and soybeans, we eat. Turning those plants into fuel is already driving up the price of food. And replacing all our oil with biofuel would require more farmland than exists in the entire nation.
This is where algae comes in. Algae produces vegetable oil, which can be refined into biodiesel. It can grow anywhere you can set up water tanks. It thrives on sunshine, which is plentiful and free. And it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. (You could, in fact, take the CO2 produced by a traditional power plant and pump it straight into an algae farm)
Algae researchers are a long way from producing any biofuel yet. But this could be a way of meeting our energy needs while being gentler to the environment.
Oily, gunky, messy tar pits give up some of their many fossils.: Tar pit at Rancho La Brea Pits, source of thousands of prehistoric animal fossils. Photo by David E. Crawley, courtesy of the University of California-Riverside.New strains of bacteria found living in the 28,000 year-old Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles could prove useful in our modern world.
Discovered in the oil-drenched soil at one of the world’s greatest burial sites of prehistoric ice age animals and plants, the bacteria and enzymes within them are showing interesting properties that could be used in the medical and biofuel industries, not to mention cleaning up oil and other hydrocarbon spills.
Pit 91 at the La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles, CA: Photo by David E. Crawley, courtesy the University of California-Riverside.Two scientists at the University of California-Riverside (UCR) noticed bubbles of methane rising out of the pits of oily asphalt at the site in downtown Los Angeles, and determined the source of the gas to be bacteria living comfortably on and in the gooey mess. The odd discovery found at Pit 91 initiated a study by Jong-Shik Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Sciences.
“We were surprised to find these bacteria because asphalt is an extreme and hostile environment for life to survive,” Kim said. “It’s clear, however, that these living organisms can survive in heavy oil mixtures containing many highly toxic chemicals. Moreover, these bacteria survive with no water and little or no oxygen.”
The bacteria are probably descendents of soil microorganisms that were trapped in the asphalt, according to Kim’s co-author and advisor David E. Crowley, a professor of environmental microbiology at UCR.
“Some may also have been carried to the surface in the heavy oil that seeped upwards from deep underground oil reservoirs,” Crowley added.
Kim and Crowley collected DNA from the microbes by first freezing globs of asphalt with liquid nitrogen (another great use of cryogenics), then grounding the mixture into a powder from which they extracted the DNA.
“Previously, some bacteria had been cultured from the asphalt, but no one had been able to extract DNA from the asphalt to study the entire microbial community,” Kim said.
Most of the more than 200 species of microorganisms identified by the researchers are being classified as new families, whose closest living relatives are able to survive in extreme environments including radioactive ones.
The results of their studies were published online in the April 6 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology , and a display about the discovery is currently at the La Brea Tar Pits' Page Museum in Los Angeles.
To good to be true? Maybe not. India’s largest car company is planning to start production on a car that runs on compressed air. An on-board tank would store over 3,000 cubic feet of compressed air. Released in small, controlled bursts, the air would push pistons to make the car go. Nothing burns, so there is no pollution, no greenhouse gas emissions, no use of gasoline.
The car has a range of 120-180 miles, about double what the best electrics now offer. Drivers will fill up at special compressors installed at filling stations. (The car also comes equipped with a compressor that can refill the tank if plugged in overnight.) Thus, “fuel” costs will come down to about 2.2 cents per mile.
The car saves energy in other ways:
- Because there is no internal combustion – no gasoline burns in the engine, and it stays relatively cool -- you only need to change the oil every 31,000 miles or so. (In fact, you can use vegetable oil.)
- As air expands, its temperature drops – in this case, to somewhere between 0 and 15 below. This cool air could be recaptured for the air conditioning system, saving even more energy.
The car does have some drawbacks. The top speed is 68 mph -- fine for tooling around town, but pretty weak for the highway. Also, to save weight, the car is made entirely of fiberglass and is glued together, rather than bolted. This kind of construction is not considered safe enough in the US. But if the air car is successful, it’s a good bet that car companies will look for ways to adapt this technology to the American market.
Some Science Buzz writers specifically go looking for science stories to write about. Then there are lazy folks like me, who just surf the web as per usual, and when something sciencey crosses our path, we bookmark it.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been running across a lot of stories on energy. None of them seemed big enough to merit its own story, but they are too good to completely ignore. So, here’s a potpourri:
America’s energy needs keep growing. Producing energy by burning coal or oil pollutes the environment. Nuclear energy is much cleaner, but it produces radioactive waste. Now a government-funded project in Tennessee is trying to recycle the waste from nuclear power plants to produce a new type of fuel—one that could produce up to 100 times as much energy, and produce 40% less waste.
One old technology that may be making a comeback is gasification—turning organic material, such as coal, into a gas which can be burned for energy. It’s cleaner than burning coal directly for energy—a lot of the pollutants are captured and re-used. And, you can gasify any organic material, including plants and farm waste.
In other threads on this blog, we’ve discussed some of the downsides of ethanol-- increased demand for corn causes farm prices to shoot up. A report from Brazil outlines some of the other potential problems, from pollution created in its manufacture, to destroying large ecosystems to raise the crops that will be turned into ethanol.
When drillers go looking for oil, they look for large pockets of liquid trapped in the earth, surrounded by non-porous rock. This is sometimes called “easy oil”—ready to refine as soon as it comes out of the ground. But there are vast amounts of oil in porous rock, like sand or shale. Miners have to dig up vast amounts of oil-soaked rock, and then separate the usable oil from the sand. It’s a very expensive process. But, as the price of crude oil keeps climbing, we are getting to the point where shale oil makes sense. And what’s even better, some of the largest deposits in the world are found here in North America.
The article linked above describes a shale oil operation in Canada. There are also operations underway in the
United States. And there’s another project underway in Israel.
Will new technologies render oil obsolete?: Photo by tbone55 via flickr.com
There’s been lots of energy news lately. Here’s a round-up of some articles I found interesting:
An inventor in Colorado is making biofuel from pond scum. Algae grow rapidly; they produce waste products that can be turned into biodiesel and ethanol; and they can absorb carbon dioxide from traditional coal- and oil-burning factories.
A company in Arizona has announced on their corporate blog that they have invented a new process of creating hydrogen on-demand from magnesium and water. This would allow a clean-burning fuel cell to produce its own hydrogen.
And speaking of fuel cells, Ford Motor Company has unveiled a prototype hydrogen / plug-in car. It runs on batteries powered by hydrogen. But, very few stations in the US carry hydrogen for refueling. So, you can also recharge the batteries by simply plugging it into a household electrical outlet. Ford hopes to have a commercial model available within 10 years.
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