Brewing the Future

By | December 10, 2006
4 Comments

Almost two years ago I wrote about a certain self-replicating nano-machine that works at the nano-level and quickly produces macro-level results. This machine is yeast.

Yeast hasn’t eaten the world Grey Goo style because they either die of starvation (because they quickly eat all sugar in their area) or they are poisoned by the product of their work – alcohol.

This fact – that yeast is killed by alcohol – places an upper limit on the amount of alcohol in beer and wine. If you want something much stronger than 10% alcohol, it will have to be a distilled beverage.

Brewers have been working with yeasts for generations to bred yeasts that can produce higher concentrations of alcohol. In an effort to improve the efficiency of ethanol production (ethanol being simply an alcohol we can burn in our cars), a group at MIT has joined this effort with their own super-yeast:

The work by MIT chemical-engineering professor Gregory Stephanopoulos and his colleagues focuses on the second part of this process: fermenting sugars to make ethanol. The yeast strain they made can tolerate ethanol concentrations as high as 18 percent–almost double the concentration that regular yeast can handle without quickly dying. In addition, the new strain makes about 20 percent more ethanol by processing more of the glucose, and it speeds up fermentation by 70 percent.

H/T to FuturePundit.

Futurepundit Randall Parker points out that this will result in an exponential improvement in efficiency because each fermentation produces more ethanol, AND isolating that ethanol will require less distillation.

These researchers also want to genetically engineer the yeast to break down cellulose into simple sugars. Then yeast could perform the two biggest steps in making ethanol from biomass…

Ethanol is less than ideal as a liquid fuel because it has much less energy per gallon than gasoline.

True, but a plug-in hybrid vehicle could probably be engineered to get acceptable range and power burning pure ethanol. This could potentially be a step toward energy independence.

Of course if we get an 18% alcohol beer, we’ll need autodrive on those cars.

UPDATE: Okay… ethanol IS the alcohol found in alcoholic beverages. No difference – except that the ethanol put in gasoline is “denatured” – made unfit for human consumption. You want people topping off their cars at the pump, not their flasks.

More info from wikipedia:

Ethanol creates very little pollution when being burned… Pure ethanol has a lower energy content than gasoline (about 30% less energy per unit volume).

A clean burning fuel with 70% of the energy of gasoline. Yeah, a plug-in hybrid could work.

  • http://triticale.mu.nu triticale

    Ethanol is also hydrophilic and corrosive. When I was first reading about using alcohol as a fuel 40 years ago (hottrodders used it because if you run enough thru a high-compression engine you could make more horsepower) there were warnings that it actually would cause the zinc alloy in the then-popular carburators to crumble. This summer in Wisconsin there were problems on the lakes, including fuel spills, resulting from running gasoline stepped on with ethanol in outboard motors not designed to handle it.

  • http://www.kirigin.com ivankirigin

    Of course, energy independence is an unreachable grail — and it wouldn’t even be that good.

    What about cell-phone-independence? Cars?

    Trade is good. International markets in a resource like Oil is good.

    If you mean, “starve asshole dictators in the Middle East”, say so :-D

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Ivan:

    Err…sometimes a euphemism serves a good purpose.
    :-)

    But point taken.

  • http://rantsandrayguns.motime.com/ Stephen M. St. Onge

            Another thing we ought to do, if we’re making a hybrid: use a Diesel or gas turbine, rather than an Otto cycle.

            Yeah, it’s harder to get a Diesel to run on alcohol than on conventional fuel, but it shouldn’t be impossible. Use some of that battery power to preheat the air and fuel when starting, for example, and perhaps put some platinum on the cylinder heads and piston faces to catalyze combustion.

            The great advantage of a Diesel hybrid is that it makes the Diesel’s poor acceleration and startup difficulties unimportant.  You can run the Diesel at optimum mileage, and use the power you don’t need for moving the car down the road to recharge the batteries.  The advantage of a gas turbine hybrid is that it overcomes the turbines abysmal fuel efficiency when running at low power.

            Another thing is that a Diesel or gas turbine running at optimum efficiency will probably run hot enough to incorporate a small steam engine into the car, further increasing mileage.  The easiest such steam engine would be water injectors firing into the Diesel cylinders or turbine combuster, plus a condensor to recover some of the water vapor in the exhaust.  Or for a gas turbine, you can make the “boiler” the turbine blades, running the gas turbine at a temperature that would normally melt the blades, but using the water to both keep them cool and add mass flow to the turbine.  You’d still need a condenser, of course.

            A final wrinkle would be to have the engine, fuel tank, and generator in a detachable small trailer.  You only cart them around when you expect to be driving further than the onboard batteries’ charge will do you.