A new study out of the University of Georgia (UGA) has all the hallmarks for Hollywood's next doomsday blockbuster.
Researchers at UGA's Bioenergy Systems Research Institute have found a way to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using a mutated form of the microorganism Pyrococcus furiosis.
So far, they have turned the recaptured CO2 into a compound called 3-hydroxypropionic acid, which is commonly used to make acrylics and other industrial products. However, Michael Adams, the lead scientist on the project, believes further manipulation of P. furiosis could lead to the development of biofuels.
Of course, as soon as the story hit popular science sites, the Twitterverse was a-flutter with suggestions of catastrophe, including plunging the Earth into a deep freeze should the bacteria escape from the lab, somehow proliferate exponentially and suck all of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Technical note: P. furiosis is archaeon not a bacterium.
It's a scenario truly worthy of Roland Emmerich, director of the scientifically insulting The Day After Tomorrow.
A really bad film might be the best thing to come out of this study.
There are some promising premises about the research. The argument for biofuels in general is that they are carbon neutral, i.e., plants extract CO2 from the atmosphere so when we burn them there is no net increase in the greenhouse gas.
Biofuels have come under harsh criticism for various reasons, though. For example, some argue growing the crops to produce the fuel diverts land use from growing food. Others point out that it takes a lot of energy to grow and harvest then extract the sugars from plants in order to produce the ethanol, energy that comes, in large part, from burning traditional fossil fuels.
Finally, the vast majority of biofuels currently being produced come from oil-palm and sugar cane plantations converted from rainforests. Critics complain that deforestation hardly constitutes a carbon neutral footprint.
According to the website phys.org, Adams believes his process is a vast improvement.
"What this discovery means is that we can remove plants as the middleman," he said. "We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass."
It remains to be seen, however, if the process is scalable. A few years back, biofuel from algae was the next great breakthrough. In the fall of 2012, however, a report published by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies concluded algal biofuel production is unsustainable because of the vast water, energy and nutrient resources required to grow and harvest the algae.
Adams' paper does not address what it would take to make his process practical on an industrial scale, but I suspect whoever runs with this (ExxonMobile would be my guess) will encounter the same kinds of roadblocks.
I'm not suggesting we should not do research into alternative energy, but we still have not developed anything that comes close to competing with oil in efficiency except for, perhaps, nuclear power.
On the contrary, we should be putting far more emphasis on developing the efficiencies of alternative renewable technologies, particularly those that have no carbon footprint at all.
