Tough bacteria may hold promise in making biofuel (extremophiles)

[jpak]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/15/BAGQKPQSSL1.DTL

Bacteria that thrive in the weirdest places on Earth hold new promise for fueling the world's cars and factories, and scientists in the Bay Area and Southern California have found some of the most promising ones inside a volcanic crater in Italy and the La Brea tar pits of Los Angeles.

Reports from the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore and UC Riverside describe the possibility of using bacteria known as "extremophiles" to break down wood into sugars that could easily be converted into ethanol as a major biofuel to replace costly and diminishing petroleum resources.

Countless species of living bacteria have long been known to exist in the most extraordinary environments: in mines without air, light or water 5 miles underground; in the intense radioactivity of nuclear wastes; in the geysers and fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park; and far beneath Antarctica's ice.

The Sandia lab chemists are working with a class of extremely ancient microbes known as archaea and with one unique species named Sulfolobus solfataricus that was first isolated from a dormant volcano near Naples and carries enzymes that could be crucial to producing ethanol more quickly and cheaply than it is today.

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[valerief]

1. Oh, yeah, let's bring them forth to multiply and mutate! nt

[Spinzonner]

2. I've heard of something like this before ...

Oh yeah, Day of the Triffids

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

[jpak]

3. Sorry - extremeophiles evolved to survive and reproduce under extreme environmental conditions

temperature, pH, pressure, extreme osmotic stress (high salt concentrations) etc.

but they do not do well and will die out under "normal" aquatic and terrestrial conditions.

That's why they are not found in these environments.

Furthermore, they have been around for *literally* billions of years and some biologists have postulated they may have been the first forms of life to appear on the planet.

No Triffids here...

[Spinzonner]

4. Small organisms with short life cycles

are capable of rapid evolution

[Dogmudgeon]

5. A similar idea: Tom Gold's *Deep Hot Biosphere*

Link to Amazon page.

The idea is similar to abiotic theories, but Gold's theory is that petroleum is produced by extremophiles, so it clearly is a biogenic theory of oil production. The only part I am aware of that has been clearly refuted is his estimates of the rate of extremophile oil production, similar to estimates by the Russian abioticists. There are, however, many sub-hypotheses and assertions that will provide years of productive work for geologists.

Still, we shouldn't count on these kinds of discoveries any time soon. The main problem is that we wasted three and a half decades and may have little or no time remaining to prepare for energy supply shocks.

--p!