Putting the Bugs to Work
Some of our worst enemies are our best friends.
We generally think of microbes as disease-causers, for instance. But try to imagine our world without those invisible recyclers of plant and animal matter that allow the soil to grow new life.
Scientists are devising ways of using microbes to clean up pollution and provide new energy sources.
Here's an example of how we have come to view our friends as enemies. Quick, what's the first thing you think of when someone says, "Termites!"? I know a good number of us say, "Raid!" Termites are bad guys, right?
Wrong.
The July 2006 Popular Science article:
"The Future of Energy: 10 Technologies to End Our Oil Addiction"
by Tom Clynes
http://popsci.com/energy
includes making ethanol with the help of some of the same microbes that live in the gut of your average termite. So, besides their recycling work, these bugs may now be harnessed in industrial-scale fermentation facilities to help brew our way out of this wreck-in-progress that is our reliance on fossil energy. Termites are only able to digest wood because the bugs in their bellies can break cellulose down. So, anything that contains a lot of cellulose (like paper and cardboard - made from trees - or wood chips or switchgrass) can be gathered - from someplace nearer than from where we get fossil oil - and used to make ethanol (which is, by the way, what the original Model T was actually designed to use. So, with the help of another bug - yeast, the sugars produced by the termite's gut microbes can be transformed to ethanol. Flexible-fuel cars - able to handle either the traditional gas made from fossil oil or ethanol - are being produced; factories to produce ethanol in the U.S. are gearing up; and farmers are starting to both use some of their waste and grow crops to make ethanol.
I hear there are people in Pittsburgh arranging to have some of our own biofuel to be made from plant matter grown locally.
Stay tuned. As the price of fossil fuel continues to rise, more and more people will learn to take their own energy needs into their own hands. "Distributed energy" (small amounts produced locally rather than massive nuclear and fossil-burning centralized plants to produce e.g. electricity) is the way of the future. One day (God willing and we don't destroy ourselves with war over non-renewable resources) you may have a fuel cell in you basement, a solar panel on your roof, and a still in your back yard.
We generally think of microbes as disease-causers, for instance. But try to imagine our world without those invisible recyclers of plant and animal matter that allow the soil to grow new life.
Scientists are devising ways of using microbes to clean up pollution and provide new energy sources.
Here's an example of how we have come to view our friends as enemies. Quick, what's the first thing you think of when someone says, "Termites!"? I know a good number of us say, "Raid!" Termites are bad guys, right?
Wrong.
The July 2006 Popular Science article:
"The Future of Energy: 10 Technologies to End Our Oil Addiction"
by Tom Clynes
http://popsci.com/energy
includes making ethanol with the help of some of the same microbes that live in the gut of your average termite. So, besides their recycling work, these bugs may now be harnessed in industrial-scale fermentation facilities to help brew our way out of this wreck-in-progress that is our reliance on fossil energy. Termites are only able to digest wood because the bugs in their bellies can break cellulose down. So, anything that contains a lot of cellulose (like paper and cardboard - made from trees - or wood chips or switchgrass) can be gathered - from someplace nearer than from where we get fossil oil - and used to make ethanol (which is, by the way, what the original Model T was actually designed to use. So, with the help of another bug - yeast, the sugars produced by the termite's gut microbes can be transformed to ethanol. Flexible-fuel cars - able to handle either the traditional gas made from fossil oil or ethanol - are being produced; factories to produce ethanol in the U.S. are gearing up; and farmers are starting to both use some of their waste and grow crops to make ethanol.
I hear there are people in Pittsburgh arranging to have some of our own biofuel to be made from plant matter grown locally.
Stay tuned. As the price of fossil fuel continues to rise, more and more people will learn to take their own energy needs into their own hands. "Distributed energy" (small amounts produced locally rather than massive nuclear and fossil-burning centralized plants to produce e.g. electricity) is the way of the future. One day (God willing and we don't destroy ourselves with war over non-renewable resources) you may have a fuel cell in you basement, a solar panel on your roof, and a still in your back yard.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 6:38 AM
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