By Katie Scott, Wired UK
Newspapers could be used to power cars, a team of molecular biologists from Tulane University in New Orleans claim.
The team from the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology has discovered a new strain of the bacteria Clostridium, TU-103, that can produce a biofuel when breaking down newspaper.
[partner id="wireduk"]The biologists state: "TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces butanol directly from cellulose" -- in the presence of oxygen.
Other strains of Clostridium have been used to produce butanol before, but they've had to be genetically engineered to do so. Others can produce butanol, but not in the presence of oxygen, while still others must break down the cellulose into sugars first. And some can break down cellulose but don't produce butanol.
The Tulane team identified their strain in animal droppings, cultivated it and developed a new methodology (for which the patent is pending) for using the bacteria to produce butanol without having to isolate it from oxygen.
Butanol is touted as an alternative to ethanol because it can be used in automobiles without modification, it contains more energy than ethanol and it can be distributed through existing fuel pipelines (although there are concerns about its toxicity).
"This discovery could reduce the cost to produce bio-butanol," says associate professor David Mullin. "In addition to possible savings on the price per gallon, as a fuel, bio-butanol produced from cellulose would dramatically reduce carbon dioxide and smog emissions in comparison to gasoline, and have a positive impact on landfill waste."
Dr Oliver Inderwildi, who is the head of low-carbon mobility at Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and was not involved in the study, called the discovery "a breakthrough."
"The scientific results are convincing, especially the point that the bacterial strain works when oxygen is present is a breakthrough," he said.
He adds: "Up to now, only bacteria that are destroyed by oxygen worked and that is a major issue for the large scale production. At present butanol is either produced chemically using a two-step process, which is relatively energy intensive (the butanol consequently has a high carbon footprint and the energy balance is not good). Biochemically it is produced by fermentation of sugar or starch and this should not be done on a large scale due to the food-fuel trade off. Therefore, the results from Tulane could help to produce significant amount of butanol sustainably."
The Tulane biologists will now test whether the bacteria also will produce butanol when let loose on bagass, a fibrous waste material they obtained from a sugarcane processing plant. But they are also sequencing the bacteria's genome in order to single out the genes that are responsible for producing butanol. The hope is that these genes could then be engineered to increase the biofuel production.
Photo: JuniorMonkey/Flickr
