This press conference has reached critical mass. We've enough journalists - Intel Spin Doctor
|
|
|
Man invents microbes that eat CO2
FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS. Boffins have invented a cure for global warming.
The bad news is: the inventors are British, so they’ll have the devil’s own job getting venture capital. The even worse news is, they’re from academia, so they wouldn’t even know how to start to looking for funding.
Some bright 12 year-old yank is probably bunking off high school to get the market clinching venture capital even as we speak.
Carbon8 and Group Intellex both displayed inventions that could reverse the build up of green house gases, at a meeting of the Sustainable Technology Group this week.
To the layman, both inventions do more or less the same thing. They eat greenhouse gases (namely Co2) and pass out something useful. Carbon8 uses Co2 to treat industrial waste and contaminated soils. This reduces CO2 to another form (such as bauxite) while rendering slags (as in the by product of steel treatment) into a non-toxic form that can be dumped cheaply.
They eat carbon dioxide, and turn slags into landfill, you’ve got to love them.
Inventor Dr Paula Carey said, "It’s very hard getting the investment in the UK. It’s hard finding anyone in venture capital who understands science."
Meanwhile, David Brunnen, MD of Groupe Intellex on the other hand, thinks a lot smaller.
His plan is to create jobs for microbial dolomites to eat atmospheric CO2. He intends to build massive homes for these dolomites, on land that is unsuitable for agriculture. With enough investment, he could build large-scale sites that could make a serious hole in the green house.
Bloody microbes, coming over here, taking our jobs and living off the fat of our land. But you watch, if they want any venture capital they’ll go straight abroad. µ
Share this:
Share
I stumbled onto this article from a search I was doing. I had a thought about something of the sort after seeing a special on a research team attempting to create living microbes or somesuch that could actually generate power while living in vats underneath a house. That sparked a train of thought about if we could create something that could eat different greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to accomplish sort of the same thing to help counteract some of the effects of global warming. This sounds sort of along the same thought process, but as someone else said, we may end up just creating a new problem. 

Everything that feeds off of something else has a certain niche in it's ecological circle... if we do introduce some new "creature" that can eat certain greenhouse gases... what happens if they feed too much? Reproduce more rapidly than expected? What will arise to feed on them? I just hope questions such as these will be considered before creating and releasing such new creatures and microbes.
I find it amusing, and perhaps a little annoying that people who don't even qualify as 'layman' believe they can point out flaws at first blush with something they don't fully understand from what amounts to a blurb. 

Do some research before before you look for flaws. Out of control microbes? Using aluminum? Read again, they use CO2 and industrial waste. The source of the by product is the industrial WASTE, not refined aluminum. 

That would be silly. And if you read the website of Groupe Intellex you will see that they are trying to replicate a system that already exists in nature, not create something new. 

At best, these processes will help offset CO2 emissions, but it is unlikely they will solve the problem entirely. 

Also consider that the use of microbes, won't require greenhouse gas emitting power generation and waste generation as would mechanical and chemical processes.
"This reduces CO2 to another form (such as bauxite)..."

We'll see how clever we all think we are when we're up to our necks in bauxite! What then, huh? Huh?!
Nice one. 

Let's not try to stop the reasons why we're getting in this mess. 

But let's invent gadgets that may postpone the problem.

One might try plants?
So no CO2 - next stop ice age
The microbes or whatever, will probably only operate under certain conditions - temp and atmosphere - not to mention that they probably also will only be able to reach a certain point before their by-products kill them. 
CO2 sequestering microbes have been around for along time and they haven't killed the planet yet so i wouldn't worry about that.

The only problem with this is that CO2 is only one of many greenhouse gases and thus causes in rising global temperature. People have it stuck in their heads (due to the media) that CO2 is the be-all and end-all of global warming.

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better and we get better at dealing with our crappy output.

Kind regards,
James
Turning CO2 into Bauxite in the absence of a nuclear reactor is nothing short of miraculous, quick contact Fleischman and Pons!
Bauxite is aluminium in raw form, so what are you on about? you suggest to do away with aluminium to get rid of CO2? seems a bit daft.
Also millions of creatures eat CO2, that's the whole idea behind planting trees you know, and using bacteria/microbes/plankton for it is about as old as the road to rome, in fact older, it's how life began.
Plus I'm sure humankind trying to 'fix' things will backfire and create even greater problems elsewhere.
Anyone familiar with mining knows of wearing CO2 scrubbers, so the science isn't complicated. Hopefully they don't look to the US for funding as they're heading into recession. Perhaps Al Gore could fund such things 8p.
Hmmm...very interesting and particularly exciting. This could very well work to save us from boiling in our own oceans. My only concern is having something like that get loose from a sterile enclosure and become airborne because it very well has the potential to render the planet lifeless. How's that you say? It's very simple. If it multiplies rapidly, like how algae bloom, it could choke plants, trees, etc to death (like how algae chokes the water of oxygen, killing the fish). It could effectively eliminate the oxygen producers that are our lifeblood. If they could find a safe way to filter these microbes through the atmosphere without actually releasing them into the environment, it could very well eliminate the immediate threats of global warming, but it should not be used as a long term solution because it would be a disaster waiting to happen.
It'll be about 20 years from now, when these CO2-eating microbes are well along with scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2 and pooping out useful byproducts, that we will find out the inevitable downside...

Maybe they just keep eating all the CO2 until all the plants suffocate.

Maybe - when the CO2 runs low - they get hungry, grow a beak and legs, and adjust their diet towards human flesh.

Maybe they roll themselves up into huge sticky balls and roll around crushing entire cities.

You just ~know~ that there ~will~ be an unexpected downside. There's always something. And we always seem to figure it out just about the same time that the patents have run out.
I invented something like this too...

it's called a tree >.>
Errr, hello? Microbes that eat CO2? What about cyanobacteria? Micro green algae, etc.
You know what is sad is that the people with the money to invest in this technology are not very intelligent at all. I wonder how society even made it this far with putting average joes in charge of companies that which they have no clue of how the product even works, much less do they have any engineering or science related degrees. It seems we think that having a business degree is enough.....
What about trees, plants and vegetation? You know, the whole ecosystem that depends on CO2 to survive? They in turn provide us with Oxygen. So...he does realise this could kill the planet, right?
Your a little late.. ay ?

http://tinyurl.com/22ro59
This sounds like pretty important news.
They are called 'plant-life' and the odd sea creature and both possibly much prettier than those microbes.

Anyway, I'm confused. I thought the Earth was close (geologically speaking) to another ice-age that might wipe out mankind. Don't we need increased carbon dioxide to stave off or, prevent it?
...the vegetarians. If they would stop eating the damned plants, there wouldn't be a problem.
The science is not settled. 

http://communities.canada.com/nationalpost/blogs/posted/pages/climate-change-the-deniers.aspx

http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.com



Bauxite?? What are you on about? 

Bauxite is an aluminium ore. It consists largely of the minerals gibbsite, boehmite and diaspore, together with the iron oxides goethite and hematite, the clay mineral kaolinite and small amounts of anatase. 

How can you produce that from (steel) slag heaps?

The microbes produce carbonate salts hence the name brand name carbon8. I can hear the penny drop from here.
We can already increase CO2 consumption by remembering a simple fact: on average, an acre of wild grasses consumes 600% more CO2 than an acre of trees. 

Let's simply deforest the planet in pursuit of planetary salvation!!! (my apologies to Jonathan Swift for my plagiarism of his original idea)
Always the British... 
Yes... Australia all over again LOL...

i hope the at least attempt to predict the ecological impact of something like this, and also have a bullet proof 'system restore'.
Various comments on the comments:

CO2, being a combustion product, isn't a great source of energy, so presumably the critter will have to expend energy to breakdown the CO2. If it then turns something into Bauxite, its unlikely to get much energy from that (unless it uses aluminum, but that's pretty pointless).

Unless the critter has some real benefits from that it won't compete very well in the rest of the environment. Between that and other safeguards, like needing particular nutrients, it's unlikely to take over the world.

What happens to the carbon, anyway?

One thing I thought might work well, though I don't know if enzymes are powerful enough for it is to convert CO2 and sand (SiO2) to make SiC and O2. Silicon carbide is extremely inert. It's also very hard so I'd worry about abrasive SiC dust. Several plants can dissolve silica, so they might be a good starting point.