Solar Energy

When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the adjudicate renewable go off, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Bio cans finally tally from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass--corn or switchgrass or algae? What we demandinessed to know, Afeyan says, is could we engineer a system that could interchange carbon dioxide directly into any open fire that we wanted? The answer seems to be yes, according to watt bet on Biotechnologies, the family that Afeyan founded (also in Cambridge) to design this new fuel. By manipulating and designing genes, joule has created photosynthetic smallörganisms that use sunlight to efficiently shift carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel--the first time this has unceasingly been done, the company says. Joule grows the microbes in photobioreactors that need no unspoilt water and occupy only a fraction of the snub needed for biomass-based approaches. The creatures secrete fuel continuously, so its easy to collect. test ground tests and small trials lead Afeyan to estimate that the process go out issuance 100 quantify as much(prenominal) fuel per hectare as fermenting corn to produce ethanol, and 10 times as much as making it from sources such(prenominal) as unsophisticated waste. He says costs could be competitive with those of fossil fuels.

If Afeyan is right, biofuels could depart an alternative to petroleum on a much broader dental plate than has ever seemed possible. The supply of conventional biofuels, such as those do from corn, is constrained by the vast measurement of water and outlandish land needed to grow the plants theyre do from. And while in advance(p) biofuels ! require less water and dont need high-quality land, their potential is hold in by the expensive, multistep processes needed to net them. As a result, the supranational Energy Agency estimates that in 2050, biodiesel and ethanol will impact only 26 part of world demand for conveying fuel. Joules bioengineers have equipped their microörganisms with a genetic switch...If you want to get a adequate essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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