If we engineered a bacterium to sequester carbon, it would not be able to compete with wild strains that did not waste that metabolic energy doing unproductive things.
Screwing around with ocean ecology has a host of unknowns that bother smart people.
But with food crops, we are already creating our own ecologies on land that was previously hosting organisms we were not as fond of. In other words, factory farming is already making so many changes to the local ecology that we don't think twice about destroying whole ecologies and replacing them wholesale. We call it crop rotation.
Weathering of mountains is how calcium gets back into the ocean to soak up the carbon dioxide.
We could speed that up, at some cost in energy. If we get that energy from fossil fuels, it may not make sense. If we get the energy from renewable sources that could have replaced fossil fuel use, it is just as bad. Artificial weathering either has to be very low energy, or we have to wait until we no longer put carbon into the air to get energy.
On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Chuck McManis <chuck.mcmanis@gmail.com> wrote:
It is an interesting thesis but would it be any more difficult to simply design a strain of E.coli that sequestered carbon? The whole 'seed the ocean with iron so that plankton will take up more carbon' is a pretty solid example of that which was widely opposed, is that something you would favor Simon? A couple of E.coli projects have been around for converting CO2 into long chain hydrocarbons as a bio diesel precursor.And the other question which I think about from time to time is the carbolic acid cycle. So the ocean is busy taking in CO2 which is resulting in acidification of seawater, so can we use chemistry on a very large scale to precipitate that carbon out as calcium carbonate or something? I don't have any idea on that side of things.On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Simon Quellen Field <sfield@scitoys.com> wrote:
Here's an idea I have not yet explored quantitatively, but I thought I'd pass along for comments.In the Carboniferous era, plants had evolved lignin, but microbes had not yet evolved to degrade it. It took a hundred million years or so for that to happen. In that time, carbon got locked up in plant material which eventually got buried and formed our current coal supplies. As carbon got sequestered, and trees evolved, carbon dioxide levels fell, and oxygen levels rose.If we could engineer the lignin in our crops so that it was not degradable, we could lock up a lot of carbon as a by-product of our current activities.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/CAA0yOM6Yqtfsy8EFKdxWF0jJcHyW9ReBFwBOLAGu3Dxi4s98ow%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
0 comments:
Post a Comment