Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday November 27 2021, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly

Researchers reveal how to turn a global warming liability into a profitable food security solution:

“Industrial sources in the U.S. are emitting a truly staggering amount of methane, which is uneconomical to capture and use with current applications,” said study lead author Sahar El Abbadi, who conducted the research as a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.

"Our goal is to flip that paradigm, using biotechnology to create a high-value product," added El Abbadi, who is now a lecturer in the Civic, Liberal and Global Education program at Stanford.

[...] Although carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere, methane's global warming potential is about 85 times as great over a 20-year period and at least 25 times as great a century after its release. Methane also threatens air quality by increasing the concentration of tropospheric ozone, exposure to which causes an estimated 1 million premature deaths annually worldwide due to respiratory illnesses. Methane's relative concentration has grown more than twice as fast as that of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution due in great part to human-driven emissions.

A potential solution lies in methane-consuming bacteria called methanotrophs. These bacteria can be grown in a chilled, water-filled bioreactor fed pressurized methane, oxygen and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and trace metals. The protein-rich biomass that results can be used as fishmeal in aquaculture feed, offsetting demand for fishmeal made from small fish or plant-based feeds that require land, water and fertilizer.

“While some companies are doing this already with pipeline natural gas as feedstock, a preferable feedstock would be methane emitted at large landfills, wastewater treatment plants and oil and gas facilities,” said study co-author Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in Stanford’s School of Engineering. “This would result in multiple benefits [...] including lower levels of a potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, more stable ecosystems and positive financial outcomes.”

Consumption of seafood, an important global source of protein and micronutrients, has increased more than fourfold since 1960. As a result, wild fish stocks are badly depleted, and fish farms now provide about half of all the animal-sourced seafood we eat. The challenge will only grow as global demand for aquatic animals, plants and algae will likely double by 2050, according to a comprehensive review of the sector led by researchers at Stanford and other institutions.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @05:56PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @05:56PM (#1200011)

    It's time! Line up for your tasty soylent green at your local depot!

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:20PM (#1200056)

      I'm only interested if it's made in artisanal small batches from free-range, vegetarian fed, sustainably farmed human beings and sold in biodegradable packaging.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28 2021, @04:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28 2021, @04:13PM (#1200247)

      Oh I thought it was going to be about eating insects. -1 Disappointed

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @07:00PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @07:00PM (#1200025)

    overweight people eat more than normal weight people. As the article points out, food production is a huge component of global warming. So fixing the obesity problem has the added benefit of reducing global warming.
    Why is this problem still not solved?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @07:24PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @07:24PM (#1200030)

      Food is too cheap. Just raise the prices of everything by 5x and the problem will fix itself.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:06PM (#1200041)

        Oh yeah sure - and use the profits to pay people a living wage and give them free healthcare. What a joke!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:53PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:53PM (#1200052)

      Rich cultures result in lazy people and the gluttons abound.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:37PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:37PM (#1200061)

        That explains Europe /sarcasm

        Or possibly it has something to do with why Europeans call US bread "sweet bread."

        Republicans, where every negative issue is a reason to hate someone else.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @11:00PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @11:00PM (#1200091)

          What do you mean? The China flu, Indian delta variant, Omicrom from Africa - the Mexican caravans of course, Jihadi Muslims tryign to kiil us - and election-stealing liberals, lying scientists and Bill Gate's mind control vaccine. If if weren't for them, we'd happy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29 2021, @12:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29 2021, @12:14AM (#1200358)

      Overweight people are likely far less of a problem than all the food that gets wasted and the excessive portions of meat that get consumed in many areas. Merely cutting back on meat to something more like a fifth of the calories in favor of fruits and vegetables would probably help a lot in terms of both health and the environment.

      But, there's also the issue about all the food that gets thrown out because it gets just left out by grocery store customers that can't be bothered to put it back or whenever there's a power outage where the food goes outside the safe limit for too long. Not to mention all the stuff that gets destroyed in transit or otherwise doesn't make it to people that actually need it.

      Really, it would be a far better use of resources to figure out how to improve the supply chain to result in less wasted food than try to get the overweight to lose weight. Obviously, there are other reasons for overweight people to lose weight, we're not anywhere near the point where it's the thing that's holding the supply production back. I've personally lost 20# over last year and feel much better for it, but the impact on the environment is probably less than one would imagine, certainly nothing compared with being 3 blocks away from my job rather than driving an hour to get there in traffic.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:01PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 27 2021, @08:01PM (#1200037)

    Some rules for propaganda:

    When the absolute numbers are against you, pound on the percentages.

    When the percentages are against you, pound on the absolute numbers.

    When you're just making shit up, leave all the numbers out.

    NASA has some percentage based propaganda:

    https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4799 [nasa.gov]

    About a third of methane comes from "wetlands" aka swamps. Which we supposedly need more of. Or also need less of. Anyway, lots of rotting stuff in swamps. About a fifth comes from livestock poop, and there's the usual distributed pollution problem where you'd have to hire a lot of laborers to follow cows around in the wasteland with a shovel and bucket, although industrial farming COULD cause less methane pollution with more infrastructure. About a third of methane comes from carbon mining industries in general, basically the distributed problem again. Ideally you light flare stacks on fire to burn the methane to much better CO2, but its not always practical. And as NASA says "The remainder of methane emissions come from minor sources" so that's about a tenth or so of the methane. The article implies landfills and water treatment plants are a significant source although NASA disagrees...

    I am intrigued at the idea of wastewater treatment plants emitting methane, which implies no oxygen fermentation, but the plants I'm familiar with have a goal of dumping into rivers with approx zero biological oxygen demand, aka they aerobically ferment which produces CO2 but not methane. So are they glorifying literal rural septic tanks as treatment plants or maybe talking about some other process maybe for industrial treatment (draining mines and quarrys or similar?)

    Fundamentally the problem with processing methane is if you have "a lot" at "high concentration" you're better off burning it for electrical power or heat, so we already do that. And if its not easily collectible, you can't process it with bacteria anyway. If you invest the money to concentrate the methane to make it bacterially useful, you can already make more money burning it for "green electricity".

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:19PM (1 child)

      by Thexalon (636) on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:19PM (#1200055)

      About a fifth comes from livestock poop, and there's the usual distributed pollution problem where you'd have to hire a lot of laborers to follow cows around in the wasteland with a shovel and bucket, although industrial farming COULD cause less methane pollution with more infrastructure.

      I think you misunderstand the problem of livestock poop quite a bit, because that's not at all the core of the problem.

      For example, in the small organic dairy operation I worked at briefly one summer, while the cows did a lot of pooping outside while grazing, but they also did plenty of pooping in the barn. The way this farm handled the indoor poo was to train the cattle to get most of it in a trench with a conveyor belt behind them, and then the conveyor would push everything into what one of the other guys called his "shit pit". And from there, apparently the goal was to get that poo composting a bit, where it would ultimately get used as fertilizer for the hay fields.

      For more industrial meat and dairy operations, it's pretty common for animals to end up in CAFOs (formerly known as feed lots) for a good portion of their life, and what those operations do with it is send it to large lagoons [wikipedia.org] that are basically giant pools of the stuff. And that's by far the easiest place to target for methane capture since you know exactly where the decomposition is happening, and that's what this tech is aiming at.

      Nobody is advocating going around and collecting all the pastureland manure out there (because that would be a lot of work and also make the pasture plants less healthy), they're looking for ways of managing the simply insane amounts of manure that happen when you try to raise thousands of pigs or cattle all in one place rather than spreading them out the way we did prior to approximately the 1950's.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday November 28 2021, @01:16AM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday November 28 2021, @01:16AM (#1200114)

        they're looking for ways of managing the simply insane amounts of manure that happen when you try to raise thousands of pigs or cattle all in one place

        See, how come it's always about robot waiters and the like rather than *this* kind of work when they represent awful jobs they make robots do [youtu.be] in science fiction?

    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:39PM (#1200062)

      Stolen election! Virus hoax! We're not Nazis!

      Yeah we hear you Very Large Man. Try a diet from everything you binge, rightwing propaganda, protein shakes, bestiality, I bet you'll become closer to Jesus!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28 2021, @11:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 28 2021, @11:14PM (#1200349)

      So it seems you have every base covered so no matter what argument someone presents you that you don't like, you can just point to your list and cry "propaganda!" Very efficient, but unnecessary since you guys did away with needing facts in 2015 anyway (they just slid downhill like a shit stain sliding down a Golden Escalator).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @09:28PM (#1200057)

    seems "stranded gas" is the main problem. similar to original problem when oil was discovered. original use of oil was to destille it for light and cooking which left other fractions from destilling looking for a use ... and the prayer was answered (tho not sure from top or bottom) in form of internal combustion engine (holy crap AND we get to use asphalt too!)
    seems fossile fuel extraction is always accompanied by global warming even if you don't oxidize it.
    the solution presented tries to make "usefull" this "by-product" but will require the fish to like their new food and also still taste like fish for end-users?
    also, you know, the general "why bother if i can just flare it" mentality is hard not to ignore when it's raining dollarbill$-ya-all...
    maybe we need to go to mars before this gets implemented?

  • (Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday November 28 2021, @06:15AM (1 child)

    by MIRV888 (11376) on Sunday November 28 2021, @06:15AM (#1200167)

    Tell it to my heating bill.
    Seems like going to great lengths to 'harvest' methane would still be mo money.
    If you are already running a large industrial process, collecting byproduct methane seems like it would be small potatoes.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29 2021, @12:16AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29 2021, @12:16AM (#1200359)

      The idea behind harvesting methane is mostly about killing two birds with one stone. You reduce a greenhouse gas that's substantially worse than CO2 and you can potentially burn it for power generation. When you can do that with municipal dumps or potentially barns, it can make some sense, but in general, that's just some of the emissions and places like the sea where methane beds are starting to thaw, it's downright difficult to do .

  • (Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Sunday November 28 2021, @10:05PM

    by gawdonblue (412) on Sunday November 28 2021, @10:05PM (#1200337)

    There are plenty of organisms around these parts that would consume methane.

    Just need to mix it with a little oxygen:
      2CH4 + O2 = C2H5OH + H2O

(1)