Can biodiesel from a Patagonian fungus be among us?

If someone from a university said they could make fuel from fungus, one might surmise that they’d been hitting the ’shrooms a little hard of late. But Professor Gary Strobel of the Montana State University (MSU) microbiology department seems more or less compos mentis.

Strobel and his team went on an expedition to the rain forest of Patagonia and discovered a certain fungus, known as Gliocladium roseum, living in the branches of ancient ulmo trees (Eucryphia cordifolia). They found it was giving off a vapor with the same medium-chain hydrocarbons that occur in diesel, along with alcohols and esters that could combine to burn more efficiently than conventional diesel.

“These are the first organisms that have been found that make many of the ingredients of diesel,” said Strobel, who travels the world in search of exotic plants containing beneficial microbes. “This is a major discovery.”

Because the fungus can grow on cellulose, it means that biodiesel might be produced at a more cost- and energy-effective level, without having to affect the food supply. More work is needed, but Strobel is on the case. “We’ll do some scale-up and fermentation,” he said, “then get enough to run a little engine. If we can do that, we are in business.”

-- Colin Ryan

Photo credits: Montana State University/Green Fuels Forecast

Comments

[Uncle B]

Americans have turned down diesels! Euro-diesel engines are a full 40% more efficient- a proven fact! 40% more miles per gallon! For reasons only an American mind can decipher, and even in times of higher fuel prices, oil hitting over $70.00 bbl today, Americans shun diesels? The new Mercedes Blue TEC diesel engines are as clean or cleaner burning than gasoline engines. Americans won't touch them! All the Algae and fungus produced diesel in the world, offered for even 40% savings, and the romance with the gasoline engine remains strong! We have CNG and the engines for it! Americans prefer gasoline! We have Ethanol, home grown fuel, and Ethanol-specific engines too! Giving great results, better than gasoline! Americans add ethanol to their gasoline getting poorer performance and gasoline remains "King of the Road" in America! We are habituated to gasoline and will not accept any other fuel, and will burn gasoline until the refineries run dry, and that will happen, and soon! We will then do as the Germans in WWII did, synthesize gasoline from coal at great expense, pay for it and burn it in preference to a host of other much better fuels and battery technologies! Addictions are like that! Illogical and deadly! No fungus will ever change the psyche of the American, and he will burn gasoline, build McMansions, drink, and do dope until the last reefer is smoked, the last Jack Daniels is emptied and the last two by four on earth is cut to pieces - we are doomed by our own obsessive addictions to a "Third World" ship among the nations! Locked into unsustainable habits and reaching the outer limits of world resources in our follies! Diesel producing fungus, Super insulations, new technologies be damned! America still drives gasoline fueled Harley Davidson's with engines that throw back to the radial piston air-craft engines from the 1920's, complete with rough running rumbley sound effects! This in the face of the Hyabusa marvel of modern technology from Japan! Fungus that yields Diesel, a modern novelty, not part of the "Perry Mason" or "Frank Sinatra" aura, will never go anywhere, but "Retro-Styled" cars are a big hit! America resists change, and likes its comfort zone too much, and will die in it, buried by technologies written in Chinese and Sanskrit, like the new stem-cell medical miracles from China today! Our doctors can't read Chines papers on them, and fall behind - not so for the Chinese, multi-lingual doctors! Even a miracle in Fungus development yielding pure diesel from cellulose and bio-mass, free from weeds of the fields, cannot overcome the strong tradition of Americans in the 1920's and gasoline!