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Why aren't we engineering plants to produce automotive fuel? We ought to at least be able to do diesel.
by andrewflnr 1y ago
Why aren't we engineering plants to produce automotive fuel? We ought to at least be able to do diesel.
- asdff 1y agoWe do this for some plants. Hybrid palms are used for palm oil production due to the favorable yields and properties compared to parental species. One might ask why there are no cars powered off palm oil seeing as we can readily grow it across the world?
- sandworm101 1y agoThere are. Millions of them. Most any diesel can run just fine on veg oils, even used cooking oil. (Some very modern cars might need the electronic control systems tweaked.) There have been times/places where grocery stores put limits on oil once it became cheaper than diesel. Mythbusters: https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI TopGear: https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoSo now, on top of clearing forests and destroying ecosystems for farmland and infinite suburbia, we should clear even more forests to get fuel for cars, so we can drive them through the infinite suburbia.
- asdff 1y agoThe forests are cleared because they are allowed to be sold for clearance. Doesn't matter if its palm oil or for cows or sugarcane or ranch homes or solar panels or data centers. People tend to want a return on their investment in land vs spending serious capital to not do anything with a jungle. If you want to limit this you need to prevent land from being sold to entities that would like to profit from it. The specific thing being grown is basically irrelevant.
- jajko 1y agoSo many incorrect statements... you know the world is bigger than your (presumably US) backyard. I suggest travelling around the world a bit and visiting ie Borneo how entire rainforest ecosystem is being reduced to nothing just due to palm oil plantations, mostly for biofuel and cheap&bad for health food additive. Similar sight across many places out there. What you wrote ain't valid for a single one.
- asdff 1y agoThe issue is once again the forest is allowed to be sold. If you open up land for development, that is typically what tends to happen. People will seek out whatever use case makes sense with that land. No one wants to lord over a nature preserve. Everyone wants to make their buck into a buck fifty. Clearcutting of the rainforest in Borneo could be solved with a pen stroke by the government in charge but it seems they are more interested in supporting industrialization than preservation.
- philipkglass 1y agoPlants have very low sunlight conversion efficiency compared to solar farms. If you need chemical fuel instead of electricity, it would still be more efficient to use solar electricity to turn carbon dioxide and water into simple liquid fuels like methanol (usable in spark ignition engines) or dimethyl ether (usable in diesel engines).
- dmurray 1y agoSolar panels have a manufacturing cost, though, while you could imagine a renewable plantation of diesel trees that needs no raw ingredients other than a handful of seeds. It could even be self-seeding, though there are some good reasons we don't usually produce GE crops with viable seeds. I'm sure the economics don't work out for it: solar panels are already cheap, the land could grow other crops, etc. But photosynthesis being lower-yield than photovoltaic generation isn't enough to rule it out. Perhaps as science fiction, on a future mission to an Earthlike planet that doesn't have the right resources to produce semiconductors at scale.
- tekno45 1y agowhat goes through my mind is the fact plants aren't low maintenance, the land has to be tended. growing the fuel plant is probably easy. How do you get it OUT of the plant? Solar panels just sit there (they do need cleaning i admit) and produce electricity that we can manipulate very cheaply already. What machine collects diesel from plants? Can you safely dispose of the plant matter?
- mapt 1y agoBiodiesel is an oil plus an alcohol (usually 80% vegetable oil + 20% methanol) reacted using an alkaline catalyst like lye. Methanol is also known as "wood alcohol", and can be made at ~40% yield by cooking down wood ("destructive distillation") in a specific fashion, or made from too-cheap-to-meter natural gas if you've got it. Anything you can do with natural gas can also be done with anaerobically fermented methane. You can also use ethanol (fermented from any carbohydrate crops) instead of methanol, creating a biodiesel with slightly different but still usable properties. ... Sunflower, rapeseed, and soybean oil have very well-established agricultural workflows which require very little labor input. Palm oil is substantially higher yield, but more labor intensive and is associated with tropical rainforest destruction. ... You don't necessarily even need to react your vegetable oil. The original Diesel Cycle demonstration engines ran on straight peanut oil, and there are some truck engines out there (like the 12 valve Cummins) that will happily run on filtered waste fryer oil all day long. It's just a matter of tuning, viscosity, compression ratios, seal materials, and the like, being slightly different from petrochemical diesel fuel. Reacting vegetable oils into fatty acid esters ("biodiesel") does attain some modest engine benefits, but mostly it's to match compatibility with petrochemical diesel grades so that you don't, eg, need to replace your fuel lines & pumps with different diameter fuel lines & pumps.
- staplung 1y agoBiodiesal is already a thing. Also, we (the US) already blend a portion (about 10%) of corn-derived ethanol to our gasoline. There are problems with it though, one of which is that overall, it probably has a higher carbon footprint (fertilizer, harvesting, processing, etc.) than just not using it.
- dexwiz 1y agoCorn ethanol is a farm subsidy. It gets greenwashed as something positive because plant=natural=good.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoIt’s not great for the environment, but it keeps a food surplus available in crisis instantly by just turning off the ethanol production facilities
- chairmansteve 1y agoTrue. But it might be cheaper to store the corn for a year and then dispose of it, replace it with fresh corn.
- dragontamer 1y agoIf you are disposing of the corn anyway, why not turn it into Ethanol and then burn it as car fuel? The only real issue with Ethanol IMO is that corn Ethanol is preventing progress in advanced synthesis made out of, ex: switchgrass cellulose. There are better sources of ethanol if we invest into them.
- chairmansteve 1y ago"If you are disposing of the corn anyway, why not turn it into Ethanol and then burn it as car fuel?" It costs more money and has a higher carbon footprint than simply using gasoline.
- bparsons 1y agoWe do. It is called biodiesel. You can make it from any organic matter.
- andrewflnr 1y agoAny? That's even more optimistic than me.
- astrocat 1y agowe already do have plants that produce (sort of) high-energy-density liquids for us. So if you want gas to be as expensive as maple syrup then... sure. :)
- ben_w 1y agoIIRC, diesel engines can run directly on vegetable oil.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoOver 1% of US land is devoted to biofuels. If we replaced those corn fields with solar, it would produce 4x the electricity currently consumed in the US.
- terminalshort 1y agoOr if we just put those panels on any other land. Land isn't the constraint here.
- fooker 1y agoSure if we could magically transport and store it. Like we can for liquid fuels.
- ben_w 1y agoNo magic required: the tech for transporting electricity predates writing, and that by about six millenia; while reusable storage was only about 27 years after dynamo generators, 1859 vs. 1832. Both have since been improved upon somewhat.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoWhat are you referring to? Copper?
- ben_w 1y agoMostly, but gold and silver are also simultaneously antiquity-era metals and great electrical conductors. No generators to connect to a power grid, nothing to use the power for, but they could still transport electricity in the time before writing.
- jameshart 1y agoMagically transporting and storing liquid fuels involves an unbelievably massive supply chain of trucks and refineries and storage tanks and gas stations. If we need infrastructure to make use of energy we can ‘magic’ it up.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoWe do and call it canola oil - which should give you an idea of whether eating canola oil is a good idea
- terminalshort 1y agoInternal combustion engines and humans fundamentally use the same chemical process to generate energy. The fact that something can be used as automotive fuel alone says nothing about whether or not it is safe for human consumption.
- zbentley 1y ago> same chemical process Our digestive systems heat and oxidize hydrocarbons to generate kinetic energy? You sure about that?
- fooker 1y agoWe do use oxidation to generate energy. Of glucose, not a hydrocarbon, but there are plenty of organisms that use hydrocarbons directly. We don't because we use glucose as our easily transportable fuel, which we evolved because plants happened to produce glucose when we evolved. If there were plants producing some hydrocarbon in fruits we'd have evolved mitochondria to use that instead.
- dgacmu 1y agoDifferent process, same outcome: hydrocarbons are broken down and oxidized into CO2. We just do it with some enzymes in the Krebs cycle instead of doing a high temperature reaction.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 1y agoSee https://www.aircela.com/ https://www.aircela.com/ and many other e-fuel startups, that one makes a very pretty image of a "personal fuel synthesizer" which makes about a gallon of gas a day which is about what my wife and I use.
- two_handfuls 1y agoCool! They have the numbers, too. Their system needs electricity for electrolysis, 75kWh per gallon of fuel. Compare to 0.24-0.87 kWh/mi for electric cars.
- PaulHoule 1y agoFor a car that gets 30mpg that is 2.5 kWh/mi which is 3x worse than the the least efficient electric car, 10x worse than the best. Still people will want to keep classic cars running in the future and there will be some market, enthusiasts will be willing to pay upwards of $8/gallon. Methanol-to-gasoline fuel is very high octane, around 96, which should keep old engines happy. The most significant market, I think, for e-fuels are large vehicles such as construction trucks and farm tractors. California has absolutely terrible air quality not just in cities but in ag areas and it would be ideal to synthesize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether which burns without any soot because it has no C-C bonds.
- 486sx33 1y ago[dead]
- wombatpm 1y agoDo you want plants you grind up into fuel or are you thinking Niven style Booster Trees?
- conradev 1y agoSomething like 40% of the corn grown in the US is turned into biofuel: https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=105761 https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1057...
- 8bitsrule 1y agoMy guess: (in the US, at least) brains focussed on profits have taken less delight in exploration/invention. (Somewhat similar to what's been happening in science.)
- xandrius 1y agoWe kind of are but we are also in the process of stopping burning stuff to create energy for ourselves, as usually burning creates CO2.
- DanielHB 1y agoWe literally make ethanol from corn and sugar cane. And biodielse from soy. It doesn't make economic and enviromental sense in most parts of the world (especially corn). In some places they are net-positive on carbon emissions compared to oil-derived gasoline. Tilling the fields, growing, harvesting, processing and transporting often emits more CO2 than the equivalent gasoline produced. Especially the initial tilling of the land to convert it to farmland releases A LOT of CO2 into the atmosphere (this is a one-time thing though). In the US all (ground vehicle) gasoline sold needs to have 10% ethanol (corn-based), in Brazil it is 20% (sugar cane based). In Brazil almost all cars support 100% ethanol fuel and it is quite common to fuel with ethanol only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil The whole bio-fuel industry is a very complex mix of economics (often requires subsidies to make sense), geopolitical (less imported oil), environmental concerns (mass scale farming soil degradation and CO2 emissions derived from it) and logistical (completely different transportation and refining process). Fun fact ethanol freezes at a fairly high temperature and mixes with water which makes it not ideal for cold climates and boats. It is quite common for unaware boat owners to f-up their engines by buying car-grade fuel-station gasoline in Brazil.
- matheusd 1y ago> in Brazil it is 20% (sugar cane based) 30% in 2025 for cars (from 27%), 15% biodiesel in diesel for trucks (from 14%). Source: https://www.em.com.br/politica/2025/06/7183470-governo-aumenta-percentual-de-etanol-na-gasolina-de-27-para-30.html https://www.em.com.br/politica/2025/06/7183470-governo-aumen... > The whole bio-fuel industry is a very complex mix of economics (often requires subsidies to make sense), geopolitical (less imported oil), environmental concerns (mass scale farming soil degradation and CO2 emissions derived from it) and logistical (completely different transportation and refining process). Don't forget lobyying by the relevant sectors!
- DanielHB 1y agoAnd the social implications of converting farmland from growing food to growing sugar cane/corn/soy. It is a VERY complex topic, but it seems overall it is a marginally positive thing for Brazil (even in emissions). While a very negative thing in the US because of all the subsidies required to make corn ethanol viable and overall negative emissions impact compared to oil gasoline.