http://www.nzherald.co.nz/element-magazine/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503340&objectid=11353005
"Now based in Chicago, New Zealand-founded company LanzaTech has been heralded for recycling the carbon-rich waste from industrial operations, such as steel works, into ethanol and other green chemicals. The company has raised US$165million from international investors since it was founded in 2005. LanzaTech's latest process, in conjunction with the IOC-DBT Centre for Advanced Bio-Energy Research based in India, is now turning CO2 emissions into omega-3 fatty acids. LanzaTech-developed microbes produce acetate that is then consumed as carbon and energy by specially developed algae rich in omega-3. The algae can then be either directly eaten by fish or the oil extracted and turned into a marketable fish oil supplement." GR- Unclear why this also wouldn't work with good ol' air CO2. Anyway, 0.0000001 GT/yr of CO2 profitably mitigated (until omega-3 is metabolized back to CO2). 35 GT/yr to go. Speaking of super biota: http://www.nature.com/news/amped-up-plants-1.15932 "What if crops could borrow the faster-acting Rubisco system of weeds and cyanobacteria? In theory, this would dramatically boost their growth rate and so their yield, all without needing any extra farmland. The appeal of such a strategy is obvious, particularly in the face of the often-quoted United Nations demand for global food production to double by 2050. In practice, replacing the enzyme has proved difficult. But there is encouraging news: on Nature’s website, researchers report that they have made tobacco plants that use the Rubisco from a cyanobacterium (M. T. Lin et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13776; 2014<http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13776>). Sure enough, the transformed plants photosynthesize faster and have higher rates of CO2 turnover than their conventional counterparts. Faster-growing tobacco plants might not sound like a boon for global welfare, but they do demonstrate what might be possible in future. (Tobacco is a common model organism for genetic-engineering research.)" GR - Question, you can amp up the bio CO2 capturing mechanism all you want, but if the goal is to produce biomass at large scales, aren't most plants nutrient- or water-limited, so where are the extra water and nutrients going to come from, aside from fossil fuel intensive irrigation and industrial N fixation? OK, in the marine environment it's just a nutrient issue. Anyway, if CO2 is not the limiting molecule, what is the point of souping up CO2 assimilation? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
