Microbes provide sustainable hydrocarbons for petrochemical industry

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By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: If the petrochemical industry is ever to wean itself off oil and gas, it has to find sustainably-sourced chemicals that slip effortlessly into existing processes for making products such as fuels, lubricants and plastics. Making those chemicals biologically is the obvious option, but microbial products are different from fossil fuel hydrocarbons in two key ways: They contain too much oxygen, and they have too many other atoms hanging off the carbons. ...they often have to be de-oxygenated — in chemical parlance, reduced — and stripped of extraneous chemical groups, all of which takes energy. A team of chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota has now engineered microbes to make hydrocarbon chains that can be deoxygenated more easily and using less energy — basically just the sugar glucose that the bacteria eat, plus a little heat. The process allows microbial production of a broad range of chemicals currently made from oil and gas — in particular, products like lubricants made from medium-chain hydrocarbons, which contain between eight and 10 carbon atoms in the chain. ...The bacteria were engineered to make hydrocarbon chains of medium length, which has not been achieved before, though others have developed microbial processes for making shorter and longer chains, up to about 20 carbons. But the process can be readily adapted to make chains of other lengths, Chang said, including short-chain hydrocarbons used as precursors to the most popular plastics, such as polyethylene.…

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