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Team:British Columbia/Human Practices/Industry
From 2012.igem.org
The Applications and Applicability of Engineered Microbial Consortia Our project sets a foundational advance by engineering microbial consortia with the purpose of distributing metabolic pathways to increase efficiency and optimization strategies. We wanted to find out from our industrial partners about the following:
- What are some potential industrial applications of engineered microbial consortia?
- What advantages are there to employing biological methods versus current chemical methods?
- How feasible is it to implement biological methods?
- Are Research & Development sectors of current organizations/companies interested in pursuing synthetic biology options?
Our Approach Our team contacted Chevron and arranged a visit to the Chevron refinery in Burnaby, BC, Canada. We communicated with Chevron representatives to find out more about the existing methods of desulfurization and costs of refining crude oil. We connected with Alberta Innovates – Technology Futures (AITF) representative Karen Budwill and Oil Sands Leadership Initiative (OSLI) representatives John Vidmar and Nicolas Choquette-Levy to discuss the progress of our project and obtain some industrial insights. Industrial Insights
From our Chevron visit, we learnt that:
From our correspondence with AITF-OSLI, we learnt that, in Alberta, upgrading and refining processes aim to reduce viscosity and desulfurize crude oil to facilitate transport by pipeline.
Presently, OSLI does not possess infrastructure for the utilization of biological systems such as bioreactors or emulsifiers. However, this is an area of interest for them and could be implemented in a time span of approximately 5 years. There is also an interest in screening tailings ponds for new organisms or genes encoding parts capable of refining crude oil.
Our AITF and OSLI collaborators are currently looking into the economic and environmental costs of refining oil, as well as our project's potential impact on industry and applications other than desulfurization. They will get in touch with us within a few weeks once they have this information.
The biocatalytic desulpurization of DBT: Hypothetical Bioreactor Design
After talking with our industrial collaborators we had a good idea about what the industry was looking for in terms of bio-desulpurization. Therefore we set out to layout a hypothetical design for a small scale bio-desulpurization plant. The general schematic of this plant can be found below (Diagram 1).
Diagram 1. General layout and flow of a bio-desulpurization plant.
