I can assure you that I am not a crackpot, just a nerd. This technology is totally proven and we are to the point of building pilot plants to provide the engineering data needed to design the most efficient large scale production facilities. We should begin construction of large scale facilities with the next 12 months. All we have done is to modify naturally occurring bacteria to break down biomass and produce different length hydrocarbon molecules. We don’t use the term oil because oil is a mix of all of the hydrocarbon chains. We produce one length chain from each bacterial line.
Thank you for coming onto the forum and taking the time to educate us about your process.
I am impressed that you are willing to answer questions.
I wish you the best of luck.
One of the problems I think you will have is maintaining a stable consortia of organisms since you are using a variety of strains. Some will grow faster than others making it difficult to maintain the desired balance. Depending on the type of mutagenesis you performed on the strains, you may also find that the strains have a high reversion frequency especially if you used chemically induced point mutations. These are just a few of the large number of problems you are facing in large scale bioreactors. Having some experience in biosynthesis, I have learned that what can be done in small scale on the benchtop becomes totally impractical on scale-up.
J.C. Bell is a Freeper. Who would have guessed. Greetings from Tifton.
OK, that’s good to know — so which hydrocarbons do you produce? Are some more expensive for you to produce than others? At what price do you hope to become competitive with oil?