Diesel fuel produced by genetically-engineered bugs.
Posted on 06/15/2008 6:34:27 PM PDT by mondoreb
Diesel fuel produced by genetically-engineered bugs.
Several Silicon Valley companies are already genetically altering microbes and small organisms--bugs, so to speak--so that they produce something for nothing.
The something? How about petroleum products.
The nothing? How about agricultural waste--wood chips or straw or other biomass.
The organisms eat the waste products and excrete crude oil.
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
This sounds far-fetched, but the bugs are producing crude right now. In about a month, the experimental microbes will have produced enough oil to fill the first gas tank with something engineers call "renewable petroleum".
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.Besides making Saudi oil a thing of the past, it will also render Al Gore's dreams of taxing the world back into the Stone Age obsolete.
(Excerpt) Read more at deathby1000papercuts.com ...
I think Al Gore could be considered biomass maybe even biomassive.
Yeah, something about the website is just “too real” for me. Also, I remember a similar story from eons ago.
And you mean?
Something?
To what I said......
Ok so they excrete crude oil. That means you have an oil spill. You’ll have to spend millions to clean that up, restore the environment, fines and so forth.
Oh and they wouldn’t allow you to drill for it anyway.
What would that do to the price of liberals?
They should program these bugs to eat kudzu.
I thought it started with microbes that could eat oil after an oil spill @$40 bbl.....at $130bbl they can reverse the process?
What happens if they get mixed up?
They also give off hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and other less desirable byproducts. The trick is separating the wanted from the unwanted. They are trying to breed bacteria which will metabolize biomass and give off only the useful hydrocarbons.
Oh yeah! Who needs compost for soil when we can put it on a chemical diet? Especially when we can put a claque of techno-whores on carbon credits so that they'll always vote for enviro-racketeering power freaks!
Great idea. /s
And p-ss gasoline.
More likely, we'd just get a lot of methane....
As always just a few years down the road and no cost estimate. Something like the oil from algae facility that was going to be built in the Arizona desert, 12 square miles of ponds.
Right.
What is that? An after-dinner speech, in the nick of time?
Nah, wouldn't work. It's like the joke about how biological researchers are turning to using lawyers instead of rats for their experiments, because... there are some things even a rat just won't do...
Well, there are some things even a microbe won't eat...
Just adding to the sales pitch you pointed out.
Stop clogging FR with irrelevant crap. You have been warned ............ FRegards
Why not? If lowly CO2 can change the world's climate then bugs can make cars go giddy up.
There have been quite a few posts about this technology. Check out threads where BellPlantation posts. He has a company doing something similar in Tifton, Georgia.
It's pretty well known that organisms extrude a variety oh hydrocarbons. In aggregate, they pool to form crude oil.
Check Bell Plantation and Bell_Energy from Georgia. They have an engineered “bug” eating grass and like bio-mass that is producing hydrocarbons. Things are working well in the lab and a test plant should be running in aTest plant should be running in a couple of months. http://wordpress.com/tag/jc-bell/
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