Renewable Petroleum: Microbes Eat Waste and Excrete Crude Oil

DBKP ^ | June 15, 2008 | Mondoreb

[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.

[mondoreb]

I’ve also read this.

[Gator101]

Cool stuff. I don't know if this particular technology is viable but the fact that stuff like this is now being so rigorously looked at is scaring the pants of the Saudis. That is why they are acting to reduce the price of oil. They know the higher it goes the more the World looks for alternatives ways of getting oil.