Speaking as an amateur home brewer, I’m a big fan of yeast. They are marvelous little critters who have the incredible ability to eat sugar and excrete alcohol. What’s not to love? Other sorts of yeast make it possible for us to have bread to eat and medical products to improve and extend our lives. Well, now there may be one more, earth shaking reason to cheer for miniscule engines of biology. Some clever scientists appear to have genetically modified a relative of the noble yeast and created a bug which can eat organic waste products and excrete… OIL.
[T]he genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Before you get too excited, the oil crisis has not suddenly been ended in one fell swoop. The technology has a ways to go, and currently the tank they have of these bugs can produce a whopping one barrel of oil per week. But with some further development and expansion, Mr. Pal thinks we can move into full scale production.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
If they are right, commercial production of “renewable petroleum” could fill approximately one third of the nation’s transportation petroleum needs in the next decade. This approach also offers one very attractive feature: other renewable energy sources such as hydrogen would require a complete re-tooling of the infrastructure to put them in service. The ability to create petroleum on the fly would allow most machinery to continue operating as it always has. Also, the fuel is being billed as “carbon negative” which means that the amount of hydrocarbon emissions it puts into the atmosphere is less than the amount that the fuel’s raw materials extracted from the system during their growth.
Hang on to your hats. We may be living to see interesting times. (And perhaps that’s not always a bad thing.)