« My dream ticket: Obama/Graham | Main | Your tax dollars at work - Israeli settler violence »

June 18, 2008

Bio-Crude Oil from bugs

A piece from last weekend about genetically modified bugs which eat waste and excrete nearly fuel-tank-ready fuel facinates me. The technology is still in the R&D stage, but just barely.

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

I seriously doubt that this technology could literally replace crude oil just because of the vast quantities of waste that would be required to feed the bugs and the sheer size of the equipment needed to make it.

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.

But it seems to me that most commercial farmers, as opposed to subsistance farming, could easily use this technology to become fuel self-sufficient. The current laboratory set-up takes up about 40 square feet of floor space and produces about one barrel of fuel per week.

Best of all, this "Oil 2.0" is carbon negative because it emits less carbon than was sucked from the atmosphere to produce the waste it is made from.

Posted by Kevin at June 18, 2008 07:33 AM