A Bug to Save the Planet

No one would accuse Craig Venter of harboring humble ambitions. In 2000 he decoded the human genome faster than anyone else—and he did it more cheaply than a well-funded government team. More recently he's set a new goal for himself: to replace the petrochemical industry. In a Maryland lab, he's manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug—a bacterium that will ingest CO₂, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Venter about the brave new world of biologically based fuels. Excerpts:

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future?
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

What would a "refinery" that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like?
They're just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that's how wine and beer are made. We're using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.

Would you have the same problem we have with corn ethanol, which is that you use large amounts of cropland?
We consider ethanol the first-generation fuel. We have second- and third-generation fuels that are much more advanced fuels, but they also come from plant sugars. We [are working on] a fourth-generation fuel, where the starting material is not sugar, but carbon dioxide.

People want to bury that CO₂ in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO₂ and the carbon in it to make new fuels.

How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

And your biologically produced fuels will work in today's cars and energy systems without modifying them?
Basically everything we're making will work in the existing infrastructure.