I think this is a great idea and would like to hear more about the economics. Let's get some engineers involved and have them estimate some costs. I suspect the actual engineering would be less expensive and less complicated than a typical refinery, so that leads me to believe it is the cellulose or whatever is fed in that is the greatest cost. However, that cost should be easy to calculate based upon our tree farm costs and could probably be used to calculate cost savings for larger scale operations. This would give us a dollar/gallon of gasoline cost or cost per barrel or whatever, so that we could compare it to the present costs of oil. Go Venter! You showed us once how to do it cheaper and faster than they said it could be done, so please, show us again!
A Bug to Save the Planet
Genome pioneer Craig Venter wants to make a bacterium that will eat CO2 and produce fuel.
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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.
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