Times
Online
June
14, 2008
“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.”
He
means bugs. To be more precise: the 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”.
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
What
is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to
reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of
hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with
oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also
carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that
sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9
has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who
now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most
recently running European supply operations in
Inside
LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from
investors including Vinod Khosla,
the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms,
each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial
yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by
custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have
taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can
take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”
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.
For
fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known
in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as
it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce
electricity to run the plant.
The
company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel,
such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in
Using
genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using
natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final
process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a
substance that is almost pump-ready.
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
That
is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory
beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a
nationwide or even global scale.
“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.
Are
Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars?
“It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re
putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is
in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides,
he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate
change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something
that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece