Imagine that! Genetically-modified germs that eat waste and piss crude oil!
Aaaaand, and this is the thing that'll make the environmental Chicken Littlists have a heart attack, the oil in question is "carbon-negative"!
Read about it here. ht: NationalNewswatch.com
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.
This could put Al Gore and David Suzuki out of business and bankrupt Mo Strong! It would be ever-so-inconvenient for them, for they're making a killing on scaring the hell out of the free world. If this "Oil 2.0" hits the market and ends up in our gas tanks for a lot less cost than the stuff we're using now, then we can just tell these guys to PFO.
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 London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
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.
Also, imagine what else it means. If this technology can produce gasoline and other fuels to be cheap and plentiful, then to hell with oil from the Saudis, the Iranians, the Russians, the Venezuelans... no longer will we facilitate those malevolent regimes' rise against us by buying their crude. It also means that we can go back to driving those wonderful land yachts, monster tree-stump-a-pullin' trucks and tire-smoking musclecars.
I hope they make this happen. Of course, "Big Oil" will probably be going all a-poopypants and will try to put a stop to it. So will the nasty OPECkerheads overseas.
