Bugs eat waste, excrete oil
June 17, 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”.
It kinda reminds me of Red Planet, a movie that came out in 2000 (if memory serves) — except that in the movie, there were insects that ate the terraforming algae that humanity had sent to Mars and excreted oxygen after doing so.
These petroleum-producing bacteria are, admittedly, both a) somewhat different, and b) real. It’s a fascinating development, though, and certainly something that sounds like it was ripped out of a sci-fi novel.
Now…is it workable in the long term, and in the large scale? If so, the most interesting aspect of the technology might just be the shift of the balance of power. Oil-poor nations with large agricultural industries could potentially become major players in the world oil market, and the idea that any nation which is a net exporter of agricultural product could refine waste from those industries into oil for its people to use would, one can only hope, have the side effect of shattering the power of the Middle Eastern oil barons.
Although, to be fair, there’s still the issues of a) cost of implementing the program on a wide scale, and b) how much oil can actually be produced from a given quantity of raw material. If an entire farm’s worth of agricultural waste will only net the farmer a barrel or two of good crude, this development won’t exactly be the miracle cure that it kinda sounds like.
