Time Immortal

Renewable petroleum…kinda.

“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.

Interesting commentary from the Anchoress:

…thanks to the noble environmentalists, we’re not allowed to drill for the huge beds of oil we own; because we’re not allowed to drill and refine our own resources, our heating and fuel bills are skyrocketing, our grocery bills are rising and - most troublingly - we may be facing Food shortages…and still mucking up Gaia, to boot.

Doesn’t sound so noble to me. And so much for our “oilman” president freeing us from dependence on other countries. He did that about as well as Bill Clinton before him.

…

Yeah, it’s bad policy. But I’m wondering if it is also immoral?

I’m sure that sounds extreme, and I don’t mean to. It also sounds very Roman Catholic, but I can’t help that; it seems to me that there is a morality question here — is it ever right to burn food for energy when people are hungry?

Taking a line through the idea of things being used for the purposes intended, one might call burning for food both “disordered” and (when doing so threatens humanity) “intrinsically evil.”

It’s certainly not news anymore to observe that food costs world-wide are rising. Even Wal-Mart is beginning to ration sales of rice (although their per-customer limit is still an indefensible 200 pounds!). Now, the world food market will respond in the way it always does — it will find new food production options, such as utilizing both GMO and organic options. Farmers will not leave as much of their land fallow in a year. Perhaps governments will step in, in some cases, to prevent urban growth from consuming areas of arable land. There are numerous corrective pressures, in other words, that will exert themselves. And were the only issue that of balancing food production against population growth, those pressures would be sufficient.

But now we add in the craze over biofuels, and suddenly one is left to wonder. If so much corn and rice is being used up to produce an alternative fuel source for Westerners — and then at the expense of the well-being and lives of people in the Third World (who cannot absorb the rising cost of food at all, unlike most people in North America and Europe) — can the use of biofuels be called moral? One tends not to think so. Indeed, when one factors in the observation that biofuels, in addition to causing massive shortages in stocks of staple foods (grains, specifically), are also more polluting to refine than is crude oil, the use of ethanol and other “bio” alternatives at the pump becomes almost indefensible.

John C. Wright has further commentary on the issue, and he doesn’t mince words — in his view, current biofuel schemes are staggeringly immoral, and can only be ruinous.