'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 Saudi Arabia obsolete. 'All of us here -
everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the
urgency,' Mr Pal says.
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 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.
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 Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural
waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local
climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or
woodchips in the South.
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 America's weekly oil
consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that
covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of
Chicago.
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.'
Power points
- Google has set up an initiative to develop
electricity from cheap renewable energy sources
- Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has
created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically
engineered bugs
- The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in
2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass
(nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid
transport fuels
