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California Company Makes Oil From Bug Poo

Going extinct?

This article on a start up company in California that has figured out how to genetically modify bugs so that they eat organic material and excrete oil is one of the most interesting things I have seen in a while.

I often rant about how all we get is more of the same out of our politicians and industry leaders, but this is a great example of outside-the-box thinking that can help to address our energy problems.

Now, before I get too ahead of myself, I think we need to take this slowly and think it through first. We don’t want to end up with another ethanol caused food crisis. But I think it is prudent to explore this.

I think two things are interesting about this development. First:

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.

I remember the first time I heard about bio-fuels I mentioned to a friend that I thought there would be eventual problems with supply because you would be competing for food. Not that I’m some genius for figuring that out, Barney could probably teach that concept to a kindergartener in 2 minutes, but I was surprised that no one initially seemed concerned by this obvious, glaring flaw. This solution is good because it shows that we’re thinking ahead a little more than we were when bio-fuels first rolled out. Using the agricultural refuse products is a much better idea than using the food products.

My concern is that this still isn’t a limitless solution though. Just as our ability to produce ethanol is limited by the amount of land we can farm to grow the crops that produce it (and by the demand for those crops as food rather than fuel), this is limited by the amount of organic material available. These things can eat woodchips, but we don’t want to deforest the whole planet so that we can drive our cars through a barren wasteland, and remember, these things will have to eat more and more stuff to meet rising demand for energy.

According to this article, it would take a factory the size of Chicago to produce enough fuel from these things to replace the 140 million or so barrels of oil we plow through a week. I don’t even want to think about what kind of raw material that would consume. Some of it is renewable, but clearly this potential is not indefinite.

Modern society will always have a need for oil, even if all cars go electric. This is the kind of solution that seems to be able to fill the rest of the niches once our oil wells run dry and we still need specialty fuels, lubricants, plastics, etc… This can probably also start to help ease the pain at the pump in the short term, but this can by no means be a long term solution.

The second thing I find interesting is:

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 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 new method seems to address another huge criticism of bio-fuels. Bio-fuels actually end up being worse for the environment than fossil fuels because they give off so much carbon in production. Now, as anyone who reads this site regularly knows, I think global warming is a huge scam – you don’t have to look further than Al Gore’s personal energy consumption to see that he’s a cheap huckster who doesn’t practice what he preaches unless it puts more of your greenbacks into his pocket.

But, in general, I support this aspect of the process of producing this new fuel because it will appeal to a broader audience and aid in its development.

This is a big win for science if we can bring this online. This doesn’t relieve our politicians of the responsibility to allow drilling in ANWAR and off our coasts, expand our refining capacity and our nuclear power capability, invest in still more alternative energy sources and technologies, and find a way to break our major dependence on fossil fuels. This is merely one important step in the right direction, we can’t allow our leaders to embrace this as a quick political band aid for the sucking chest wound that is our energy policy and move on unchallenged. This finger buys us some time, but the dam still has cracks that need repair.