Matt Simmons and bugs that excrete oil
It seems Matt Simmons has updated his presentations list. Always worth a quick scan.
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The Times (London, not New York) had a nice little piece on a successful endeavour to genetically engineer bacteria to excrete oil, instead of the regular fatty acids they usually produce.
It’s nice stuff, but unfortunately won’t — can’t — be brought online fast enough to make up for supply shortfalls. They can make 1 barrel per week, per 1000 Litre process vessel.
In order to make 1,000 barrels a day (world demand is 85 million barrels) that would 7,000,000 Litres of process vessel volume. Scaling up to a million barrels would involve seven billion litres — probably all of it, freshwater.
That’s about two thousand Olympic sized swimming pools. Factoring in the need to bring the food to the bugs, and I have difficulty seeing this technology being readily scaleable, the way that wind and especially solar are.
All the same, very cool indeed…