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GE Microbes Make Ersatz Crude Oil From Many Sources
polymath69 writes "According to The Times Online, genetically modified microbes have been developed capable of turning surplus material such as wood chips, sugarcane, or others, not into ethanol, but into a substance which could substitute directly for crude oil. They claim it could be sold for about $50/bbl, and the production process would be carbon negative."
There was an episode of the Three Stooges that did this very thing. I suspect this is just as legitimate too!
Mo, Larry, the cheese!
i did not know oil is from dead plants
where have you been all my life? this is such a dramatic reworking of how i understand the world. where would we ever be if you had not alerted us to this important breakthrough?
hold on, gotta catch my breath and process this...
can i say now that water is wet and get modded informative too?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No it isn't. Especially not if they get spread over a large area.
GM crops were evil in greenhouses, I seem to remember. Which are, obviously, also "sealed vats".
I think it's a little more like, you invaded Iraq, you pay the price.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If they buy it, they might well use it. Right now in the US there's a massive shift away from large, inefficient vehicles like SUV's and pickups toward small cars and hybrids, all due to the fuel prices and the net effect of which is to reduce demand for crude oil. It's in everyone's best interest for the oil companies to continue using the existing infrastructure for refining and distribution since infrastructure is *expensive* and the consumer pays for it in the end. I'm not sure exactly where the profit "sweet spot" is on the supply &s demand chart, but certainly they want to optimize sales volume vs price. Sell less oil = make less money in any case. Besides, Americans *like* big cars - history has proved that over and over.
Enter these oil producing bugs. You could take any kind of organic scrap and turn it into oil (so long as they don't use food crops for substrate and cause worldwide food riots, but that's another story). If the $50/barrel claim is accurate AND it turns out to be carbon negative, you have the greatest marketing pitch in the history of the world:
"Buy a Hummer and save the planet from global warming!"
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Nuclear waste is a myth spread by a cold-war government wanting to limit access to radioactive materials. Nuclear by-products are only dangerous because they are emitting radiation - energy - which by definition means that they are not waste, since waste is material which is not useful. They can be used in any number of long-life, low-drain applications, powering betavoltaic or radiothermal generators, not to mention their uses in medicine and other disciplines. Or they can be used in breeder reactors as fission fuel.
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