Creating Oil Instead Of Pumping It
August 22nd, 2007
For some time now I have been wondering why we can’t just directly create the stuff that we currently rely on nature to provide: oil, food, etc. These items are basically made from four very plentiful elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—and I see no reason why we can’t just combine the elements in the right manner to create what we need. A company named LS9 has made a step in the right direction. They have developed bacteria that take corn-based sugars and convert them to oil. (They hope to eventually use switchgrass instead of corn.) One neat thing is that gasoline created from this oil is free of contaminants, such as sulfur, that exist in natural oil.
Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/…
(via Slashdot)
[link]josh Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:58 am
People made synthetic gasoline in WWII, so its not that we can’t make it. And we have relied on nature (crude oil, coal, natural gas) to provide most of our energy needs. Certainly oil was an incredibly cheap way to get energy for almost a century. And no one cared about pollution. Oil is cheap and easy. Converting food (aka corn) into gasoline is neither.