No, this isn't about growing energy demand. Any reader knows that we stress that the impact of declining demand and increasing supply brings on the paradox of falling energy prices at the time that conventional wisdom merchants tell us prices are up.
What we're talking about here is growing energy. Dubbed oilgae, this is better energy production through biotech. This is a long way from coventional biofuels, of which there is considerable doubt over both cost and efficiency.
There are any number of off the wall sounding schemes to produce energy, but this one is different. Look who is taking this seriously and who is investing serious money:
On Tuesday, Exxon plans to announce an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae — organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter
Venter is the guy who did what they said couldn't be done: He replicated the human genome (it just happened to be his) in two years instead of thirty. The combination of Venter with Exxon is very, very big. Perhaps it will be a big failure. Or it would have a huge payoff. Exxon looks at things in thirty year views, and they can afford to, but $600 million is still a fair piece of change even by their standards but this partnership between one of the most conservative energy companies and a true scientific visionary could be massive.
Exxon’s partnership with Synthetic Genomics is also a vote of confidence in the work of Dr. Venter, a maverick scientist best known for decoding the human genome in the 1990s. In recent years, he has focused his attention on a search for micro-organisms that could be turned into fuel.
“Algae is the ultimate biological system using sunlight to capture and convert carbon dioxide into fuel,” Dr. Venter said.
Algal biofuel, sometimes nicknamed oilgae by environmentalists, is a promising technology. Fuels derived from algae have molecular structures that are similar to petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, and would be compatible with the existing transportation infrastructure, according to Exxon
Venter told the New Scientist in 2007:
Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make.
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