Earth Equity News

A Bug To Save the Planet. Interview by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, June 7, 2008, registration. "No one would accuse Craig Venter of harboring humble ambitions. In 2000 he decoded the human genome faster than anyone else -- and he did it more cheaply than a well-funded government team. More recently he's set a new goal for himself: to replace the petrochemical industry. In a Maryland lab, he's manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug -- a bacterium that will ingest CO2, sunlight and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can be pumped into American SUVs. Fareed Zakaria spoke to Venter about the brave new world of biologically based fuels... Venter: 'We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline... [The refineries would look like] large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that's how wine and beer are made. We're using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure... We consider ethanol the first-generation fuel. We have second- and third-generation fuels that are much more advanced... [but that] also come from plant sugars. We [are working on] a fourth-generation fuel, where the starting material is not sugar, but carbon dioxide. People want to bury that CO2 in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO2 and the carbon in it to make new fuels... We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.'"