Angry in the Great White North

Renewable petroleum?  Every environmentalist's nightmare. 

Well, it's a nightmare that might yet come true.  In this case, oil from algae:

Under the gleam of blinding lamps, engulfed by banks of angrily frothing flasks, Makoto Watanabe is plotting a slimy, lurid-green revolution. He has spent his life in search of a species of algae that efficiently “sweats” crude oil, and has finally found it.

Now, exploiting the previously unrecognised power of pondlife, Professor Watanabe dreams of transforming Japan from a voracious energy importer into an oil-exporting nation to rival any member of Opec.

Professor Watanabe’s vision arises from the extraordinary properties of the Botryococcus braunii algae: give the microscopic green strands enough light – and plenty of carbon dioxide – and they excrete oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on the surface of the algae can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics.

Very cool.  But tricky too.

Can something algae really make oil on the grand scale?

For one thing, this doesn't have to be about replacing traditional oil drilling.  Imagine if 3% of the world's oil came from a source like this.  Then 5%.  Then 7%.  Then a bit more.  The effect on oil prices could be dramatic, driving them down to a level at which these living sources of crude would be just competitive.

But even at 5%, we're talking about tremendous amounts of oil.  How do you get algae to pull this off?

It's tricky.  Of course it is, or we'd have been doing it already:

There remain, however, substantial obstacles before cars and aircraft are all running on algae. Although field tests have proved that there is little technical difficulty in breeding or harvesting the algae, the sums do not add up. A prospective algae-breeding oil concern would either have to invest billions of dollars in expensive breeder tanks – at a cost of around three times what the oil would sell for on the international market over the lifetime of the tanks – or find an enormous expanse of well-irrigated land in a country where labour can be bought very cheaply. It is for this reason that Professor Watanabe believes the world’s first algae farms will be constructed in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam.

It's always about surface area.  Each cell has to be provided carbon dioxide, food, and sunlight in order to do its magic.  If you simply put all the algae in a barrel, the algae near the surface would work, but the ones at the bottom or in the centre would do little or nothing, except maybe die and release toxins that kill the rest of the algae.

You could lay the algae out flat, but then you need huge areas of land.  Not just for the algae, but for the farm equipment and the oil extractors to get in.  It's just like a farmers field.  All those neat rows with "wasted" space in between.  But the machinery has to roll along somewhere.

Each algae released tiny drops of oil.  What if you could insert the genes responsible into another plant that creates fluids at a more prodigious rate and in a more compact space?

Coconuts?  Why not?  Now the plant itself is a three-dimensional energy and nutrient gathering system -- it's own breeder tank.

Oil priced by the nut instead of by the barrel.

If we go down the genetic engineering path, there are other possibilities.  Start with a bacteria designed to make oil:

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Like the algae, these bacteria take in carbon dioxide.  A "carbon negative" means to create oil.

One of the microbes used in this approach is not a bacterium at all, but genetically modified yeast.

Yeast can be finicky.  I make bread from scratch at home, and it took some practise to be able to make loaves consistently.  Screw up the conditions for the yeast, and you get a biscuit.

Still, I find that interesting because a fungus-based approach has a lot of possibilities. 

How about putting those genes into a slime mold?  Slime molds are essentially macro-sized single-celled organisms (either fungi or closely related -- scientists are arguing that point).  A slime mold starts of as a single cell.  When the the nucleus splits, the cell does not, resulting in two nuclei in one larger cell.  Split, split, split, and soon you end up with an enormous cell (relatively speaking, but up to meters in size) happily consuming entire logs on the forest floor.

There are no cells "on the inside" starved for light or carbon dioxide or nutrients.

Moving up to that size means the beasties are easier to manage (you can see them), and the nutrients do not have to be pulverized for efficiency.  The oil could be produced in quantities large enough that the droplets would be affected by gravity.  The oil droplets would just roll of the mold for collection.

Heck, I don't know if this is at all possible.  A coconut fill with oil or a slime mold the sweats the stuff might also poison itself in short order.  But it is interesting.