Flora, fauna, dinosaura …

B4T Editorial Staff

The lead for this story is that scientists at a biochemical start-up have filed for a patent on a form of genetically modified “Blue-green Bacteria” which is supposed to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide directly into diesel fuel.

But wait, there’s more! The angle on this story is that this particular bacterium is, as far as we know, the oldest living form of life on earth. In other words, it is (as a life-form) the origin of the rest of Earth’s plants and animals. In other words, it is the ancestor of our ancestors. In other words, it is our great-great-greatest grandpa/ma. 

And we are going to use it to make fuel for trucks to make highway fumes? Is that proper respect for your elders? 

Welcome Back to Weird Science
We pushed back the piece from the B4T stringer in Helsinki on “Ice Road Rampage” to make room for this latest dispatch from Weird Science. Biofuel and global warming are ever reliable sources for head-shaking amusement, with their inevitable allusions to bacon grease and cow farts, but this one isn’t so much funny as funnily unsettling, bringing to mind that spine-tingling chill we used to get when Rod Serling would step into a Twilight Zone set to close an episode with an ironic epilogue about the butterfly effect or not opening certain doors to the future or whatever. 

This is the third in our series on algae as an alternate fuel, the fourth piece in total that our department of B4T has published on the power potential of “pond scum.” It’s also probably the last, at least for a while. We realize that reader interest in the subject is just about exhausted (assuming it was ever there), but this piece ties everything up with a nice bow. Also, it happens that we live not very far from the Mystery Plant in Leander, Texas, so maybe some night we’ll get Scooby and the rest of the gang into the ol’ van and see for ourselves just what that funny flickering light is all about. ROOOOO! 

All Pond Scum is Not Alike
The last few years have not been happy ones for what started out as the Era of Algae. The most promising of the biofuel start-ups, Greenfuels, went under in 2009 to the tune of a $70 million tax write-off for its investors. Others have gone the same way and of the 24 that remain, an industry analyst recently gave positive assessments to only three.  

Yet here is Joule Unlimited, backed by, among others, such esteemed professors of bio-chemistry as Boston University’s George Collins and Harvard’s George Church, making what the New York Times has called “grandiose claims” about its new product. (The claims are grandiose, but grandiosity has been a characteristic of the entire biofuel industry and NYT is careful not to say they are untrue.) Yet Joule’s energy source has been classified as an algae since Linnaeus. How is it that Collins and Church have succeeded where other bright lights have failed? 

Because, Church says, they’re not into algae. According to them, other bio-energy researchers have been sittin’ in the right church but the wrong pew. There are thousands of different types of algae but they all have certain yucky characteristics in common. However, in recent years, what was known as “blue-green algae” has been reclassified. It may look like an algae and quack like an algae, but it’s really a bacteria. To be specific, it’s cyanobacteria (“cyan” means a range of blue/green colors). 

Why Bacto-Diesel is more like Milk than Gasoline
You say “to-may-to.” I say “to-mah-to.” Algae or bacteria, does it matter? Yes, because bacteria has a different internal structure than algae. First of all, Joule’s genetically engineered, highly customized bacteria makes a lot of oil and second (and more important), instead of retaining its oil, cyanobacteria regularly excretes it like perspiration. With the proper way of collecting or harvesting the oil, you have an operation less like a refinery that makes gasoline than a dairy farm that makes milk. The difference is that the refinery draws upon a non-renewable source (unrefined petroleum), while the dairy farm’s cows renew regularly in the form of calves. (To clarify for those who may have gotten lost in the metaphors, all oil comes from living matter; even petroleum was once flora and fauna and—so to speak—dinosaura.)

In other words, (to return to today’s pet phrase), if Joule lives up to its claims, it has found a way to make cheap oil that will never run out. There could be money in something like that. George Church says their process can make 15,000 gallons of diesel per acre annually on land unsuitable for anything else. That’s at least five times more than any other current biomass process. 

But, boy, is that a big “if!” As we said, Joule says it has a pilot plant in Leander, Texas, where for the last couple of years it’s been producing ethanol, presumably from its customized cyanobacteria. The ethanol has provided enough data to ramp the plant up for large-scale production of diesel fuel. 

Don’t rush to the pump just yet. Analysts say it could be as much as fifteen years before Joule has a marketable product (though Joule believes it will be much sooner). 

If…
That is, if Joule ever has a product. The reputation of its founders, which is Joule’s main source of credit right now, could follow those of other bio-pioneers to bankruptcy court. The fact is that so far Joule has disclosed next to nothing about its process. Even its patent applications have little in the way of hard data. George Church has just published a study of research findings, immodestly titled A New Dawn for Industrial Photosynthesis in the academic journal, Photosynthesis Research. However, as NYT reported, that study has been read by the technically literate and found technically thin (not flakey, not fraudulent, just not very disclosing).

Church defends the company’s vagueness as caution, which is typical of companies in the bio-industrial field, where secrecy is sometimes better protection than a patent. 

If cyanobacteria does turn out to be the energy bridge to tomorrow, is that because in a way, it is also a bridge to humanity’s remotest past? Not to the planet’s past, mind—because there are many non-living things older than this particular life-form—but to our past because, according to Darwin, earth’s abundance of flowers and trees and ferns and insects and coral and fish and whales and cats and snakes and people and chickens all come from a single source, Grandpa/ma Cyanobacteria. 

Offered for Your Consideration
We’re speechless. There may be a message here. We wish that the ghost of Rod Serling would step out of cyberspace onto our computer screen and explain it to us with his low-key eloquence, but tonight he’s speechless too. So whether this is irony or fate or meaningless coincidence is something that our readers, those of you who have remained to the end of this speculative ramble, will have to supply for themselves.

Cue theme music: Dah-dah-dah-DAH! Doo-doo-doo-DOO!...

Sources for this article include NPR: Earth/Sky, Minnesota Daily News, Science News for Kids, New York Times and Giga.com: Earth2Tech Info.

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