Company To Produce a Diesel/Ethanol Fuel Mixture for $1.19/Gal and 25,000 Gal / Acre?

We will never run out of Energy. The mind of man will always come up with new ways to exploit the resources at our disposal.

One of the next steps will be genetically-engineered micro-organisms which secrete fuels as a byproduct of their life processes.

Wait, did I say "next"? It's already being done.

From Al Fin:

Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has received $70 million to commercialize technology that uses micro-örganisms to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel.

The company claims that its genetically engineered bacteria will eventually be able to produce ethanol for as little as $1.23 a gallon or diesel fuel for $1.19 a gallon, less than half the current cost of both fossil fuels and existing biofuels...

The company, formerly known as Joule Biotechnologies, claimed in 2009 that its organisms could in theory produce as much as 20,000 gallons of ethanol on an acre of land in single year. Company officials now say their target is 25,000 gallons per acre, and that efficiencies they have already demonstrated take them 60 percent of the way to that goal. _MIT Technology Review

In a peer-reviewed paper published last year in the journal Photosynthesis Research, Robertson and others showed that their process can achieve an overall efficiency of 7.2 percent in converting sunlight to liquid fuel. The figure is roughly seven times higher than the efficiency rate of systems that use naturally occurring microörganisms.

The key to the increased efficiency, Robertson says, is that the engineered bacteria can secrete liquid fuels continuously. Nonengineered microbes produce oils that have to be harvested and refined into fuels, and the organisms have to be ground up to release the oils, so each batch yields only a single harvest.

The microbes that attain 60 percent of the company's stated productivity goal have been secreting ethanol in outdoor SolarConverters at the company's three-acre pilot plant for the past six months. To increase efficiency, Robertson says, the company will further manipulate the organisms' genetic makeup to limit all biological processes that compete with fuel production. For example, Joule has been working for several years to shut down genetic pathways that allow the organisms to keep growing. That should enable them to devote more energy to fuel production.

Robertson says that the company has just begun to optimize production in its diesel-secreting microbes, which currently yield fuel at a rate that is only 10 percent of the company's goal of 15,000 gallons per acre per year. _TechnologyReview