Biofuel Revolution!

Commenter Brock at my article Biofuel Breakthrough? had a few very interesting words on the subject that bodes well for the future.

Well I’m cautiously excited anyway. Biological systems have been producing simple sugars and lipids for a few trillennia now, and it’s only the laws of Darwinian Fitness (not the laws of physics) which have discouraged them from adding even more carbon atoms to the chain. I know many teams have been working on this (a good friend who is a VC in this space tells me about it all the time; and Craig Venter has received mid-nine figure funding from Exxon-Mobile for this very thing), and if Joule has spoken prematurely, I’m sure someone will get there within a decade.
And frankly I hope it’s multiple someones. I don’t want a cartel (OPEC) replaced by a true monopoly. Talk about obscenely enriching monopoly rents!
This should be cheap to build out too. All the sophisticated equipment is reproduced biologically; human labor just needs to build some really big petri dishes. Sort of like how babies are enormously complicated but the cost of production is food and shelter for the mother. Just $1/day in Africa!
The ironic thing is that the limiting resources of this technology will be diffuse sunlight, and thus empty land not otherwise being put to productive use. You know what country has tons of sunlight and otherwise useless real estate? Saudi Arabia. Ha ha! Long after they stop digging it out of the ground Europe will still have to import oil from Arab deserts. At least America has New Mexico.
Eventually though Russia, China, India and Indonesia are going to want sources they control – but they lack the land or sunlight for. This will lead to really big floating petri dishes out on the ocean near the equator and far from land. Today’s deep sea oil rig is tomorrow’s equatorial E. Coli farm, surrounded by thousands of acres of (what looks like from an airplane) a whole bunch of lily pads. Oil tankers will then bring it to shore.

Brock did make one minor error. The company in question, Joule, is using a genetically modified form of cyanobacteria. Other than that I believe he is spot on.


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4 responses to “Biofuel Revolution!”

  1. William O. B'Livion Avatar
    William O. B’Livion

    First off, while they may have a monopoly on this process the outputs are the same as other (traditional) processes, so they don’t have a “real” monopoly.
    If they have a valid patent (and with this much money on the line you can be sure it will be tested) then the monopoly on the patent is only good for (IIRC) 17 years, and can be extended for another 17. If they have managed to find the ONLY combination of genes to do this, then let them get filthy f’ing rich for 34 years, and then the market is open. They’ll be competing with traditional markets that whole time, and they will have broken the back of OPEC.

  2. M. Simon Avatar

    Bill,
    That seems right to me.

  3. AML Avatar
    AML

    Little bit wrong there. Patents are good for 20 years after filing — you can’t extend them. What you can do is continue to file improvement patents and potentially get another 20 years from that filing. However, eventually you hit the wall where what you’ve disclosed makes new disclosures obvious over prior work and the PTO will make you file terminal disclaimers limiting your patent life. So not 34 years, more like 22-24 years tops.
    Then you have to figure in how easy it is to work around with other genetic combos and other processes. Could be very hard, could be easy.
    I can think of three reasons that they are being so hush-hush despite the fact that they have patents: (1) it doesn’t really work, regardless of the patents. The PTO can’t really judge results, just try to judge whether its novel and non-obvious; (2) it really does work and not all aspects of it are patented …yet; (3) it really does work and some important aspect of the process is going to be held as a trade-secret.

  4. M. Simon Avatar

    AML,
    What I liked about what Bill said was “competing with oil”.