Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from how stuff works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, has
Speaker 1: the impossible happened? Are we about to have gasoline and
Speaker 1: diesel fuel produced by organisms rather than having to pump
Speaker 1: it out of the ground as fossil fuels. Since late
Speaker 1: last year, there have been a number of articles about
Speaker 1: a company called Jewel Unlimited. That's j O U. L e.
Speaker 1: As opposed to the Jewel in Jewelry. Here's what the
Speaker 1: excitement is about. In August of two thousand ten, Jewel
Speaker 1: Unlimited was granted a patent entitled Methods and Compositions for
Speaker 1: the recombinent Biosynthesis of n Alkanes. Translating that title, gasoline
Speaker 1: and diesel fuel are n alkanes. Rec Ombinent biosynthesis means
Speaker 1: that they've taken bacteria or some other biological entity and
Speaker 1: they've re engineered it so that it can better produce
Speaker 1: in al kanes, and they've come up with the methods
Speaker 1: to do that in a commercial sense. So if you
Speaker 1: go to the website of Jewel Unlimited, you can find
Speaker 1: this remarkable quote. This integrated commercial ready solution will enable
Speaker 1: the previously unthinkable liquid hydrocarbons on demand, meaning above ground
Speaker 1: fuel reserves can be deployed where needed, overcoming the extreme
Speaker 1: risk and complexity of oil exploration and production. As a result,
Speaker 1: jewels solution has industry changing potential across multiple markets that
Speaker 1: derive products from petroleum, replacing a finite, unstable resource with
Speaker 1: one that can sustain virtually unlimited production free of the
Speaker 1: land and resource constraints that hinder biofuels. Jewel will directly
Speaker 1: target fossil fuel replacement with unprecedented volumes of renewable diesel
Speaker 1: at a fraction of the land use incurred by current methods.
Speaker 1: At full scale production, the company projects delivery of up
Speaker 1: to fifteen thousand gallons of diesel per acre annually at
Speaker 1: costs as low as thirty dollars per barrel equivalent. Jewels
Speaker 1: pilot operations are currently underway, with commercial development to begin
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve. End quote. It's an amazing quote. Really,
Speaker 1: this is a commercial ready solution. According to the quote,
Speaker 1: it's on demand production, it's virtually unlimited production, it's unprecedented volumes,
Speaker 1: it's fifteen thousand gallons of diesel per acre, which is
Speaker 1: unheard of, and it's as low as thirty dollars per
Speaker 1: barrel equivalent. Even if the cost estimate is off by
Speaker 1: a factor of two, it's still a huge win. That
Speaker 1: would be diesel fuel at two dollars a gallon. It's
Speaker 1: relatively easy to convert diesel to gasoline in an oil refinery.
Speaker 1: But even if it weren't diesel fuel at thirty dollars
Speaker 1: per barrel, prices would be so inexpensive that everybody would
Speaker 1: quickly convert over to diesel cars, and all coal fired
Speaker 1: power plants would convert to diesel as well. Fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: gallons of diesel per acre annually is an amazing production rate.
Speaker 1: An acre of corn yields only eighteen gallons of corn oil,
Speaker 1: an acre of soybeans yields only forty eight gallons of
Speaker 1: soybean oil. Fifteen thousand gallons per acre annually is just
Speaker 1: so far outside that that it's almost unbelievable. How much
Speaker 1: land are we talking about here? The United States burn
Speaker 1: something like a hundred and thirty billion gallons of gasoline
Speaker 1: every year. So if you take a hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: billion and divide it by fifteen thousand gallons, you at
Speaker 1: eight point six seven million acres That sounds like a
Speaker 1: lot until you realize that there are forty seven million
Speaker 1: acres of farmland in Kansas alone, just in Kansas, and
Speaker 1: Kansas is the number three state in terms of farmland,
Speaker 1: So there's lots and lots, like hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: acres of farmland in the United States, eight million acres
Speaker 1: is a drop in the bucket. It would be easy
Speaker 1: to replace all gasoline, diesel, and coal used in the
Speaker 1: United States with this technology. You could, in theory, produce
Speaker 1: all the gasoline you need in a suburban yard. If
Speaker 1: a car gets twenty miles per gallon and it travels
Speaker 1: twelve thousand miles per year, it consumes six hundred gallons
Speaker 1: of gas per year. Less than two thousand square feet
Speaker 1: of land would produce that much gasoline. Our world now
Speaker 1: splits into two versions. And keep in mind that Jewel
Speaker 1: Unlimited isn't the only company making these kinds of promises.
Speaker 1: There are several other algae, bio you old companies that
Speaker 1: are in the same realm. In the first version of
Speaker 1: our world, there's a huge number of problems that are
Speaker 1: now solved, everything from peak oil to oil spills, to
Speaker 1: carbon emissions, and your carbon footprint. All of those things
Speaker 1: are going to go away over the next couple of years,
Speaker 1: and we no longer have to worry about them. We
Speaker 1: still will have to do a lot of clean up
Speaker 1: work in the global warming and climate change space, but
Speaker 1: at least now it's imaginable inversion to something will go
Speaker 1: tragically wrong and in two thousand twelve solutions like this
Speaker 1: will suddenly and mysteriously disappear. Which version are you betting
Speaker 1: on for more illness? And thousands of other topics? Doesn't
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