New Companies Offer Hope for the Future

With all the current doom and gloom, I thought it might be useful to offer more of what is just over the horizon with new technology that is going to revolutionize our country by bringing jobs to America that solve many of our current problems such as the fact that we are shipping so much of our money to Arab countries in exchange for their oil.

While there are many approaches to alternative fuels, I believe that a start up called LS9 offers the clearest and simplest path to replacing foreign oil. You can see this at LS9.com, and here's a quote about their technology:

"Pushing the frontiers of synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology, LS9 has created industrial microbes that efficiently convert renewable feedstocks to a portfolio of "drop in compatible" hydrocarbon-based fuels and chemicals. LS9's unique technology provides a means to genetically control the structure and function of its fuels, enabling a product portfolio that meets the diverse demands of the petroleum economy.

LS9 has developed a new means of efficiently converting fatty acid intermediates into petroleum replacement products via fermentation of renewable sugars. LS9 has also discovered and engineered a new class of enzymes and their associated genes to efficiently convert fatty acids into hydrocarbons. LS9 believes this pathway is the most cost, resource, and energy-efficient way to produce hydrocarbon biofuels and petroleum-replacement products. This translates into efficient land and feedstock use and directly addresses tensions between food versus fuel production."

LS9 is using that old enemy e coli as their bacteria for converting starches like cardboard and paper into biodiesel! Waster, water and e coli combine to make diesel. What a miracle.

While energy systems in the past have been centralized and monopolized as in large scale electric utilities and huge oil companies who dominate the world, I wonder if our future isn't going to be a more diverse and spread out form of energy industry.

For example, what if farmers can get a culture of the LS9 ecoli and simply place it in a big vat with waste corn stalks and water? The LS9 information states that the end result of such a mixture is biodiesel that floats to the top of a tank and when skimmed off, can be burned in a diesel motor. Talk about cutting out the middleman! A process this simple could make farmers extremely efficient. I'm reminded of Jurassic Park and the statement that "Life finds a way". It strikes me that once an ecoli bacteria has been created like this it will be spirited out of some lab or factory and become like a yeast for making bread that no one owns and everyone can use. Life will find a way and no small handful of large companies will control all the energy.

In the same manner, another company, nanosolar inc. at nanosolar.com describes itself as the third wave of solar. They have developed a technology for printing photovoltaic material on thin film aluminum rolls, and promise solar power at one sixth the cost of current silica based technology. Again this is a few years out, but this seems to offer the possibility of running the average household with an investment of less than ten thousand dollars.

I like GM's Volt concept, a battery electric motor car with a small electric generator that is fueled by gasoline, but in the future could be a small biodiesel powered generator. What a wonderful future this is going to be! Plug your car in at night and fill up the battery with electricity from the grid that you have been sending electricity to all day, or storing perhaps in your home zpower battery system, (see previous blog). Top off your biodiesel tank with the daily skimming of biodiesel from your small garage garbage processor, "Mr. E Coli?", which converts your newspaper and cardboard into liquid biodiesel fuel?

And more than likely, a low cost subsidized government loan courtesy of our wonderful new President Obama will help us pay for the new aluminum solar roof, the Mr E Coli unit and the Volt!

I for one will enjoy the sight of the Arab nations returning to their days as wandering nomads of the desert, their palatial cities abandoned for tents and camels as they wander from oasis to oasis feeding their goats and camels and wondering how all that money slipped through their fingers leaving them nothing to show for it as I drive my Volt around on yesterday's newspapers and sunshine.