Friday, February 29, 2008

Most important news story of the decade?

AFP, the French news agency, reports that J. Craig Venter, one of the world's leading geneticists, expects to produce fuel from genetically-engineered organisms that eat global-warming villain CO2 and expel methane. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy,"Venter is quoted as saying. He expects to be producing what he calls fourth-generation fuel in 18 months; presumably, the initial output will be tiny, if not minute.

Apparently, one of the challenges facing production of usable amounts of fuel is getting sufficient carbon dioxide out of the air.

The AFP article does not state whether the use of such organisms would materially slow or even stop the increase in greenhouse gases; to this non-scientist, the process of using harmful emissions--CO2--to produce fuel that is then consumed and produces more CO2 sounds like a perpetual-motion machine. Still the idea is exciting, and the concept of replacing fossil fuels with renewables is probably necessary to long-term human progress.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

to this non-scientist, the process of using harmful emissions--CO2--to produce fuel that is then consumed and produces more CO2 sounds like a perpetual-motion machine.

It sounds fishy to me to and I've had a number of years experience seeing through violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Now if the catalyst of this process was photosynthesis I would be less suspicious, but I saw no mention of it. So I conclude, that you are more of a scientist than you realize :^).

Leanderthal, Lighthouse Keeper said...

I'm was heartened to see that you placed a question mark at the end of the title of this post.