Thursday, June 12, 2008

Algae

I once had a fascinating conversation with a bio-hazard engineer. He told me about his study of microorganisms that could be used to clean up oil spills or even radioactive material after a nuclear accident. Since then I've had the awareness that tiny little lifeforms can get rid of bad things, but I hadn't yet considered that they could produce good things until yesterday.

Right now we seem to have a bit of an oil shortage. We actually don't, what we really have is a lot of political and economic warfare and the perception that there is a shortage of oil. When the perception changes the price changes (and when enemies we are dependent upon try to crash the dollar... that's another topic).

Innovative companies like Algenol may hopefully soon change the perception about the availability of oil. I just heard about this interesting technology on the radio, the process of training algae to secrete ethanol:
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1032368520080611

2 comments:

Kent S said...

So then are we also close to growing money on trees or spinning staw into gold? What about alchemy?

Kent S said...

Correction: straw