Bio fuels

[Charlie Bell]

On 01/05/2008, at 6:42 AM, Curtis Burisch wrote:
>>> What about algae the produce large amounts of complex hydrocarbons
>>> per unit
>>> of input sunlight, as the syn biology proposal I mentioned would do.
>>> Granted, it's a tough job as Charlie pointed out, but the price of
>>> equipment for synthetic biology is falling faster than Moore's
>>> law....so
>>> there is at least a reasonable chance that something like this could
>>> work
>>> in 5-25 years.
>
>> And algae or photosynthetic bacteria breed fast, so evolutionary
>> biology as well as synthetic biology and genetics may have a large
>> role to play.
>
> Efficiency is sub-1%, and we need to use the surface of this planet
> efficiently. Sorry, this doesn't cut it.
>

At the moment. But it's worth exploring in the lab. There's very  
little to lose by trying it out - one day, most of what we make may be  
from biofactories.

Charlie.