Friday, May 13, 2011

Oil from E Coli

The US Department of Energy’s BioEnergy Institute has teamed up with the fairly new company LS9 to further innovate their E. Coli strand that produces crude oil. Right now at this stage there is enormous potential with the strand of E. Coli, however it is still in the adolescent stages and the technology needs more development before it is commercially available. There seems to be a debate as to if there should be so much money poured into this bio fuel.
I believe this is just putting a band aid onto the problem. Even if this technology pans out to be something of a miracle cure to the crude oil problem, I don’t think we have the ability or the current technology to implement such a system. Instead of finding a renewable resource, it seems that we are just switching to a different means into getting the same thing, instead of crack, its cocaine. I would rather see a company making strides in implementing wind farms in areas of huge wind potential then a company figuring out how to get crude oil in a different way.
--Tyler McCleaf