On the outskirts of Silicon Valley lies LS9, a company that may just have found the solution for the world’s present oil crisis. The term ‘renewable petroleum” may sound like an oxymoron but to Greg Pal, Senior Director of LS9 Biofuels Company, it’s tangible reality. The dark substance in the jar above is remarkably, diesel fuel produced by genetically modified bugs. That’s right folks, someone has found a way to reproduce crude oil (which can be refined into other products like petroleum or jet fuel). Quite unbelievably, LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, invisible to the naked eye and start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, the DNA of which are modified so that when the bugs feed on agricultural waste like wheat straw or woodchips, the microscopic wonders excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

According to a Times Online article that I read, the company claims that this “Oil 2.0″ will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made. But then it points out that LS9 has only been able to produce one barrel a week in a lab that takes up 40 sq ft of floor space. This means that with America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covers about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

33-year-old Pal claims however, that construction of a commercial-scale facility will be well underway by 2011, with the resulting oil production costing a mere $50 a barrel! Considering that existing oil deposits take what? 10 lifetimes to form? and are the biggest pain to dig for, extract, and transport, this is one lofty promise. But if this is all true and possible, I think ABC has found its next Bachelor.

Original article from Times Online.