Can algae oil save us?
In our green real estate section, you can usually read articles on green tips for our homes. But this text will be focused on an interesting research, which may lead to helping us if we are feeling bad because of our cars eat up too much gas. Our everyday life has many essential parts and oil is usually one of them. People in the developed countries often cannot think of a life without a car, it is just so common to have one. As most of the realtors whose job requires driving around a lot, I do the same. Picture a life without a car – isn’t it nearly impossible? The prices of oil are driven up and down by the unsound oil supplies and our planet is suffering from carbon dioxide emissions and fuel burning. These are the well-known fundamental problems of driving.
Craig Venter is an American biologist and also a prosperous businessman who established The Institute for Genomic Research. The main focus of his work is genetic engineering. A great deal of heated debate has been caused by his newest project.
A couple of experiments have already been concerned with biofuels, some of them also with natural oil created by algae. But Venter has more aspirations than that. His goal is to change the genomic structure of algae so that they would create oil nearly the same as traditional crude oil. That would be a huge step forward, as we would be able to use the current oil industry infrastructure such as refineries, and even plastics production could use the same procedure and production plants as we are using currently, producing plastics from crude oil. It doesn’t shock us that one of the companies producing the most oil on the planet, Exxon Mobile, gave $600 million for Ventor to further with his research.
And now you may be demanding, OK, but what is so great about it from the ecological point of view? Well, just this. Oil production based on algae may quite likely be the solution to one of the most serious threats facing the world today. Plants use the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, employ it in a photosynthesis process to produce the oil and then the oil is burned and turned into oxalates. It will of course take more time to work all this out, this promising solution won’t be available this or next year. But for sure it is a possible way to try, and Craig Venter with his team have made the first steps towards a success on a field where others have already tried and failed. There are plenty of people out there that want to go easy on the environment, but due to their occupation, it is very difficult for them to stop using cars, just like so many of my fellow Toronto realtors can’t.