Dan

Calabrese

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January 6, 2009

If We Can Turn Bacteria Into Fuel (And Someone Just Did), What Else is Possible?

American energy independence may be closer than anyone realizes, and one of the most promising sources is neither wind nor solar nor oil nor coal nor even nuclear – as useful as all of the above may be in their own right.

It is biomass, especially bacteria – genetically manipulated to produce hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline and diesel. I wrote about this in May 2008, and in the eight months since then the people involved have made so much progress that a major announcement is scheduled for next week in Washington D.C.

My prior column explained the efforts of Tifton, Georgia-based Bell BioEnergy to develop hydrocarbon fuel from biomass materials, especially bacteria. The idea was to convert biomass in the same way that termites do when they digest their food. Owner J.C. Bell told me he was working on the technology that could use this process to produce even sophisticated fuels like gasoline and diesel.

Just in the past three weeks, Bell BioEnergy has successfully produced both gasoline and diesel in its laboratory using residual biomass waste from bacteria. Its progress has so impressed the Pentagon that representatives from the Army will be present next Thursday, January 15, when Bell announces the breakthrough. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) will also take part in the announcement.

(Disclosure: My North Star Writers Group colleague Herman Cain is an investor in Bell BioEnergy and provided information for this column, although he had no such stake – and had not even heard of Bell BioEnergy – when I wrote my previous column on the subject. I have no financial stake in the company or the technology. I wish I did.)

The Pentagon’s interest is to secure an energy source that is not dependent on foreign sources, particularly ones that are not always all that friendly to the United States. To that end, now that Bell has successfully shown it can produce gas and diesel in the laboratory, the Army plans to grant Bell access to seven of its bases to use as demonstration test units. The first has already been built at the Fort Stewart Army Base in Savannah, Georgia. Bell is financing the construction and operation of the test units, but the Army is providing logistical support, security and biomass input.

The challenge for Bell at this point is to show that it can perfect the speed and specificity of each of the bacteria such that it can produce these fuels in mass quantities. The goal is to produce the fuels by the billions of gallons, and the eventual goal is to operate as many as 500 production facilities – all using the perpetually renewable raw material of bacteria for the production of the same hydrocarbon fuels we get today from fossils deep in the ground, mostly from other countries.

This is still a long way from success, and much could go wrong during the upcoming phases. But there’s a larger lesson in what Bell is doing here. To listen to sky-is-falling people in the environmental movement and elsewhere, you’d think it’s a foregone conclusion that America has to give up its lifestyle – its cars, its comfortably heated homes and the entire notion of nationwide transport of goods. Even our incoming president said during the campaign that Americans can no longer heat their homes to 72 degrees because other countries won’t permit us to do so.

The “drill baby drill” movement of the past year – so compelling when gas prices soared above $4 a gallon – spoke to the undeniable reality that we can’t keep depending on foreign oil sources. Much of the left, which doesn’t want us to use oil, scoffed that America doesn’t have enough of its own oil, and at any rate it could never get to it quickly enough to make a difference.

All this failed to foresee the promise of technology and innovation. Just as the ability to make fuel out of decomposing fossils was once unimaginable, necessity will likely be the mother of invention again, and someone will develop a new way to make it. Perhaps Bell BioEnergy is that someone. Perhaps Bell will fail. But someone will do it, because it needs to be done. And even the progress Bell has made to date, limited though it is, proves that the concept is not fanciful.

We still need to drill, baby, drill, but it is probably true that there are limits to the long-term benefits of doing so. It is also true that we shouldn’t use any energy source wastefully – not even one that is plentiful and renewable.

But there’s every reason to believe that America can meet its own energy needs, now and in the future, just by applying its own ingenuity. Regardless of whether Bell makes it or not, that is the real lesson of next week’s announcement.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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