Welcome to Brainstuff from how stuff works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, has the impossible happened? Are we about to have gasoline and diesel fuel produced by organisms rather than having to pump it out of the ground as fossil fuels. Since late last year, there have been a number of articles about a company called Jewel Unlimited. That's j O U. L e. As opposed to the Jewel in Jewelry. Here's what the
excitement is about. In August of two thousand ten, Jewel Unlimited was granted a patent entitled Methods and Compositions for the recombinent Biosynthesis of n Alkanes. Translating that title, gasoline and diesel fuel are n alkanes. Rec Ombinent biosynthesis means that they've taken bacteria or some other biological entity and they've re engineered it so that it can better produce in al kanes, and they've come up with the methods
to do that in a commercial sense. So if you go to the website of Jewel Unlimited, you can find this remarkable quote. This integrated commercial ready solution will enable the previously unthinkable liquid hydrocarbons on demand, meaning above ground fuel reserves can be deployed where needed, overcoming the extreme
risk and complexity of oil exploration and production. As a result, jewels solution has industry changing potential across multiple markets that derive products from petroleum, replacing a finite, unstable resource with one that can sustain virtually unlimited production free of the land and resource constraints that hinder biofuels. Jewel will directly target fossil fuel replacement with unprecedented volumes of renewable diesel at a fraction of the land use incurred by current methods.
At full scale production, the company projects delivery of up to fifteen thousand gallons of diesel per acre annually at costs as low as thirty dollars per barrel equivalent. Jewels pilot operations are currently underway, with commercial development to begin in two thousand twelve. End quote. It's an amazing quote. Really,
this is a commercial ready solution. According to the quote, it's on demand production, it's virtually unlimited production, it's unprecedented volumes, it's fifteen thousand gallons of diesel per acre, which is unheard of, and it's as low as thirty dollars per barrel equivalent. Even if the cost estimate is off by a factor of two, it's still a huge win. That would be diesel fuel at two dollars a gallon. It's relatively easy to convert diesel to gasoline in an oil refinery.
But even if it weren't diesel fuel at thirty dollars per barrel, prices would be so inexpensive that everybody would quickly convert over to diesel cars, and all coal fired power plants would convert to diesel as well. Fifteen thousand gallons of diesel per acre annually is an amazing production rate. An acre of corn yields only eighteen gallons of corn oil, an acre of soybeans yields only forty eight gallons of soybean oil. Fifteen thousand gallons per acre annually is just
so far outside that that it's almost unbelievable. How much land are we talking about here? The United States burn something like a hundred and thirty billion gallons of gasoline
every year. So if you take a hundred and thirty billion and divide it by fifteen thousand gallons, you at eight point six seven million acres That sounds like a lot until you realize that there are forty seven million acres of farmland in Kansas alone, just in Kansas, and Kansas is the number three state in terms of farmland, So there's lots and lots, like hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the United States, eight million acres
is a drop in the bucket. It would be easy to replace all gasoline, diesel, and coal used in the United States with this technology. You could, in theory, produce all the gasoline you need in a suburban yard. If a car gets twenty miles per gallon and it travels twelve thousand miles per year, it consumes six hundred gallons of gas per year. Less than two thousand square feet of land would produce that much gasoline. Our world now
splits into two versions. And keep in mind that Jewel Unlimited isn't the only company making these kinds of promises. There are several other algae, bio you old companies that are in the same realm. In the first version of our world, there's a huge number of problems that are now solved, everything from peak oil to oil spills, to carbon emissions, and your carbon footprint. All of those things are going to go away over the next couple of years,
and we no longer have to worry about them. We still will have to do a lot of clean up work in the global warming and climate change space, but at least now it's imaginable inversion to something will go tragically wrong and in two thousand twelve solutions like this will suddenly and mysteriously disappear. Which version are you betting on for more illness? And thousands of other topics? Doesn't how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works
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