How can we eliminate fossil fuels?

using bacteria. The company further claims that they'll be able to do this at a rate of fifteen thousand gallons of diesel fuel per acre, and that the diesel fuel will cost the equivalent of oil if it were at thirty dollars per barrel. Now, this is miraculous if they pull it off, and I did talk about it in my podcast. I also posted it on the blog. And what was interesting was the reaction to that. Almost universally,

people thought one of two things. Either that the oil companies, because they want to make billions of dollars a year in revenue from oil, are going to come in and crush this effort in any effort like it, so that none of these uh bacteria generated or algae generated liquid hydro carbons ever make it to market, or people thought that this company is lying in order to raise money, that they are just making up these claims and that

there is absolutely no truth to it. I don't think their claims are false, because there are lots of companies pursuing the same kind of activity, either in the bacteria or in the algae space, and the number of companies would imply that there really is something there. But the conspiracy theory thing is kind of interesting if you think about it, because historically there is a fair amount of evidence that the oil company do participate in conspiracy theory

kind of stuff. For example, there was the dismantling of the rapid transit system in Los Angeles. There was prohibition which many think was put in place not because of the problems of drinking alcohol, but because of the problems of making ethanol as a fuel. Things like that do make you think. So I was thinking about it, and I was thinking, Okay, let's say that these conspiracy theories are true. And there were so many people that came up with this kind of comment that, you know, it

made me think. This is a deeply seated belief in the United States. So let's say these theories are true. How could you get around it? What could you do that would make it impossible for the oil companies to stop the effort to create liquid hydrocarbons from bacteria or algae.

My thinking took me in this direction. One way to get around the conspiracy would be to widely publicized instructions for a fuel production system that any normal, do it yourself type maker person could easily build in his or her backyard. Imagine if a system like that existed, You invest a couple of hundred bucks, and suddenly you can make your own fuel, essentially for free, in your backyard.

If thousands of people were doing this, there would be no way to squash that movement, and that would give small companies the cover they need to grow fuel in bigger batches, and soon fossil fuels would be a thing of the past. The funny thing is, the more I think about this, the more realistic it seems. This might actually be a project that falls within the abilities of normal do it yourself folks, and more importantly, the maker community. Think about the pieces needed to pull this off. First,

we need the ability to grow algae. Now, this is not a complicated problem. Anybody who's left a bucket out on the back poor that has rainwater and it has seen algae grow right before their very eyes. So any kind of large plastic barrel or an inexpensive above ground swimming pool can be used to grow algae. Algae like lots of other plants, produce oil. You know, corn produces corn oil, soybeans produced soybean oil. So algae produces algae oil. We next need a way to separate that oil from

the algae. Now this isn't trivial, but it's not impossible either. You can dry the algae and then you can press the algae sort of like you press olives to get olive oil. You can press the algae to get the algae oil out of it. There's no magic here, and the sun can do the drying, so it's not like we need energy to dry out the algae. Now with that oil, you can do one of two things. You

can burn oil directly in a diesel engine. You have to do a little bit of modification to heat the oil up, especially in winter, or it's not gonna flow properly and it's gonna come up the engine. But when mr diesel invented the diesel engine, he intended vegetable oil to be the source of fuel, so this is not an unusual thing to do to a diesel engine. But if you don't want to use liquid vegetable oil in your diesel engine, then you have the option of taking

that algae oil and turning it into biodiesel. This again is not trivial, but it's also not impossible, and it's something that just about anybody could do in their garage if they wanted to. Now, whether you use straight vegetable oil or bio diesel in a car, you have successfully grown fuel in your backyard at low cost on your own, and there really isn't any way for anybody to stop you from doing this. If we wanted to turn this into a widespread do it yourself movement, what would we

have to do? What's missing? There's really only two things. The first is a set of complete step by step instructions with all the kinks worked out, so that someone can pick up these instructions and start making fuel in their backyard without it being a real problem, or without them making a lot of mistakes, or without anything blowing up, which is impossible. You can't really blow anything up while

you grow algae and press oil out of it. But it would be nice to know how to make the press and what to feed the algae and so on, so step by step instructions would help. The second thing we need is good strains of algae that produce a lot of oil. This, too, is something that the maker community could grab. Ahold of the discovery and or the

creation of algae strains is something that's fathomable. One way to do it would be to go out into nature and gather different strains of algae from different ponds, separated into its different species, grow them, and see which strain of naturally occurring algae produces the most oil. It's also getting easier and easy year for makers to do biotech at home or in rented facilities because biotech equipment and biotech procedures have gotten a lot less expensive and a

lot easier. So you could imagine a part of the maker community going out and trying to create to bioengineer their own algae strain that produces a lot of oil. Then it would just be a matter of making these high oil algae strains available to people so that they

can use them in their backyard algae growing pools. So just imagine what would happen if this could be pulled off, If the instructions could be developed, if the processes could be simplified, if a strain of algae could be found that produces a really high quantity of oil per cubic meter of water, then we would be on the cusp of the elimination of fossil fuels. It's one of the most important problems humankind needs to solve, and it would be great if do it yourselfers and the maker community

could make it happened. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff hs W. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.