From Popular Mechanics:

Amidst increasing criticisms of ethanol's shortcomings—lower energy density, energy-intensive production and distillation, and the inability to transport the fuel within existing pipelines—a growing handful of companies are betting that the biofuels of the future will look almost identical to the petroleum-based fuels of the present.

"It's getting easier and easier, but it still takes a decent amount of effort to engineer a biological system into doing something that you want it to do," says Neil Renninger, co-founder of four-year-old Amyris Biotechnologies, a company that previously engineered microbes to churn out inexpensive antimalarial drugs. "So before going down the route of engineering a bug to make a biofuel, we wanted to make sure we were making the best biofuel possible."

The claim is that these "test tube" biofuels approach the energy-density of gasoline itself.

Faster, please.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.