Craig Ventner: Bullshit!

OK, Craig Venter is the wizard who won the contest to sequence a human genome (his own), but I have got to call bullshit on this story:

A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California.

"We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."

You can't use CO2 as fuel - fuel has to supply free energy, and CO2 can't do that. We already have organisms that convert CO2 to fuel - we call them plants - but the CO2 is not a fuel, it's a substrate, the process is fueled by solar energy from the Sun. Something has to supply the free energy if you are going to convert CO2 to a fuel.

I suspect that what Ventner really has in mind are some altered bugs that use Sunlight to make CO2 into a more directly useable fuel - something more like gasoline, but the story as written is bullshit.

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