quick somebody sit on it

Personally I would've thought they would be Cyanobacteria with some Archebacteria genes spliced in, but I guess there are more E. coli vectors for assembling this kind of thing.

Neil Reynolds in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

...We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year...

Now watch the major oil companies, or Goldman-Sachs, or some serious players try to buy these guys out. Or take them out. There is about a trillion dollars of fossil fuels left in the ground, and they seriously don't want this technology developed until they've squeezed us some more.

All of this effort since the turn of the century to turn humanity towards a post-industrial neofeudalism as we ride down the oil depletion curve. And now some bright girls and boys have gone and come up with a solution to the problem before its time.

Stay out of small airplanes, kids, and watch out for short selling Wall Street bank$ters- a.k.a. the technology police the $ystem uses to destroy things that are too good to make them a dirty buck.

Ah, too late- the squid have a tentacle in it already.