ExxonMobil tunes in to drop-in biofuels, turns on to algae

Biofuels Digest
July 16, 2009 | Jim Lane

In California, more details have emerged on the $600 million ExxonMobil / Synthetic Genomics partnership, and an astonished group of writers at newspapers around the world have added reaction to the largest investment in biofuels history by its most prominent skeptic, ExxonMobil. The effort appears to be aimed at producing a drop-in fuel that utilizes continual harvesting of oil.

According to the Economist, “Other firms are working on ways to break up the cells of oil-rich algae to get at the oil. Dr Venter, however, has succeeded in engineering a secretion pathway from another organism into experimental algae. These algae now release their oil, which floats to the surface of the culture vessel. That is why he refers to the process as biomanufacturing. It is not farming, he reckons, because the algae themselves are never harvested.”

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