How "Pond Scum"
Could Soon Power Your Car
You probably know, it took the earth 300 million years to "make" oil. Can you imagine what a breakthrough it would be if we could squeeze that whole process into a month… a few weeks… or even a few days? Because it looks like that's exactly what we're about to do.
That's right. As you read this, technicians in a half-dozen labs and companies are figuring out how to "make" oil — and I mean the real kind — in laboratory beakers.
It's called "cellular oil" and it could soon replace the need for every drop of oil we now get from the ground… or from overseas… and even from Alaska or offshore drilling.
Gas for your car, jet fuel for airplanes, truck and train diesel — all of it homegrown, and as much as we want. In the same way earth "made" trillions of gallons of oil… but much faster.
See, it turns out that not only did the earth use the natural lipids in algae to make oil over the millennia. Today's algae — common pond scum — is packed with those same natural lipids.
And if you think I'm talking about boring "biofuels" think again.
Scientists are turning this pond scum into real, regular petroleum. It's possible to process it the same way, too. In the same processing plants and pumped from tanks at your local gas station.
This isn't like getting "biofuel" from food crops either.
For one, you don't eat algae. So using this won't jack up your grocery bill. But also because it turns out we can get a LOT more oil out of algae than we can from any other crop source.
An acre of soy, for instance, only gives up a pathetic 50 gallons of fuel on a good day. An acre of corn, what we use for ethanol now, yields only 250 gallons of fuel. Even sugar cane only yields 450 gallons of fuel per acre.
Meanwhile, you can get up to 10,000 gallons of fuel from just one acre of algae.
How much fuel is that?
Well, think about it this way.
Right now there are more than 40,000 regular oil and gas fields around the world.
Some are huge — hundreds or even thousands of square miles.
Just the Bakken Formation alone could run as large as 25,000 square miles. It covers parts of North Dakota, Canada, and Montana.
And nobody's even sure how much oil it still holds.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy says we could replace all U.S. oil demand with algae-oil farms totaling just a little bigger than the state of Maryland.
One top biotech engineer from Arizona State recently told NPR algae-oil technology could meet worldwide demand — not just oil, but all fossil fuels — with as much land-area as Texas.
And remember, we don't have to grow algae-oil on land at all. They can make oil for us almost anywhere — out at sea, in skyscraper-like greenhouses, even in wastewater.
And oil-producing algae grows fast too.
You can replace an entire fuel crop of algae in about 10 days. Then you can harvest the oil and start all over again, as often as you like, with the same algae.
Exxon Is Already "In" for $300 Million
Exxon is already "in" on algae oil for $300 million. That's how much they are giving Synthetic Genomics, just one of dozens of companies working to get this onto the market. You can't buy in alongside Exxon, because Synthetic Genomics is private. But we've got our research team looking into many more of these companies. You'll start hearing a LOT more about this, very soon.
It's like milking a cow.
This is a gigantic breakthrough. Maybe on par with the day Drake cracked ground to start drilling oil in a creek bed, back around the middle of the 19th century.
So why don't you see news screaming across your TV screen?
This might sound like science fiction to you. But imagine what people thought of solar, geothermal, or even nuclear power… and now they're all part of the mainstream.
As you read this, the Italian city of Venice is gearing up right now to power half their city with an algae-based power plant. Others will follow. The windfall profits will follow too.
And this is just the beginning…
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