There are all kinds of schemes for replacing gasoline, from corn-based ethanol to algae producing biodiesel. Me, I'm putting my money on genetic engineering. See, all those other things require some kind of industrial infrastructure. They're all multi-stage processes. You have to harvest the corn and process it, or build your vats, etc. It's all just too much work.

I figure genetic engineering will make it easy. Imagine an acorn. Toss a bunch of them into a field. Come back 5 years later and find a forest. Hook up a network of hoses like tapping a sugar maple and drop the end into a 55-gallon drum. Drip drip drip you get bio-diesel. The trees aren't a product of evolution, so they don't need to waste their time with things like seeds. Nor do they need the diesel for themselves, so we can suck it all out. We can design them to grow like weeds for 5 years, and then stop dead, so the majority of their photosynthetic potential can go into sweet sweet biodiesel. Splice some algae genes and tweak their photosynthesis. To be user friendly, you make them sprout a spout when they're mature, so you don't even need to tap them, just hook up the hose.

This is probably not the most efficient way of producing energy from a chemical perspective. That's not what to optimize for. What you want to minimize is human effort. There's basically no investment of human effort after the acorns are produced. Nor is there any new technology needed to burn biodiesel, unlike ethanol (a little bit) or hydrogen (a lot). It doesn't need fancy batteries, because diesel is sort of a battery anyway. It's carbon neutral and way better environmentally than most of the ways we produce energy today. Just imagine driving up to a tree to fill up when your Hummer is running dry.

Credit where credit's due. This is not an idea original to me; I got it from the gasoline mangroves in the short story Appeals Court by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.

¶ 1414 Posted at 02.13 PM ⇒ No Comments ( science! | deep thoughts )