I hate to be sceptical, but revolutionary organisms that turn CO2 and solar energy into burnable stuff are called plants. From what I read here, his big idea is to get organisms, presumably bacteria, to generate methane instead.

That's probably possible, but how is this automatically a big improvement over growing wood and burning it? The critical part here would be to generate more usable energy per acre and per dollar. Which somehow assumes these new organisms will be comparably efficient at producing methane as existing plants are at producing themselves.

This is what the VC media is reporting. I commented on the same story, from Bloomberg in January, at PFF. It is titled "Supergene Labs Design Microbes to Change Sun to Fuel, Eat Waste ". With a jaundiced eye focused on enacted US legislation (H.R. 2828, H.R. 6) and likely returns of this particular project, following is the comment.

Actually, the story is a sell-sheet for patented processes and devices, gene-splicing and DNA synthesizer, i.e. Venter's library.

The money, honey. Here's my favorite data point in this extraordinarily long snooze item.

An older generation of drug-oriented biotech firms, squeezed by research costs and long product approvals, has suffered persistent losses even with investors' initial enthusiasm. When South San Francisco, California-based Genentech went public in 1980, its shares soared to $88 from $35 in less than an hour, a record at the time.

Through 2006, 30 years after Genentech was formed, U.S. publicly traded biotech companies as a group had never celebrated an annual profit, according to estimates from the Boston-based Ernst & Young Global Biotechnology Center. In 2006, 336 U.S. public biotech companies lost a combined $3.5 billion on revenue of $55.5 billion, falling short of the $59.5 billion in sales at Target Corp. stores that same year.

Scientific Exploits

Human Genome Sciences Inc., a company Venter helped start in 1992 to find commercial uses for discoveries at his nonprofit research lab, lost money in 36 consecutive quarters through Sept. 30. [2007] Showing the hazards of DNA-based investing, Human Genome Sciences hasn't had a drug product reach the market since its debut.

All the same, Venter has gained celebrity for scientific exploits such as decoding human DNA in a virtual tie with the U.S. government's Human Genome Project, which had an eight-year head start.

The article does mention that VC expect growth from foreign sales.

In brief, money goes in and only comes out in the form of license fees for further research. The fact that investors around the world were no less interested in corn and sugar biofuel development means simply that Venter et al. will turn any trick in the book to raise cash. That includes rolling out"global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page." Notice neither is paying "stakeholders" dividends.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.