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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Aircraft are indispensable in the modern age for transporting people, delivering goods, and performing military operations, but the petroleum-based fuels that power them are in short supply. Scientists have now discovered a way to generate an alternative jet fuel by harvesting an unusual carbon molecule produced by the metabolic process of bacteria that are commonly found in soil. The research, by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was published recently in the journal Joule.

[...] Keasling wanted to recreate a molecule called Jawsamycin, which is named after the movie “Jaws” because of its bite-like indentations. It is generated by the common bacteria streptomyces, an organism that Cruz-Morales had worked with in the past.

“The recipe already exists in nature,” says Cruz-Morales. The jagged molecule is produced by native metabolism of the bacteria as they munch away on glucose. “As they eat sugar or amino acids, they break them down and convert them into building blocks for carbon-to-carbon bonds,” he says. “You make fat in your body in the same way, with the same chemistry, but this bacterial process has some very interesting twists.”

[...] Cruz-Morales explains that the fuel produced by the bacteria would work a lot like biodiesel. It would need to be treated so that it could ignite at a lower temperature than the temperature needed to burn a fatty acid. However, when ignited, it would be powerful enough to send a rocket into space. “If we can make this fuel with biology there’s no excuses to make it with oil,” says Cruz-Morales.  “It opens the possibility of making it sustainable.”

In the future, Cruz-Morales hopes that he and the team of Department of Energy researchers who worked on the project will be able to scale up this process so that their alternative fuel could actually be used in aircraft. “The problem right now is that fossil fuels are subsidized,” says Cruz-Morales. “This is something that is not only related to the technology, but the geopolitical and socio-political constitution of the planet right now. You can see this as a preparation for the moment because we are going to run out of fossil fuels, and there’s going to be a point, not far from now, when we will need alternative solutions.”

Journal Reference:
Pablo Cruz-Morales, Kevin Yin, Alexander Landera, et al., Biosynthesis of polycyclopropanated high energy biofuels [open], Joule, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2022.05.011

Original Submission