Life’s a gas no longer
April 12 2030
When climate concerned biochemists were looking for ways to reduce potent greenhouse gases, they developed bacteria that could curtail methane emissions by consuming the gas as food.
A start-up backed by Whole Foods was soon at work, cleaning up pollution at dairy farms and producing organic fertiliser as a byproduct.
Initially they used a cocktail of microbes naturally found in soil, and bred them to be more efficient and thrive on a highmethane diet. Oil and gas companies also turned to this method of reducing emissions and converting gas that would have been flared off into a valuable product for organic farming; even better than synthetic fertiliser, and much kinder to the environment.
Then the biotech boffins got in on the act, and started tinkering with genes and things. Soon they had an enhanced synthetic organism (ESO) that eats methane as if it is on steroids and breeds like crazy. Finally we had a scalable solution to the threat of methane emissions from thawing permafrost and rotting landfills. Launched at COP32, the methane-busting ESO was greenlighted for global use in the climate fight.
Farmers rejoiced as EU restrictions on operations were relaxed and herds could be expanded once more. But then worrying reports emerged from Russia and Qatar.
It seems the novel microbe is so good at consuming methane, natural gas production has dropped significantly.
“We’re getting far too much nitrogen coming out of the fields, and not enough pure methane,” complained one Gazprom executive. “Something is eating our gas.” As we reduce our reliance on coal and oil, gas becomes a critical energysource, and now it’s under threat.
It’s back to the lab for the biotech wizards. Can they develop a microbe that produces hydrogen instead? And can they introduce a gene drive that kills off the rogue ESO? The warning is clear. When you experiment with nature, beware of unintended consequences. /First published in Mindbullets April 11 2024
MAKING NATURE WORK AGAIN July 27 2027
The past five years have seen a perfect storm of crises in energy, food, industry, and on the environmental front.
We were barely over the worst of the Covid-19 crunch, when Russia’s attack on Ukraine sent Europe — and the world — into a maelstrom of rising prices and short supply. And then the heatwaves of 2022 brought the focus back to climate change.
Of course, sustainability was always about more than the climate; plastic pollution, resource depletion and environmental degradation were equally at crisis levels, and action was urgently needed. Fortunately, the most important resource was infinitely abundant: human ingenuity. And there’s nothing like a real disaster to spark innovative solutions.
Dozens of scientific start-ups quickly embraced the smorgasbord of lucrative opportunities these crises presented, chasing everything from green ammonia to better hydroponics.
But a handful of them hit upon the ultimate innovation — using nature’s own capacity for sustainability, and employing biomimetics and bioengineering techniques.
Now we have scitech companies developing enzymes and bioagents to reclaim precious metals from electronic waste, including phones and solar panels. Others are eliminating PET plastic pollution with microbes that “eat” plastic bottles and regurgitate chemical feedstocks. Yet another is coaxing microorganisms to turn sunlight and garbage into diesel and jet fuel. Using genes from marine molluscs, we can make bioceramics stronger and lighter than steel or Kevlar.
“This is exciting,” says biotechnologist Kyle Larsen, “because we’re implementing large-scale biofactories using a variety of microbes, not only algae, to convert waste into valuable products.”
With the latest CRISPER gene-editing tools, and artificial intelligence systems to help us identify and optimise microbes and enzymes, the applications for bioengineering are limitless. And because these systems require no mining or crops, they contribute to the circular economy, relying on creation rather than extraction.
Putting nature to work that’s how you make sustainability sustainable. First published in Mindbullets in July 28 2022