Bug juice

This is interesting for a couple reasons.

“I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction...

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

Now, this also begs the question... could our theories about how oil is produced in the earth itself be wrong? The popular picture is that of all the dinosaurs dying out (cause TBD), then Nature taking its course over "millions of years" with their carcasses. This, of course, reinforces the "old earth" timeline required for evolutionary theory.

Could it be you only needed to add lots of water and some bugs well adapted to extreme environments?