A team from the University of Exeter (UK), with support from
Shell Technology Centre Thorton, has modified strains of E. coli bacteria to
produce “petroleum-replica” hydrocarbons in the diesel range. While the
technology still faces many significant commercialization challenges, the
resulting drop-in fuel is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel and so
does not need to be blended with petroleum products as is often required by
biodiesels derived from plant oils.
In an open access paper on their work published in the
Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, the researchers note that
their work—rather than reconstituting existing metabolic routes to alkane
production found in nature—demonstrated the ability to design and to implement
artificial molecular pathways for the production of renewable, industrially
relevant fuel molecules.