Will technology save us?

by: Clem Guttata

Sun Jun 28, 2009 at 18:51:02 PM EDT

If you enjoy tracking the latest potential silver bullets, Jonathan Leake reports on a doozy: the discovery of ancient bacteria that can turn coal into methane.

Craig Venter, the controversial American scientist who helped decode the human genome, has announced the discovery of ancient bacteria that can turn coal into methane...

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Venter even suggested the discovery could open up the world's coalfields to an entirely new form of mining, where coal is infected with the bacteria, allowing methane to be harvested "without even digging up the coal".

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He added: "We and BP think we can scale this up substantially to provide a huge increase in the amount of natural gas available without even digging up the coal."

Such ideas need to be treated with caution. The biotech industry is renowned for making claims that later turn out to have been excessive. This is often driven by the need to attract investors.

Venter does have a good track record, as shown by his lead role in the race to decode the human genome, but his discovery would need far more research and investment before it could be deployed on an industrial scale.

If this discovery could be scaled up to an industrial scale it would replace the very expensive (and unproven) carbon-capture and sequestration technology. It would also allow for mining of coal that is currently inaccessible, though probably employing far fewer miners.

Still, it would provide no relief to our dependence on fossil fuels for the transportation sector. And, it would merely postpone the inevitable day we run out of stored carbon energy (coal).