Another bio-fuel possible-maybe

Big ambitions, but there's a lot at stake. This article in Forbes mag caught my eye: Amyris’ technology harnesses a modified yeast that essentially "eats" the crushed sugarcane and spits out a hydrocarbon-like renewable fuel. The technology came from research at the lab of Jay Keasling, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Now if it's a goer and can scale up then it solves a few problems. If, I said, if.

Let me list a few of these problems and the claimed advantages of this solution:

• Biofuels generally take land away from food-generation and give it over to fuel production, although it may be that this idea has less of a footprint in that regard
• Biofuels also need energy to be expended in manufacture and distribution, but whereas some biofuels are incompatible with existing petroleum fuels and their infrastructure, this one can use the same pipes end-to-end without raising concerns about solvency, impurities and corrosion. Although it seems unlikely that major oil pipelines serendipitously pass by sugar refineries, at least we can envisage building some short spur lines to wherever we do the bio-processing, and we can assume cheap water transport is nearby to sugar refineries as well
  
• Given that ethanol requires more extensive trucking, this idea could sink the aggressively expanding ethanol industry pretty quickly (probably a good thing, but not everyone would agree!)
  
• But it still robs us of a food source and valuable agricultural land, although in this case it's sugar cane rather than corn (somewhat preferable I guess as rich western nations need to reduce their sugar intake anyway!)
• And it still needs energy in manufacture, although there may be less of it required (don't know the actuals here, do we? What energy is expended in growing the microbes, or in encouraging them to feast on the cane?)
• And as a bonus the biotech involved can be used elsewhere: Keasling and his former post-doctoral students started Amyris to develop a synthetic anti-malarial drug. But the process of modifying either yeast or bacteria to churn out specific byproducts is general enough that they could make products as varied as drugs or fuels.
  
• So in a nutshell this particular idea potentially uses much more of the existing oil distribution infrastucture, saving the expense and carbon-cost of building new pipelines or trucks to get the product to market, resolving a big minus of the ethanol alternative.

The big bet here is that oil will run out sooner rather than later and that prices will stay high. It's possible however that there's more cheap oil yet to be found, or that the big exporters have kept a supply "for their children". So they could kill off this competition by short-term overproduction (driving down prices), although that's a dangerous play. Also, alternatives like ethanol, solar, wind, geothermal and tidal generation - perhaps even nuclear power - may ramp up quicker than expected and drive down costs again, but that seems unlikely for now. But in 20 years, who knows?

Assuming just such a 20 year window, these biofuel ideas, including ethanol to some extent, may embed themselves and come to wield considerable power, both as a method of stretching out current oil supplies and as a means to keep prices down, forcing the alternatives to remain a mere slice of the overall market. Unless they get a leg up by legislation or subsidy, of course.