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Cemvita’s CEO, Moji Karimi, says that because microbes consume carbon dioxide, Cemvita’s fuel could come close to being carbon neutral. The fuel would still produce emissions when burned, but would be partially offset by the carbon captured to do so.
As for the light microbes need, Harris says, Cemvita will likely use artificial light inside the reactors. While sunlight is free, reliance on the sun will impose restrictions on how and where the company can set up its manufacturing facilities.
Cemvita is far from being the first company to try producing fuel with engineered microbes. Companies like LS9, founded in 2005, and Joule Unlimited, founded in 2007, have caught huge investments and excitement in the biofuels boom. Eventually, most of these efforts either stalled or turned away from fuels. LS9 sold in 2014 and Joule shut down in 2017.
Microbial fuel companies may face a different world today, says David Berry, co-founder of Joule Unlimited and LS9 and now a biotech investor at Flagship Pioneering. Berry says genetic engineering tools have improved significantly. Today, researchers are able to find and test genes much faster, and techniques for incorporating them into the genetic material of microbes have become more precise.
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