UCSF research team produces green gasoline from French bacterium, yeast

In France, a discovery of an organism in a French garbage dump has prompted a research team at the University of California – San Francisco to identify a path to producing drop-in renewable gasoline from a gas emitted by biomass. The bacterium was discovered in France in the 1980s and, when fed to switch grass, converts it to acetate which is in turn consumed by a yeast that converts it into methyl halides. The halides, which are emitted as a gas, can be converted into gasoline or ethylene (used for bioplastics such as plastic bags). The UCSF team said that a pilot plant for the process could be built by 2012.

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