The end of petroleum is in sight. The reason is simple: the black goo that powered and built the 20th century is now losing economically to other technologies. Petroleum is facing competition at both ends of the barrel, from low value, high volume commodities such as fuel, up through high value, low volume chemicals. Electric vehicles and renewable energy will be the most visible threats to commodity transportation fuel demand in the short term, gradually outcompeting petroleum via both energy efficiency and capital efficiency. Biotechnology will then deliver the coup de grace, first by displacing high value petrochemicals with products that have lower energy and CO2 costs, and then by delivering new CO2 negative biochemicals and biomaterials that cannot be manufactured easily or economically, if at all, from petrochemical feedstocks.

2021-11-22: Here’s one approach:

Biologists have devised a way to engineer yeast to produce itaconic acid—a valuable commodity chemical—using data integration and supercomputing power as a guide. Yeasts and other microbes are commonly used to produce useful chemicals. While it is easy to get them to produce some chemicals in high yields, like ethanol, other chemicals may provide more of a challenge. Kumar hopes that this system of combining machine learning with metabolic modeling and multiomics datasets will help overcome these production challenges. “Though we still need more testing on this model, there is an amazing potential to expand this computationally guided bioengineering to other systems. This strategy could open up a new era in biosystem design for the production of eco-friendly chemicals.”

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