Exxon Is Investing Millions in This New Technology

Exxon Is Investing Millions in This New Technology

A private think tank with an all-but unlimited budget... A maverick genius with a history of world-rattling results... A secret Pentagon "skunk works" defense project... And a fuel technology that could not only reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, but also reverse global warming. Combine those four elements with corporate titan ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) and you'd have the basis for the next James Bond movie, right? The fact is, those agents and agencies, as they say in the spook community, aren't doing anything secret. You can read about it on the front page of The New York Times or find the details in Exxon's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The maverick genius is Dr. J. Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome. And now he has switched his focus to another organism, one that's smaller and simpler than Homo sapiens, perhaps, but whose ramifications might prove just as far-reaching. You see, what Dr. Venter and his team have done, at the behest and with the financial backing of Exxon, is to develop an algae -- the stuff that grows lightning-fast in water -- that can spit out a ton of oils called lipids. If you've ever heard a lecture about cholesterol from your doctor, you've heard the term before. These oils can be refined into petroleum-like products that can be employed for all sorts of useful purposes, including running internal combustion engines. In short, Exxon is working out a synthetic version of the geologic process that converted Mesozoic-era plant remains into crude oil, without the need to wait a million years or drill thousands of feet into the earth's crust to get it. Think about what this could mean. This algae can be grown at sea. It can be grown in places where no other crops could survive. It is, in short, the golden ticket. And look who's doing it: The world's leading energy company and the most celebrated scientist of his time! Amazing what you can do with money, isn't it? Exxon, it should be noted, was a longtime biofuel holdout. It panned the idea for years. So you can bet that it didn't arrive at this point lightly. The company, confessing its reluctance, noted that it had heretofore considered every type of alternative biofuel technology out there. "We literally looked at every option we could think of, with several key parameters in mind. Scale was the first. For transportation fuels, if you can't see whether you can scale a technology up, then you have to question whether you need to be involved at all," a top Exxon official told The New York Times. In other words, getting something to work in a computer simulation or in a beaker wasn't enough. Exxon needed something that could be replicated on a massive scale, not just barrel by barrel. It needed a technology it could ramp up to a refinery-sized operation. It needs to be able to fill tankers, not test tubes. And it settled on algae. The trouble with Exxon, of course, is that it's not a "fast-track" stock. It's too large to see the big returns I hunt for. Meanwhile, most (certainly not all) the small players in this industry are privately held. Now, I don't cover private companies that often. After all, if you can't put your money in it, there doesn't seem to be much of a point. However, I expect some of the companies in this space -- names like Energy Derived and Solazyme -- to go public. In the meantime, we'll keep these companies in mind as we watch the financial news, because they may be the most valuable names we'll ever hear.