So this stuff is between ethanol and gasoline in terms of energy density, but the process can be tailored to produce stuff that's more like jet fuel or diesel? Seems pretty darn interesting. Maybe when we start to run out of oil, we'll use this. But by that time, either electrons will have surpassed and replaced liquid fuel, or the higher cost of producing liquid fuel will balance out with the much greater efficiency of these future vehicles.

Once again I feel that something is missing here.
If growers move from food production to the bio-materials required for this process the result will be soaring food prices and in poorer countries, famine and starvation.
These processes can only be viable if they use waste products and do not compete with the increasing demands for food.

This is sugar we are talking about, not real food.

Yes but would more sugar be grown instead of food crops because of higher profits. We have seen huge areas of the Amazon and other areas cleared for growing sugar cane and palm oil for bio-fuel. As much of the corn crop is used for this Fed. gov't. subsidized, expensive joke that does drive up food costs for all,including the poor in this world.

re; Julian Skinner
what crops will be used to produce the sugar? In the USofA we make ethanol to be mixed with gas from corn and the price of tortillas went up in Mexico and elsewhere.
Using farmland to produce motor fuel is stupid.

So is drilling for Coal Seam Gas in the farmlands of the World .

If we were to create a form of zoophytic plankton that produces excess amounts of sugar from photosynthesis (which will be child's play in just a few years), we could grow them out in the middle of the ocean - massive production capacity and no competition from land-based farming.
While we're at it, we can also grow algae out there as feedstock for cattle, and free up enough land-farming capacity to feed another 6 billion people (my basis? Enough food is grown annually to feed 11 billion people, but more than half of it goes to feeding animals). Since it would be zoophytic plankton, this technique would also sequester a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere (ocean-going plankton already produce 2/3 of the atmosphere's oxygen).

Depending on who you believe, obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. Millions of tons of perfectly good food are dumped every year. Seems to me most cases of famine are caused by fat people stealing from the starving people. Food marketing is a sickening business!

If you can tune the size of the hydrocarbons to be like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, that's great! That makes it a pretty versatile base product but when he goes on to mention it could be used to make plastics as well, that is excellent! Now we can speed up the rate we are covering the oceans of the world! I would rather hear we have developed efficient ways to harvest the flotsam and turn it back into usable petroleum.

Algae is already being used in Spain to grow fuel in areas which would not be suitable for farmland and which does not use food crops. They can grow it in the desert away from farmland and turn it into regular gasoline which has the highest energy density of all commonly used liquid fuels for cars.
An experimental plant in the US says they can create oil to refine into gasoline using this renewable method for about $85 per barrel which at todays prices is competitive with oil drilled and pumped from the ground.