Estimated revenue from ethanol that a quarter acre of Iowa farmland can earn per year: $300

Amount it could earn each year with a wind turbine on it: $10,000

News release: Algae-to-oil discovery devastates Russian oil market

Dateline: Zurich, Switzerland, 15 January 2016

The resource curse is not a myth. This was a lesson post-Soviet leaders lived first-hand and worked assiduously to avoid. Throughout the '00s, the Russian leader, joined by co-leaders-for-life in Astana, Ashgabat, and Baku jealously guarded and carefully managed the flow of hydrocarbons – oil and natural gas – to Europe. But while they could control the pipelines, they could not control Craig Venter. No one controlled Venter. And though his colleagues dubbed him “Darth Venter, an idiot and an egomaniac,” Time Magazine got it right: Venter's “incandescent idea” of unlocking the genome freed Europe and the West from mercurial and autocratic oil producers.

Tired of his peers' constant derision and the prying eyes of the US President's Advisory Board for Biosecurity, Venter welcomed the European Union's invitation to participate in its €100 billion Genome Initiative. In 2010 Venter shuttered his Rockville and La Jolla labs, crossed the Atlantic and set up shop in Cambridge. While his cash-starved colleagues in the US waited for Washington and the President to move beyond the distracting stem cell debate, Venter's startup, Synthetic Genomics, achieved the holy grail of the biofuel industry: direct organism to oil production. Through metabolic engineering, Venter's team coaxed microalgae to secrete oil directly through cell membranes, thereby eliminating the costly processing steps that plagued other biofuels like corn, switch grass and rapeseed. […]