We have to build cities, we need them.

But we have to make them in a different way.

Dan Kammen: We need a wave of innovation,

not only for our way of life, but also for the planet.

The consequences would be enormous if we lose

this battle.

Thomas Goetz: I'm Thomas Goetz, executive editor at Wired

Magazine. At wired, we look

at the innovators and innovations that are changing

our world. In the next

hour, we'll see three stories from acclaimed filmmakers about

the future of energy.

We'll explore cutting edge innovations in how we drive,

how we live,

and, in our first story, how we fuel our cars.

They're all ideas that promise to

shape the path to the world of 2050.

[♪...]

The world has right now, close to a billion cars,

and we might double the

number of cars on the planet by 2050.

So if we double the number of

vehicles, we really increase the amount of fuel they consume, and

that's going to have a big, big footprint in terms of our demand

for resources to move all those vehicles around.

Kay Keasling: We're pulling up carbon that's been stored

underground and burning it in our

automobiles and putting all that carbon dioxide into the

atmosphere.

If we don't reduce that, we could have changes in the

climate that we could never recover from.

There's a number of forecasts for what type of transportation

economy we could move into.

One vision is that we would use more and more liquid fuels,

another one is we'll use more and more electricity.

Right now, more of the

industrial activity is focused around liquid biofuels.

The thing about a fuel is, its really unparalleled on a weight

basis how much energy is in a gallon of fuel.

And even if batteries develop as some of the

advocates hope they develop, we're not going to see batteries

running large trucks and we're certainly not

going to see an electrified air flight.

We're going to need transportation fuels for

those that will directly replace the petroleum based

fuels that we're using today.

This has kicked off people looking at a whole range of

other alternatives to petroleum in your tank.

Isaias Macedo: Commercial production of ethanol as fuel

started in Brazil in 1975. When we

started the ethanol program, nobody talked about reducing

emissions. This was not an issue at that time.

First, and most important, we didn't have money

to buy oil anymore after the first oil short.

We were importers of oil.

And today, more than 50% of all cars use ethanol

instead of gasoline.

Brazil made a very conscious choice to try to find a way to

reduce their fossil fuel dependence.

And they didn't have to look very far because Brazil's

climate is ideal for growing sugar cane.

Carlos Dinucci: when you have sugar cane plantation,

you have only two things to make:

sugar and ethanol.

My family has been in the sugarcane business since 1955

and about thirty years ago, I thought

"there's an opportunity to make more ethanol."

Now, we're producing 120,000 cubic meters of ethanol.

Brazil today has very close to 400 sugar mills.

The overall sales is 30 billion us dollars.

And this number is increasing.

If you look at how they make ethanol and how efficient the

process is, it's really a model for all of us.

They grind the plant up, extract the sugar from the

cane, the sugar goes into these large fermentation tanks which

combine sugars together with yeast that naturally produces

ethanol. They use the rest

of the plant to generate heat to distill the ethanol

and turn it into fuel.

They also use that heat to generate electricity renewably,

not putting excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Brazil has gotten to a point today where they're using about

40% less petroleum than they would be otherwise, but Brazil

cannot supply the whole world with ethanol because they

would have to cut very strongly into food

production and into critical natural areas like the Amazon to

make that happen.

This really boils down to the fact that there's only so much

arable land, and growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another

demand on that landscape.

We cannot kid ourselves into thinking that we've found a

general solution for the world problem.

I think we have to face the world in this way today.

We have no oil in very large quantities anymore.

We have no coal transforming in a clean way, in the meantime we

have to do the best we can, and the best at

the moment is that we can do biofuels.

Sugarcane to ethanol is an incredibly efficient process.

You get out about seven times the energy you put

into growing the sugar cane. In the US when we produce

ethanol from corn, for every unit of input of energy we get

about the same amount of energy out.

So we're really not gaining anything.

We need a better process.

We don't have to take what nature's given us, we can

actually engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient.

And that's the basis

for a lot of the work that we're doing now.

What we need to look at though, is which of the pathways to come

out of this are not only good financially,

but those that are also good for sustainability.

And this equation is really wide open right now.

We are in a race to develop fuels.

The race isn't with other countries, the race

is against time.

Cristiano Borges: To meet the immediate and future demands, we

made the energy solution spring from the ground.

Luis Scoffone: Brazil is the most efficient ethanol producing

country in the world. Sugarcane

alcohol from Brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint by up

to 70%, compared with gasoline.

The biggest challenge for fuel providers, and car manufacturers

is to reduce CO2 emissions over the next twenty years.

Demand for mobility will continue to grow.

We believe that biofuels are very

important because they help in an immediate way.

All forms of fuel are going to be needed; hydrocarbons,

natural gas, biofuels, all of them are going to

be part of the energy needs for the future of transportation.

Brazil has been very successful at taking a resource they had

and finding the process to make that into

ethanol and people call those first generation

biofuels. We have lots of lab work around

the world that are looking at the

second generation and that's generally turning cellulosic

material from for example weeds, into biofuels.

And the United States is very much at the

forefront of the innovation part of the equation.

For centuries we've been using yeast to consume glucose and

produce wine and beer.

We're trying to do something very similar, only we're

engineering the yeast to consume that glucose

and turn it into a fuel or drug or chemical.

We call this synthetic biology and when i started in this area,

many of my colleagues said "Oh Jay, this is

great work, but where's the application, what

are you going to do with these tools?" Who cares?

Malaria is an enormous problem.

In any one year, a million or so people die of

the disease and most of them are children under the age of 5.

So we thought this was a great opportunity to engineer yeast to

produce an antimalarial drug called artemisinin.

This drug is derived from plants right

now, but its too expensive for people in the developing world.

So my laboratory engineered yeast to produce small

quantities of artemisinin, now that process is being scaled up

and we'll have this drug on the market shortly,

but at a substantially reduced cost.

It turns out that that anti-malarial drug is a

hydrocarbon and it's very similar in

many ways to diesel fuel.

We thought, gosh we can turn our attention now to

fuels. We can make a few changes in that microbe to turn it into

a fuel-producing microbe.

If we imagine that glucose is going to be our new petroleum,

we need a source for that glucose.

So the crops that we're looking at are crops like

switchgrass.

This is a native grass, it grows without a lot of water and on

marginal lands. we could turn it into energy farms.

The challenge though, is that unlike sugar cane, it's

very difficult to get the sugar out of that biomass.

So we use what we call a pre-treatment process to extract

the glucose from the plant, and then we feed that

glucose to a yeast that we've engineered to

produce hydrocarbons.

And that yeast takes in the sugar, and it changes its

composition and gives us this high-energy molecule.

They float to the top, you skim them off,

you put them in your tank.

But it takes a lot of work to get from that small test tube

all the way up into

the million-gallon tank, so we have to give it time.

But I think that some of the discoveries that are happening

might be applied by the end of the decade.

In terms of a sustainable equation for the planet, the

role of biofuels is quite tricky.

There are a variety of crops that do not compete directly

with food, and finding ways to utilize those

types of crops first, that's very attractive.

So solving the science is part of the story, but then

evaluating all of the new fuels in terms of the land-use

impacts that they could have, that is an even

harder story than doing the good science.

Imagine that you could have one process that could take in

sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel.

And imagine if that didn't involve growing

anything at all.

Nate Lewis: The synthetic biologists are trying to take

plants and make them do things that they wouldn't normally do.

On the other hand, materials chemists, like

myself, want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve on the

process that nature does in real photosynthesis.

We should follow the blue print of plants converting sunlight

into fuel, but take the approach that it could be much simpler.

All we really need is a light absorber

that absorbs sunlight.

We also need a catalyst like iron or nickel.

So when you see the hydrogen coming off of the photo-active

material, that's an example of a semi-conductor

breaking the chemical bonds of water to make

hydrogen and oxygen.

Ultimately, our pieces are going to be contained in

something that is easy to roll out like bubble wrap,

where in would come sunlight and water.

You would vent the oxygen to the air, but the bottom

would wick out your liquid or gaseous fuel, that then you

could collect and use for our cars and planes and storage.

Our goal is within two years, to have the first artificial

photosynthesis solarfuels generator that we can hold in

our hands. and then, get to scale beyond that time.

We're certainly not good at predicting the future, but to

me, electric vehicles look like a sustainable option.

We've heard proposals about things as

far-fetched as nuclear power planes, and even some proposals

to move freight around with lighter-than-air vehicles.

And so if the future in 2050 does

include a fair amount of oil, what it means would be that we

haven't deployed as many of these clean

technologies as we already know are possible.

If you think about how long it's taken for us to build up the

petroleum industry, we can't hope to reverse that overnight.

It's a huge change in our infrastructure.