Craig Venter has a track record, and he is brilliant. Therefore, we are paying attention.
Newsweek reported in 2000 Venter decoded the human genome faster than anyone else did, and he did it cheaper than a well-funded government team.
Now he has set a new goal of replacing the petrochemical industry.
In his lab, he is manipulating chromosomes in the hopes of creating an energy bug—a bacterium—that will ingest carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water, and spew out liquid fuel that can power cars, trucks, and other internal combustion driven machines.
Venter declaimed, “The fuel-and-oil industry is a multi trillion-dollar industry, so I think there is room for dozens to a hundred solutions, each of which could create trillion-dollar industries.
“The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics, and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives. There are multiple bil-lion- or trillion-dollar industries out there that new inventions will help spawn.
At Ford’s Camaçari plant in Brazil, there are two dozen or more suppliers operating right inside the complex.
Indeed, in many cases, they are producing components alongside Ford’s main production line. The concept allows Ford to take just-in-time manufacturing to a whole new level.
Inventories are small or nonexistent. Components like dashboard assemblies flow directly into the main Ford assembly line at the precise point and time of installation.
The Detroit News reported at this Ford factory, a group of Visteon Corp. workers connect the wiring in a dashboard module for a Ford EcoSport.
Next to them, Lear Corp. employees are building seats for the same vehicle. A
few feet away, Ford’s Diede Silva dos Santos applies trim to a Fiesta sub-compact. She has mastered seven jobs at the plant and is working on an eighth.
“If you do different jobs, it’s more interesting,” said Silva dos Santos. “It gives me a chance to expand my knowledge. (It) makes me a more valuable employee, too, so that I will have a future here.”
Ford’s U.S. factories, and leaner and more flexible than any other Ford facility. It can produce five different vehicle platforms at the same time and on the same line.
Ford sources said it is the sort of plant the company wants in the U.S., were it not for the United Auto Workers, which has historically opposed such extensive supplier integration on the factory floor.
Many automakers use South America to try out new manufacturing ideas. Volkswagen AG has suppliers in some of its factories, and General Motors Corp. has a supplier park surrounding its plant in Gravataí, Brazil. However, analysts say no automaker has gone as far as Ford.
“South America is kind of the global sandbox for a lot of automakers to try out new methods,” said Michael Robinet,
vice president of global vehicle forecasts for CSM Worldwide. “Ford was able to think out of the box, and it’s paying off for them.”
“Right now oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking, and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.
“South America is kind of
the global sandbox for a
lot of automakers to try out
new methods.”
—Robinet
“I envision maybe a million micro-refin-eries. Companies, cities, and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. This would eliminate a lot of the distribution problems and associated pollution.”
Venter sees the first organism produced fuels being one or two years away. “We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades,” he finalized.
All of them exemplify a different kind of worker in a different kind of plant for a Detroit automaker.
This state-of-the-art manufacturing complex in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia is not only the centerpiece of Ford’s Brazilian turnaround plan, it is also one of the most advanced automobile plants in the world. It is more automated than many of
References:
Archives