BBC Focus Magazine

[Shadowwolf]

University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Graduate student Janice Frias, who earned her doctorate in January, made the critical step by figuring out how to use a protein to transform fatty acids produced by the bacteria into ketones, which can be cracked to make hydrocarbon fuels. The university is filing patents on the process.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110323135635.htm

Okay so it's not in the bag just yet but could the prospect of running out of oil about to be negated?

[Healerman]

The motoring kiss of death. Clarkson will hate it. It produces diesel.

Personally, I love this idea.

[Shadowwolf]

Where one can be artificially produced it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the other may also be managed in time.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Distilled extract of fermented sugars works quite well.