Spinning Straw into Black Gold

Every oil company likes to claim it’s really in the energy business. But at Chevron, chief technology officer Don Paul is seriously thinking about the day the petroleum wells run dry. The first way we’ll cope, he says, is by extracting usable fuel out of tar sands, oil shale, and coal.

But fossil fuels are certainly not the future. Paul, who trained as a geophysicist at MIT and got his start at Chevron as a researcher three decades ago, has seen multiple waves of technology transform his business. First, computers revolutionized exploration and drilling. Now, Paul argues, nanotech-fueled chemistry is about to put his company into what he calls the molecule business, where it won’t refine gasoline anymore – it’ll synthesize better, cleaner fuels from scratch.

CNN