Mark Carpenter, research fellow at Cranfield University's Chemical Safety, Fuels and Environment Group, said that hydrocarbon fuels were "a very good way of storing energy" but that linking the process to renewable energy was the only way to make it tenable.
But a group of biologists led by Eivind Hovig of the Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo has managed to find a way to speed the process up, by linking together the vast quantities of disconnected biochemical information that have already been published.