Imagine thousands of Plexiglass tubes stored underground much like wine in a temperature-controlled cellar. While grapes are the prime ingredient in a bottle of Chardonnay, these tubes are full of odorous algae. And the long tubes of green slime are stored vertically, with carbon dioxide bubbling up from the bottom. Timed pulses of water push overflow algae – engineered to replicate four times daily – out the top of the tube and into a collection system, where the overflow is squeezed to yield, get this, crude oil.

“Why wait 10 million years for oil?” asks David Summers, one of the masterminds behind UMR’s underground algae project.