An olive-skinned, chiseled hunk of a guy pointed and said something to his buddy when Christina parked the X-car in its reserved spot on the UCLA campus. She didn’t bother to flirt because she knew his attention was on the car, not her. As far as she could tell, guys in L.A. weren’t interested in a brainy, cosmetic-free woman with a propensity to gain weight even if she had smooth, clear skin, a delicate nose, and arresting eyes. Her one weekend a month with sexy wheels—any motorized wheels, for that matter—was over. Mickey had cleaned off the tar, so other than an empty fuel tank, the X-car was returning to Dr. Chen in tip-top shape.
Summer school wasn’t in session, so even though it was a Monday morning, the sunny campus was rather empty. The majority of patrons buying their morning coffee at the outdoor Court of Sciences plaza were graduate students, who worked year-round. Christina purchased her favorite caffeinated beverage, a fountain-fresh cup of cola, said good-bye to the sunshine and climbed the stairs to her research lab. Signs advertising the UCLA-CaliPetro Bioenergy Institute greeted her when she reached her floor.
When CaliPetro first negotiated with UCLA for this collaboration, leftish students, faculty, and members of the public organized protests against corporate corruption of university science. But as state support for the UC system withered, the university had to choose between shutting down the lab and accepting money from the energy conglomerate. Christina benefited from the university’s decision. CaliPetro’s involvement—both financial and technical—made her work possible.
She strolled down the hall and was surprised to find the door to her lab was unlocked; usually she was the first person to arrive on Mondays. The collection of oversized “DO NOT DUPLICATE” university keys she wore around her neck rattled as she put them away.
“Dr. Chen?” she called.
“In here, Chrissy.”
She followed the voice to his office. Dr. Robert Chen was on the telephone. He waved but didn’t flash his usual smile. With his graying hair, hopelessly out-of-date eyeglasses, and pale, skinny feet in a pair of huaraches, Dr. Chen reminded Christina of her father, who was also a fashion-clueless scientist of a certain age. She went to her desk and unloaded her backpack.
“Don’t get comfortable,” Dr. Chen said, emerging from his office with a look of distress. “There’s been an accident at the Syntrophus test site.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Fire,” Dr. Chen said, “and possibly an underground explosion.”
“Oh my God,” she said, stunned. The Syntrophus test—which Mickey had been so interested in—was the centerpiece of her Ph.D. thesis project. With CaliPetro’s help, Dr. Chen had won approval from the city to use a brownfield site for the work, at a bankrupt gas station in south central L.A. Setting up their mock tar sand in the underground storage tanks had been costly, and as of yet, they hadn’t reaped any meaningful data. What if the experiment was ruined? Selfishly Christina wondered how many extra years this accident would put between her and graduation.
“We need to check the damage,” Dr. Chen said. “I rode my bike today. Did you return the car?”
“I did, but it’s almost out of isobutanol.”
“The bugs made a fresh batch. We’ll fill it up and meet the CaliPetro rep in Jefferson Park in an hour.”
#
Christina stared out the window of the little X-car as Dr. Chen drove past a vacant lot and an unkempt auto repair shop that was barely distinguishable from the adjacent junkyard. The street had a bombed-out look to it already; she wondered what they would find at the test site.
The old gas station didn’t look much different from its usual state of decay, except for an array of new-looking cars bearing logos for various government agencies parked in front. Christina and Dr. Chen joined the coterie poring over the site.
“I don’t see any damage,” she said.
“Let’s check the access portal,” Dr. Chen replied.
As they walked toward the hole which led to the underground gasoline storage tank, Christina noticed scorch marks on the concrete. Blackened tufts of burned weeds curled from cracks in the pavement. At the access portal, the cap which normally sealed it was missing.
“Hello, Robert,” said a bespectacled man wearing a light blue polo shirt with the CaliPetro logo on the left chest.
Dr. Chen shook the man’s hand. “Morning, Sid.”
“It’s not good, Robert. From the reports it sounds like we had a big methane fire here last night.”
Dr. Chen nodded solemnly and got down on his knees to peer into the hole.
“Anyone hurt?” he asked.
“We don’t think so. They found a homeless encampment over behind the propane tank, but nobody was in it. Looks like the fire just burned from the portal, nowhere else, so unless somebody was standing over it at the time, things should be okay.”
“That’s a relief,” Dr. Chen said, standing up. “I can’t see anything down there. The detection system is completely gone.”
“We found part of it earlier, blown out and burned almost beyond recognition.”
Dr. Chen nodded again. Christina saw the heavy disappointment in his face.
“I suppose the good news is this means our bacteria worked,” she said.
Sid from CaliPetro looked at her. “Excuse me?”
“The methane that fueled the fire must have been produced by Dr. Chen’s bacteria,” Christina said. “We designed the Syntrophus bacteria to break down heavy crude oil, and then convert the products into flammable methane gas. This fire proves the system works. The bacteria made enough methane to cause an accident.”
“True enough, Chrissy,” Dr. Chen said. “But it won’t do us any good now.”
“Why?” she asked.
Sid answered. “This incident proves your energy harvesting strategy is too dangerous. CaliPetro can’t have explosions and fires at a production site. ”
“But this was an artificial system—a contained storage tank. Surely in a real tar sand you could find ways to manage it safely,” she said.
“Perhaps,” the rep said, “but CaliPetro won’t be financing the research to figure it out. Absent any encouraging findings, we’ve reached our funding limit for this technology. We’re more interested in spending our R&D dollars these days on renewables. You’ve got a good idea here, but the Institute will be focusing on cellulosic ethanol from now on.”
“But—“ Christina said.
Sid ignored her. “I’m sorry, Robert. The tar sand energy harvesting project is dead—at least until crude hits $175 a barrel,” he said with a chuckle suggesting this was a standard they could never expect to meet.
Christina gave her boss a look imploring him to argue, but Dr. Chen simply shook the oil man’s hand and said, “I hope we can work together again sometime.”
“I’ll be in contact with you about the mess. CaliPetro agreed to pay for cleanup of this site when the experiment ended. We’ll meet that obligation, but if the storage tank was damaged by the fire, remediation is gonna cost us a helluva lot more than we expected.”
Before Sid wandered off to talk to a city official, he turned to them and said, “Maybe you can get the Canadians to help you out. They have the most to gain from your process.”
Christina knew that Dr. Chen had already contacted a Canadian oil company, one that operated in the vast Alberta tar sands, but the company wasn’t ready to commit funds until Chen’s project was further along. That would never happen now.
Chen wandered about for a few minutes. Christina prayed for a miracle to resurrect the project.
“There’s nothing we can do here, Chrissy,” he said. “Ready to go back to the lab?”
She nodded despondently, and they returned to the X-car.
“Dr. Chen, what are we going to do?”
“Put the Syntrophus project on hold,” he said, “or at least the field trial part. We can still study the organism. The genetic modifications we made to it may be useful in the future.”
‘In the future’ won’t help me finish my Ph.D. in the present, she thought.
As if reading her thoughts, Dr. Chen said, “Fortunately we have several projects to keep us busy. You can include the genetic engineering of Syntrophus in your Ph.D. thesis. But from now on, this will be your baby.”
He patted the dashboard as he spoke.
“The X-car?”
“Not the car, the fuel that it runs on. Biodiesel produced by E. coli bacteria. The fuel of the future: renewable, carbon-neutral, and not food-based.”
This was good news. She thought the biodiesel project was way cooler than the tar sand research. She’d wanted to work on it from the beginning, but Dr. Chen insisted it was too risky for her Ph.D. thesis.
“Making the bacteria photosynthetic, like little plants, is revolutionary,” Chen said. “If we can get it to work—still a big if—it could change the world.”
He paused, momentarily lost in a fantasy of dollar signs, Nobel prizes, or maybe both.
“I won’t force you to take it on. You know what we’re trying to do is extremely ambitious. It might never work.”
“I want to, Dr. Chen. It’s worth the gamble, even if I have to spend the next ten years in graduate school.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Chen laughed. “Sometimes things move quickly. Look at our Syntrophus project.”
“Fast work indeed,” Christina said. “A little too fast.”
Dr. Chen nodded. “I never expected they’d make enough methane to cause an explosion like that. I guess we’re lucky the little buggers didn’t blow up half the city.”
The joke reminded her that in all the excitement, she hadn’t yet spoken to Dr. Chen about the incident at La Brea.
“You heard about what happened at the tar pits on Saturday?” she asked.
“Of course. It was all over the news.”
“I was there, you know.”
“Really! That’s right, you volunteer for their digs.” He glanced at her as if searching for the answer to a question. “You haven’t shaved your head so I guess you didn’t get doused in tar.”
“Fortunately not,” she said. “The crazy thing is, nobody can explain what happened. Why was there such a huge bubble when normally the gas seeps up in smaller amounts?”
“I’m sure a geologist will come up with a model to account for it. If I remember the last time I visited La Brea, the gas bubbles varied quite a bit in size and frequency.”
“They do,” she agreed, “but this bubble was way beyond the normal range for size.”
“In any random distribution—a bell curve—you occasionally get outliers.”
“I know, but…” she said, her voice trailing off into uncertainty.
They turned into the campus of UCLA and Dr. Chen zipped the X-car into its reserved parking spot. He looked at his student.
“What’s bothering you, Chrissy?”
“I witnessed the biggest bubble burst, but the gas from the bubble didn’t change the odor in the air. Hydrogen sulfide gas is really stinky. If the bubble had released it, I would’ve noticed.”
“Which means what?”
She hesitated, not wanting to school her P.I.
“It suggests that the gas rising from the tar pits in those anomalous bubbles was almost entirely methane.”
“That’s normal for La Brea.”
“Well, yes, most of the escaping gas there is methane. I once saw a volunteer ignite a small leak in the grass and cook a hot dog over it. But normally the methane is contaminated with H2S. This gas bubble wasn’t.”
Dr. Chen shrugged his shoulders as he exited the car. Even though he wasn’t a tall man, he could easily lean on the X-car’s roof and look over as she closed the passenger door.
“So they better not light any matches around Hancock Park for a while,” he said.
She needed more reassurance. Out with it.
“Dr. Chen, I can’t help wondering… I mean, we optimized our Syntrophus bacteria to degrade hydrocarbons… and the field test started a few weeks ago… and now the fire…”
“Are you suggesting there’s a connection between my research and the incident at Rancho La Brea?” Dr. Chen said.
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“Certainly not. And you of all people should know why.”
She did know the reasons why. She helped design the safeguards in the genetically-altered bacteria. What worried her was she wasn’t the only person to detect a hint of vinegar in the air on Saturday.