Craig Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, has struck a deal with ExxonMobil to develop biofuels from algae. Under the $600 million partnership, SGI will develop fuels that cars and planes can use without having a modified engine. A new facility will be built in San Diego to house ponds and bioreactors for the algae. "We will be trying out these different approaches … using newly-discovered natural algae to test the best approaches we can come up with to go into a scale-up mode," Venter says in the Guardian.