For years, manufacturers have relied on raw materials like petroleum and crops to make industrial chemicals. In turn, those industrial chemicals go on to be used in all kinds of consumer products. But petroleum depletes a nonrenewable resource, and plants require lots of energy and land—and neither method is particularly efficient or cheap. But what if harmful greenhouse gases could be harnessed as the raw material instead, allowing for the use of existing resources to make chemical manufacturing greener, cheaper, and more efficient?

It’s an ambitious vision, and just what Derek Greenfield, co-founder and CEO of a San Francisco-based startup called iMicrobe, has in mind. iMicrobe (short for Industrial Microbes) wants to transform natural gases into chemicals to be used in manufacturing. To do so, it needs to engineer microscopic interactions between bacteria and gas. Reportedly, the company uses chemical reactions between methane, which is found in most natural gas, and microorganisms like yeast to produce results that are identical to the ones achieved with bio-based raw materials. The chemicals that result from these methane-microbe interactions can then become the building blocks of still more chemicals.

Currently the team is using E. coli bacteria in their process, but they’re also testing other microbes, too. Ultimately, they hope the process can make natural gas the input for all kinds of chemical outputs.

“If we’re successful, a number of years down the line people will be able to buy products made using our process,” said Greenfield. Everything from fragrances to plastics might one day be made using chemicals that came from microbes and methane. “They won’t know that [the products were] made using our process, but they’ll be buying something greener.”

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