I got to thinking about if there was any way to track oil consumption within the KSA and thought about car sales as an indicator. I found this:

BMI has raised its automotive sales estimates from 3.8% to 5.0% in the light of strong sales in H207 and despite a dip in GDP growth to 2.7% from 4.3% in 2006. Total automotive sales in 2007 are estimated at over 545,000 units.

The population is about 27 million in the KSA, so just about 2.0% of the population bought cars last year. In the U.S. in 2004 there were about 7.5 million cars sold out of a population of 285 million (link), thus about 2.6% of the population bought a car that year. Also, the record in the U.S. for year to year increase was 5.88% in 1972-1973 but if you look at the KSA stats above, it's pretty close to that. So the KSA would probably have similar ownership per capita as the U.S., given another decade or two without TSHTF. Reduced exports indeed!

*edit* I made a mistake in one of the numbers that I corrected.

bugs that eat cellulose and make crude.
I very much hope they are storing it in a bio safety level 4 building.

I'm not gonna bother to read any more than what you posted - I can well believe that a former software executive thinks you can pour crude oil into a Lexus, but I cannot imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

The pitch and volume is getting hysterical - "there's no place like home, there's no place like home........".

There is just so much bloody nonsense out there - water carbs, bugs that shit gasoline, what have you. I've said before that we've all been wallowing in so much energy for so long that we cannot even see it. There is just a ridiculous amount of useful energy in a gallon of gasoline, and in spite of that it takes a lot of fuel to move a vehicle. And how many gallons have you used in your lifetime? Consequently, people have no intuition at all about how much energy it takes to move an automobile. The end result is that people are desperate to believe in anything that promises to keep them in unlimited energy, but the fact is that nothing can.

Boy will they be pissed when they figure it out - but in the mean time it's a golden opportunity to separate the scientifically illiterate from their money.

This has been all over the news lately. Let's see the EROEI, eh? If you have to spend a large amount of energy on making buffers, media, electron donors and keeping environmental conditions just right to culture those bacteria you ain't goin' nowhere. Here's an analog from another industry: for some years, bioremediation has been the future of toxic waste disposal and many people have gotten funding to develop strategies to do it and implement them. Thus far, it isn't working nearly as well as hoped because it is damn difficult to get a particular strain of bacteria to grow where you want them, they tend to grow where they want to grow or they just get eaten by the native bacteria because they don't have a niche in the ecosystem. That's not to say it can't be done, though. If this guy has something he'll be a bajillionaire faster than you can say "12 mpg SUV", but my money's on that he's a snake oil salesman (I'm speaking figuratively).