Page 9 - Alphabet

Alphabet's 'moonshot factory' promises the moon

Project Foghorn is one of those straight-from-science-fiction concepts we've come to expect from Alphabet, the sprawling conglomerate formerly known as Google. The idea, hatched by the company's X research lab, was to use seawater and chemistry to create fuel that could be refined into gasoline. This gas would be just like the gas we fill our cars with today - except that unlike today's gas, it would not add to global warming because it would recycle carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.If the project had been successful - and this was always a big if - it would have changed the definition of green energy and potentially undercut some of the most important industries in the world, not least the oil business. But after two years of trying, and an undisclosed research budget, Foghorn died during a January staff meeting.The result: Everyone on the team received a bonus (they won't say how much).X, formerly called Google X, cheekily refers to itself as "the moonshot factory". They are