This Bacteria Liquid Turns Sand Into Stone Stronger Than Concrete — Why Isn't This Used?

In a research laboratory at the University of California Davis in 2015, a civil engineering professor named Jason DeJong poured approximately half a liter of a slightly cloudy liquid into a plexiglass column filled with ordinary construction sand. He left the column undisturbed for approximately seventy two hours. When he returned, the sand at the top of the column had transformed. Where he had poured loose granular material three days earlier, he now found a solid cylinder of tan colored stone, cemented together at the molecular level, with a compressive strength of approximately fifteen megapascals, roughly three fourths the compressive strength of standard residential concrete.

The technology is called microbially induced calcite precipitation, formally abbreviated MICP in the geotechnical engineering literature. The active ingredient in the liquid poured over the sand is a specific bacterial species called Sporosarcina pasteurii, a common soil bacterium found in every terrestrial environment on Earth. When grown in a nutrient solution containing urea and calcium chloride, the bacterium produces an enzyme called urease that breaks apart the urea molecule and releases carbonate ions that immediately react with the calcium to precipitate solid calcium carbonate, chemically identical to limestone, marble, chalk, and the calcium carbonate that makes up every seashell, coral polyp, and sea urchin on the planet. The calcium carbonate precipitates preferentially at the specific points where individual sand grains touch each other, forming microscopic mineral bridges that fuse the individual grains into a continuous solid mass.

Nature has been producing biocemented rock through essentially identical microbial mechanisms for approximately three and a half billion years. The oldest confirmed stromatolite fossils, discovered in the Dresser Formation of the Pilbara region in Western Australia, have been radiometrically dated to approximately three point four eight billion years ago. In 2012, an American architect named Ginger Krieg Dosier founded a company called bioMASON in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, specifically to commercialize the manufacture of biocemented construction bricks at ambient temperature using no fossil fuel energy inputs.

In this video, I cover the full scientific history of MICP research from the 1970s through the current commercial deployments, the specific chemistry that allows Sporosarcina pasteurii to turn sand into stone at ambient temperature, the natural precedents including stromatolites, beachrock, coral reefs, and the entire limestone bedrock of every continent, the honest challenges that have prevented industrial scale deployment including slow curing times, ammonia byproduct management, treatment uniformity across large volumes, and feedstock cost at industrial scale, the commercial applications currently emerging through bioMASON, Basilisk, and Prometheus Materials, and the two case studies of individual experimenters and small firms already producing biocemented structures at hobbyist and boutique architectural scale.

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