Forget Jesus sandals. The recent surge of interest in Craig Venter has seen the modest, immaterialist earth-born god reinvented. In his place stands a surfing dude with a sailing yacht named The Sorcerer and his eyes set on what he touts as the next multi-trillion-dollar industry. He even has a one-up on water into wine. Thin air into fuel.

Is Venter playing God… is God playing with Venter… The media debate, which peaked for me with the concern expressed by one athiest Guardian-reader "that a crazed evangelist may use the technology to create God", has been a lot of fun.

But it has also missed the point. Which is not whether Venter's synthetic addition to the earth's inventory of species is the eighth day of creation – or whether it is no more than a slightly obscure feat in computer-programming. The exciting part is that Venter wants to harness his creative powers to give the world a biologically engineered, renewable fuel – one he claims could scale up to rival the petrochemical industries.

He isn't the first one to think of harvesting CO2 from the air and turning it into fuel, in the same way that trees and algae do. As Duncan Graham-Rowe explains in this recent feature, the conversion process has already been sussed, and researchers across the world are working on ways to make it more efficient.

As it stands, it's exceedingly energy-intensive – and this is the problem Venter intends to address, by genetically designing bacteria that would convert CO2 into fuels with a higher energy content and at a much higher rate than currently possible.

It's not the stuff of miracles. If he pulls it off, it'll be thanks to everyday, down-to-earth, lab-based science. And it will be just the sort of game-changing innovation that could help to tease us away from our obsession with fossil fuels.