Mining with manufactured microbes

This is a pretty interesting article. By clipping manufactured sections of DNA into a host bacteria, Craig Venter and his team plan to manufacture biological organisms to help with things like climate change.
There are lots of issues that surround this kind of innovation. Bioethics groups will certainly have a view and Pat Mooney certainly fingers the bigger issue, that we all need to be thinking about it now.
"Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organisation, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?""
There must be millions of possible things to do with this, but I can think of a couple. Jack Uldrich talks about using it to produce low cost biofuels, but how about using manufactured micro-organisms to extract minerals from an ore deposit in situ. The could extract minerals of choice and replace them with something else like carbonate. So extracting minerals, without upsetting the landscape, and sequestering carbon in the same process.