Algae Could Be Major Hydrogen Fuel Source
While the first algae-to-biofuels facility went online today, scientists at Argonne National Labs are manipulating the photosynthetic super-organism for another use: creating hydrogen.
Algae grows prolifically in adverse conditions, and can store large amounts of oils or starches useful for making biodiesel or ethanol. But some strains also use an enzyme called hydrogenase to produce small amounts of hydrogen gas. Scientists think this is the organism’s way of getting rid of excess energy under high-light conditions.
- » See also: OriginOil Announces Algae Processing Breakthrough
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But the hydrogen isn’t really linked to photosynthesis in a way that’s useful to the plant (or us). So researchers are now trying to combine the activity of the hydrogenase enzyme with photosynthesis, to produce a sun-powered hydrogen-generation pathway.
The only problem: efficiency. Biological pathways will only convert about 5-10% of the sun’s energy into hydrogen. The scientists at Argonne hope to create a synthetic pathway that steps up the conversion, by extracting the hydrogenase enzyme and placing it in a synthetic protein framework.
Admittedly, this research is in the early stages, but it could someday offer major advances in renewable-fuel production. Is there anything algae can’t do?
I guess if this doesn’t work out, we can always fall back on algae biodiesel being used in biodiesel fuel cells…
Author’s note: this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. The April Fool’s joke can be found here: Ford’s Coal-to-Liquids Concept Vehicle: Release in 2010
Related Posts:
First Algae Biodiesel Plant Goes Online: April 1, 2008
How Solar Panels Could Power 90% of US Transportation
How Biodiesel Fuel-Cells Could Power The Future (And Your Car)
Source: Science Daily (Apr. 1, 2008): Algae Could One Day Be Major Hydrogen Fuel Source
Let’s hope so! Algae seems to be the best future fuel solution so far. We need to stop the money we’re pouring into corn-based ethanol projects (which is really just a subsidy to the corn industry, a powerful voting block) and move that money into algae fuel development.
Hydrogen is old news.
There is little point in retooling our cars to run on hydrogen produced from algae when we can run on the same liquid fuels we already use now also produced from algae.
When you figure the environmental costs of producing these new cars the break even is extremely far into the future.
Hydrogen, in fact, could be produced by hydrolysis (using renewable energy such as wind power) as an ingredient to be used to make the liquid fuels we now use.
Algae? Come, on people! then you have to harvest and extract it, etc. Hydrogen can be extracted with much fewer steps from any bio source, and in massive amounts from things like water (it’s the “H” in H20, remember?.
The whole earth is packed full of Hydrogen, and Hydrogen is really, really, really abundant in the water of the earth (that is the blue color areas surrounding the continents of any desk Atlas Globe.
Hydrogen is everywhere! even the sun is hydrogen (on fire). FuelCell electric cars work with Hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen can be extracted with simple electrolysis by anyone at home.
It’s a basic science lesson in junior high school chemistry.
Also, it’s super clean, producing water vapor when used in a fuelCell electric or even in a combustion engine…!
Let’s all get our heads together on this matter and get on with this “Hydrogen Society” every politician and nature freak is babbling about.