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Power Science

Organism Uses Solar Energy to Produce Hydrogen 58

Posted by timothy from the beans-could-power-a-methane-economy dept.
Stan Freeman writes "CNET is reporting that Stanford University researchers have discovered a soil microorganism that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. They are trying to adapt this naturally occurring anaerobic organism into one that can survive in a more normal environment. There is some more information on biological water splitting here on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) web site."
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Organism Uses Solar Energy to Produce Hydrogen More

Organism Uses Solar Energy to Produce Hydrogen

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  • Err (Score:5, Informative)

    by rbarreira ( 836272 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @02:51PM (#13159232) Homepage
    Too bad both links point to the same site, so no CNET news.

    Here it is [com.com].

    First post?
  • I just saw something about this on Scientific American Frontiers. I don't think it ws this particular critter, but something more run-of-the-mill. Anyway, it was able to produce (indirectly?) a pretty good load of hydrogen while cleaning smokestack outputs. And it tasted goodm too!

  • Not that impressive (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @02:56PM (#13159297) Homepage
    Big deal -- I use bio energy to produce methane every day.
  • This is what the Martians did and look what it did to the water on their planet!!

  • Cost measurements? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by justanyone ( 308934 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @03:01PM (#13159347) Homepage Journal
    Someone please contact the authors and ask the following questions:

    * What is included in the cost measures?
    * Do these costs represent capital costs or recurring costs?
    * Is the cost per unit biomass (food) at market rates?
    * What temperature band does this work under?
    * Please cite patent numbers for those granted so we may link to them?
    * When you cite, "maximal theoretical electron transport rate" is this presuming some currently unavailable technology or the maximal rate you ran your demonstration at?
    * Are you using expensive fuel cell membranes, and if so, is the capital cost of these counted in?
    * Are you factoring in any losses due to leakage, probable losses of uptime to the facility from maintenance required by your technology, etc.?

    Gotta be exact here, we're a tough crowd for 'free energy' stories, we've seen too many of them...
    • Definatly not free energy. Remember you can get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen, thefor it must take atleast that much energy to seperate them. The bateria non withstanding require that energy. As stated in the link they get their energy from the sun. So essentially this is a form of solar energy. So the cost calculations need to be in the form of percentage conversions minus what the bateria itself needs to survive, and cost of building a large enough container to collect sunlight. (And your ot

      • Re:Cost measurements? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Salis ( 52373 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @03:30PM (#13159681) Journal
        But it's much cheaper to mass produce organisms that perform electrolysis than to build solar panels.

        Especially if the organism is photosynthetic (like the algae they mention). Add water, carbon, nitrate sources, and plenty of sunlight. And the organisms are easily transportable (unlike a bulky solar panel).

      • Re:Cost measurements? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by leonardluen ( 211265 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @03:52PM (#13159876)
        you are forgetting something. it doesn't have to beat current forms of solar energy, that isn't the purpose. it only needs to beat current forms of hydrogen production. it doesn't matter how efficiently it collects solar energy, as long as it costs less resources to use this to produce hydrogen. and for these purposes the sun should be considered a free resource because it will be there whether or not we use it.

        • Re:Cost measurements? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by linzeal ( 197905 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @06:28PM (#13161118) Journal
          It does not need to cost less than current forms of H energy either. All it needs to do is find a nitrate souce from a waste process that makes more money than the current use. Believe you me, there are so many different types of waste sources and uses that this is interesting just for that.
    • Why don't you do it yourself? ;) [stanford.edu]

      And if possible put the replies here :)

  • great .. (Score:3, Funny)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisumNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday July 25, 2005 @03:03PM (#13159368) Homepage Journal
    .. i for one welcome our new "bug that ate the oceans" overlord, and would like to remind them that, as a useless bag of mostly water, i'd be quite happy to disappear into a large puff of gas, at a moments terrible andromeda-zone notice ..
    • Unfortunately, the microorganism in its natural state is anaerobic, which means it dies when exposed to large concentrations of oxygen.

      Evolution already took care of the problem... the critter gets out of hand producing too much oxygen, it dies in its own poisons before turning the planet into a steaming cinder.

      To get around this problem, the researchers produce millions of the bugs and expose them to a low concentration of oxygen. They then take the ones that survive and use them to parent a new gen

      • Oops... never mind.

        if it goes 'oops... never mind', i say kill it. if all we get to is 'oops...', then clearly it has killed us.
      • For you High Schoolers*, this is a great project to embark yourselves upon! And it sounds pretty easy once you have the microorganism isolated!

        * Evil Genius School alumni only

    • Re:great .. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      useless bag of mostly water

      Ok, you receive 10 geek demerits.
      Go directly outside, do not play go, do not collect 200 quatloos.

      The correct geek referrence is ugly bag of mostly water.

      -
  • Will I be able to fill two tanks in my car up? One with soil and bactiria, the other with water. Then let it do it's thing and I get to go?

    • No, you would (presumably) fill your car with hydrogen, which had been produced earlier by this bacteria somewhere. However, storage technology for hydrogen still has a long way to go, so don't expect this to have any practical implication on your life in the near future.
  • I realize that one problem is creating microbes that are more tolerant of their excretions (ie oxygen and hydrogen). My question is how to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen. Is it easy? Is it cheap? Is it necessary? Does that kind of process totally negate any energy/materials savings microbes would generate?

    • Re:Oxygen contamination? (Score:4, Informative)

      by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @04:26PM (#13160190) Journal
      RTFA.
      they have two methods, one cycles the organism in a soup between two fermentation tanks, one enriched in sulfur the other deficient in sulfur. They are trying to engineer an algae that has a form of hydrogenase that does not break down immediately in the presence the oxygen it produces and they have are also tweaking the genes of the algae so it will produce the gas in one tank and get shuttled to the other tank, where the different nutrients allow it to recover for another go-round. The bug should work anaerobically in the sulfate tank producing hydrogen gas there, then photosynthetically in the unsulfered tank, recharging. Net oxygen production occurs in the photosynthetic phase, a separate tank from hydrogen production: the O2 and the H2 are never mixed to begin with Well, thats the theory anyway...can't you read?
      • Yes, I did RTFA's. However, neither you nor TFA's had any indication of how easy or cost-effective their proposals were. I didn't read every paper the lab had ever published, but nothing in the links indicated where they decided that $30/kg was attainable. Also, the articles seem to indicate (although I admit I could be wrong) that O2 is produced in the anaerobic phase, although in smaller amounts than during the photosynthetic phase. It's on page 7 of the first PDF listed. O2 seems to present in the sulfur
        • "....O2 seems to present in the sulfur tank. I don't know how much is present...."
          You have a point here...we are pretty much just going on pictures here and the arrows seem to indicate that O2 is both emitted and consumed in roughly equal amounts. Its not clear that oxygen is a byproduct in the sulfate stage. Numbers would be helpful.
          I'm not always that condescending and I regret the tone of my reply.

          I'm not a chem. engineer but what little I know about fuel cells leads me to expect that it IS necessa
          • a clear description of hydrogen fuel cell [absak.com] shows that hydrogen and oxygen must be separated. The direction and strength of the current depends entirely on the relative purity of the gases [mixed gasses would "short circuit" the cell] and which side the cell is loaded with which gas.
          • Oxygen is very reactive and hydrogen is very small and light. There are many oxygen selective membranes which can be used to purify the stream. Hydrogen's ability to diffuse through just about any solid would lend it to use a thin metal plate as a membrane. Last and easiest, it should be simple to find something that O2 will react with that Hydrogen won't (or will to a much lesser degree) that can be regeneratable. Lithium or other alkali metals would probably work well here. (It would have the added ben

  • oh boy.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by dvdsmith ( 892766 )
    I can see the next SciFi Channel movie now,

    DROUGHT

    with the usually plot line; older scientist's manipulating the DNA of the organism results in disaster. Enter the late 20's, early 30's young male prodigy who saves the day, along with the help of the older scientist's 20-something daughter. BTW, the old fart dies.

  • Do Hydrogen Cars Generate More CO2 Per Mile? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doug Dante ( 22218 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @04:13PM (#13160070)
    Most Hydrogen generated today is made using Steam reforming of natural gas [bellona.no]

    This process produces "7.05 kg CO2 ... per [1.0] kilogram hydrogen".

    Now new cars are getting near 140.9 [grams] C02 [per kilometer] [www.acea.be] (This is a target, double it if you want)

    So, how many KGs of Hydrogen does a Hydrogen powered car need per mile? Multiply x7.05kg to get emissions based on current production technologies.

    Are these hydrogen cars poisoning the planet? With a 500 km (310 miles) range, a gas powered car at the target level could sequester and store about 70 kgs (154 pounds) of CO2.

    If gas stations were required to accept and sequester this CO2, we could effectively eliminate CO2 emissions from most new automobiles without criss crossing the world with Hydrogen delivery lines or developing a totally new CO2 free hydrogen creation system.

    Just capture 50% of CO2 emissions and you'll be doing quite fine as far as cutting emissions goes.

    • Capturing CO2 (Score:2, Informative)

      by fejes ( 799784 )
      The issue isn't capturing the CO2, really. It's what you do with it, afterwards.

      You can't release it into the atmosphere: Global climate change.

      You can't really sink it under the ocean without some significant consequnces. (People have proposed this a number of times, but it's still a bad idea.)

      I'm not sure how much CO2 coca-cola uses each year, but I doubt it's THAT much.

      Why not just look for a solution that doesn't generate CO2?

      Hence, use biocatalysis to perform the hydrolysis by extracting out the
      • Hence, use biocatalysis to perform the hydrolysis by extracting out the enzymes from the organism. Of course, that technology is a few years off, still.

        A few tens of kg of nitrogenase (the enzyme in nitrogen-fixing bacteria and algae) have effects of the same order of magnitude as all the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch fertilizer facilities around the world. So people have been thinking for decades about turning that into a nice industrial process. Imagine blowing air across a membrane loaded with enzyme a

        • That's very true - Nitrogenases suck up a tremendous amount of ATP, and are only producing Hydrogen as a by-product. That, in itself is a tremendous disadvantage to this process. The sheer amount of energy used to power a Nitrogenase is amazing, and still no one knows why they Hydrogen gas is produced anyhow. With luck, Hydrogenases may be slightly less energy intensive.

          Still, I am aware of some very intresting (although preliminary) data involving Nitrogenases from R. palustris that are showing some si
    • "Are these hydrogen cars poisoning the planet?"

      No, our current economic system is killing the planet. (Don't look at me, I don't have the answer).
    • If gas stations were required to accept and sequester this CO2, we could effectively eliminate CO2 emissions from most new automobiles without criss crossing the world with Hydrogen delivery lines or developing a totally new CO2 free hydrogen creation system.

      Hmmm....run it up to the roof, use the sunlight there, with water from rain, and *grow* stuff in a *controlled environment*. Pharming, in particular, comes to mind: rare high-profit GM'd crops -- say, taxol or various "orphan drug" crops. If that's

  • This solves the biodiesel dead end? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @05:09PM (#13160563) Journal
    We have read that ethanol is an energy dead-end [slashdot.org] using more energy than it delivers when all costs are included. Due to the fact that current biodiesel production processes need a vegtable oil feedstock, it too is a lousy energy source [cornell.edu] when all costs are considered.
    But, U.Wisconsin chem researchers have a chemical [heat and catalysts, not bio-reactors] process that make biodiesel out of cellulose, which is 3/4 of dried plant material by weight [wisc.edu]. This means most of what farms [and cities too, if you count leaves and grass clippings] burn, bury or compost could be feedstock. Study the diagram...the UW process needs an H2 in-feed [it hydrogenates carbon chains to make the diesel, the H2 shown leaving the reactor is a fraction of what goes in]. So their process would be an energy winner if only a source of H2 that does not consume fossil fuel were available .

    NREL, Stanford, meet U. Wisconsin. U. Wisconsin, meet Stanford and NREL. if you guys play nice together and don't play politics, maybe my grandchildren won't be bicycling to the library to read about an age when combustible hydrocarbon liquids were used to run selfpropelled vehicles.
    I'd love to know exactly how credible the UW claims are. To whet the appetite of chemically knowledgible /.ers who might otherwise not have seen this article, their energy bottom line:
    About 67 percent of the energy required to make ethanol is consumed in fermenting and distilling corn. As a result, ethanol production creates 1.1 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed. In the UW-Madison process, the desired alkanes spontaneously separate from water. No additional heating or distillation is required. The result is the creation of 2.2 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed in energy production.


    I was so tempted to try posting the UW result when it came out but /. can't get forty comments on biology topics in 2 hours. [and they get over 900 on ethanol...go figure!] The eds like stories that get hundreds, not tens of responses. Is there a /. equivilent for sustainablity nerds?
    • About 67 percent of the energy required to make ethanol is consumed in fermenting and distilling corn. As a result, ethanol production creates 1.1 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed. In the UW-Madison process, the desired alkanes spontaneously separate from water. No additional heating or distillation is required. The result is the creation of 2.2 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed in energy production.

      Ok first off it was my understanding that corn was not an ideal plant for
    • Interesting. TFA calls it a "diesel additive." Any idea why it would be a poor fuel on its own?
  • I read about this quite some time ago on Bruce Sterling's Viridian list; I've been using this cite [i-sis.org.uk] but it's great to have better ones.

  • Salt Water? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @05:40PM (#13160797) Homepage Journal
    Can this bug survive in salt water? If so, it makes it easier since we wont have to supply it with de-salinized water. On the other hand, could it help in making a cheaper de-salinizing water process?
  • adapt this naturally occurring anaerobic organism into one that can survive in a more normal environment
    I'm sure that if this organism could talk it would tell you that being taken from natural soil to a hydrogen production facility was not exactly moving into a more normal environment.
  • Check out this wonderful site.

    http://www.peakoilandhumanity.com/chapter_choice.h tm [peakoilandhumanity.com]
  • to become a Hydro-Alge farmer

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