Biological energy sources for hydrogen and ethanol
Steve Spence over at Green Trust posted last week on work being done at the J. Craig Venter Institute that is working on both sides of the biofuel vs. hydrogen green car divide. Researchers at the Venter Institute are working with microbes and plants to reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. There aren't many details available at the Venter Institute's website, but Dr. Hamilton Smith is leading research projects to reengineer "the photosynthetic pathway to divert the sun's energy into more hydrogen production" as well as reengineer "cellulase pathways in certain bacterial to produce ethanol." John Craig Venter founded Synthetic Genomics last year to produce these energy sources from modified microorganisms. [Source: Venter Institute via Green Trust ]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Howard Lee Harkness 11:52AM (7/05/2006)
If there is a way to get photosynthesis of hydrogen, then there are only a few show-stoppers left, such as having to invent whole new storage and transportation systems. Then we have to deal with embrittlement of most metals. Oh, that and the fact that hydrogen has an incredibly large range of explosive mixture with air. Hmmm....
BTW, there is already biological production of ethanol -- in fact, that's how most of it has been produced in all of recorded history. Ethanol doesn't have much going for it, either economically or ecologically, but it's still better than hydrogen.
Algae-derived biodiesel still looks to me the most promising of the current alternatives. Although, if the economics of direct photovoltaics can be improved by about another factor of 3 or 4 (solar cells have already improved more that I thought they would), it will be a contender.
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Richard 3:45PM (7/05/2006)
As Lee points out, transportation and containment issues limit the usefulness of both hydrogen and ethanol. I prefer the approach used by Great Point Energy http://www.greatpointenergy.com/. They use a catalytic process to produce methanol, pure natural gas.
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Howard Lee Harkness 5:16PM (7/05/2006)
Great Point is very interesting -- one of their little blurbs on the website said that their process can also be used to make diesel, about which I would like more information. Diesel has some advantages over methane (and even more so over hydrogen), including energy density, ease of storage, transporation, and safe handling. It would be interesting to compare diesel made from coal and diesel made from veggie oil in terms of cost.
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