Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Use Microbes to Produce Hydrogen
An anonymous reader writes " Environmental engineers at Penn State University and a research scientist at Ion Power Inc. have created an electrically-assisted microbial fuel cell that can be used to produce hydrogen from organic material. The amount of electricity needed for the process is less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone. This advancement can be used to produce hydrogen as a byproduct of water treatment. " Coverage at ScienceDaily as well.
I have been using microbes to produce methane for a while now, why can't I run my computer from that?
Need extra power for that long haul flight, just eat a curry before hand!
liqbase
haha you lose
Finally, a good use for cell phones!
I need this, the amount of unwashed dishes and dirty laundry lying around could turn my entire apartment into a megastore of cheap energy!
less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone
What is that in Libraries of Congress per Electronic Arts business day?
The amount of electricity needed for the process is less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone.
To power what? A 100-gallon microbial fuel cell or a very teensy one?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
- One hundred thousand megatons of hydrogen are produced by less energy than is required to power a cell phone for one nanosecond.
- One molecule of hydrogen is produced by less energy than is required to power a cell phone from the moment it is activated with a completely charged battery until the moment it shuts off because its battery becomes completely discharged.
This is what I love about Slashdot articles....shocking my toillet.
Onda Technology Institute
Canyonero!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Will people be able to buy microbe tanks to generate hydrogen for their own homes? Imagine every home in the world adding to the hydrogen generating infrastructure. All of a sudden fuel cell cars would be a viable venture. Want wheels? Just add sea monkeys!
Maybe the key phrase in one of the TFAs is "electrically-assisted".
Bring some cows into the fold...never underestimate the power of bullshit.
Join the TWIT army now!
And what does that say? Nothing. I'm pretty sure I can create a couple of hydrogen molecules with that amount of electricity too and I won't even need any bacteria in the process.
Here's a more useful bit from the article, though it would be even more useful if they would just say what fraction of energy this process requires:
i can finally power my car with tap water!!!!
Uhhhh. I haven't cleaned my room in a while. Yeah, I know those are half-eaten spaghetti bowls. Just don't light that cigarette in here, ok bud?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yeah, I know he'll get modded up anyway because his post is long and toward the top of the thread, but he raises exactly the question that I thought of upon reading the summary.
Is this supposed to be a cheaper way of cleaning wastewater, a more effecient way of creating hydrogen for fuel cells, or some combination of both? The article never really goes in depth on exactly why these bacteria are so good.
I, for one, welcome our new karma-whore sig writing overlords
What a gas!
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
hope this developes into cheep fuel technology for cars.
So why aren't we applying the same kind of thinking to power generation? 40% efficiency, 60% "waste" heat, at a couple of hundred C.
Deleted
here they are
We're one step closer to Mr. Fusion!
Did the Volt turned into a unit of power while I was sleeping? And I thought I did well in physics.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
pdf with the original paper here
The less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone statement is totally meaningless because it gives no indication of the efficiency of the process. Even at "0.25V", if the process requires tens or hundreds of electrons per molecule of hydrogen, then the process may be horribly inefficient. Even the "produces four times more hydrogen than would be typically generated by fermentation alone" is meaning less without some facts such as the molar conversion efficiency -- how many moles of hydrogen per mole of acetate does the augmented process create?
Moreover, this process is not the holy grail of pure electrolysis (e.g., splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), it is an electrolyticly augmented chemical conversion of carbohydrates into carbon dioxide (green house gas), water, and hydrogen. In theory, this process could by part of a biomass-to-hydrogen fuel generation cycle, but as we have seen with ethanol production, the amount ethanol-based energy harvested is poor in comparison with the energy required to grow, reap, and process the plants (corn).
Don't get me wrong, this is a very intriguing finding, but there is far too little information in the article to determine if this process is thermodynamically better or worse than simply burning the carbohydrates in a furnace or standard combustion engine.
What frustrates and saddens me is that the analysis needed to make useful statements about this discovery are not that hard to make. Any competent chemist or chemical engineer could provide a useful back-of-the-envelop estimate of the energy inputs and outputs given an afternoon with the raw data from the experimenters. Either the scientists involved did not do this analysis (shame on them) or the journalists chose to ignore key results (shame on them) or the actual return on energy input is very poor indeed (to bad for all of us).
I hate articles that quote meaningless comparisons and leave the true question of practically total unanswered while holding out a vaporous promise that our energy problems are solved.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A Fuel cell, if I am not mistaken, is a device for storing hydrogen and extracting electricity from hydrogen once stored.
However the linked article talks about "fuel cells", but then talks about this "fuel cell" as producing hydrogen-- as if for some kind of process that would be used to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells.
What am I missing here?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This advancement can be used to produce hydrogen as a byproduct of water treatment.
Ummm, that's not a byproduct. That's supposed to go into the water.
when the headline on fark.com is more informative than this
The process also produces good old CO2. You know, that nasty greenhouse gas. Not the environmentally friendly solution that it is spun as.
Interesting research, but until the CO2 problem is solved it still needs work.
for morons. If you guys don't have insightful FACTS to add to the story, why sit here and comment all the time about how the original post lacks details. Reading all of this useless moronic complaining just lowers everyone's IQ.
Your digestive system requires (and produces) various enzymes to digest different foods. Without the proper enzymatic mix, digestion is inefficient and a gaseous output results.
To get a decent methane volume, you have to vary your diet in a pathological way. Eat a sudden excess of foods you seldom eat. Try a progresson of beans - kidney beans, great whites, navy beans, blackeyed peas, and of course, the dreaded garbanzo. Mix in some onion varieties periodically. Then there are the peppers: bell peppers, jalapenos, and even habaneros are very efficient in terms of obtaining the desired output.
Stay away from rice and noodles, as these seem to lessen the effect.
I understand that certain vegetables - broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, for example, can also have dramatic benefits if consumption is managed properly as above.
Unripe apples and certain kinds of nuts are good candidates, but I find them to quickly lose their efficacy, and so they should be either reserved for a special occasion (such as a wedding or funeral) or simply enjoyed for their non-flatulent properties.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
1) Release vague press release concerning revolutionary energy-production technology.
2) Watch enrollment skyrocket.
3) Profit!
Of course I didn't RTFA, but if them lil microbe things are breaking off the hydrogen the carbon is going to have to go somewhere.... unless they're bonding it into a solid carbon form (diamonds or graphite or such) then it's going to be into CO2 or similar. Not exactly a huge leap forward in environmental friendliness.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
However, giving the bacteria a small assist with a tiny amount of electricity -- about 0.25 volts or a small fraction of the voltage needed to run a typical 6 volt cell phone -- they can leap over the fermentation barrier and convert a "dead end" fermentation product, acetic acid, into carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
I agree, it is written poorly.
or even better yet
Microbes use hydrogen to produce scientists.
The actual paper referenced is Electrochemically Assisted Microbial Production of Hydrogen from Acetate by Drs Hong Liu, Stephen Grott, and Bruece E. Logan from Penn State, in the publication "Environmental Science and Technology."
Enjoy...
"scientists use microbes to produce hydrogen"
Lazy scientists. Wont somebody please think of the microbes.
Mr. Fusion!
Does this sound like the Matrix to anyone else or is it just me?
so you take wastewater, a small electrical charge and some bacteria and you get electricity, hytrogen and clean water.
man the oil and power companies are going to hate this......
anybody wanna bet that one of the oil or power companies will buy the rights to this and sit on it for a few hundred years?
so close!
...this is good if it pans out. Considering how Global Peak Oil might have been already reached, or if not, we're close to it, we're going to be needing a replacement for petroleum and soon.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I love the peanut butter jar tech, I also love the comment that it requires .25 V, which is just tiny fraction of 6V. For that matter its an even smaller fraction of the 25,000 V in my TVs flyback transformer. I get that .25 V is small but at how many amps? .001 mA, or 1000kA the pouwer requirement is vastly different. On the other hand this could be a neat way for cities to deal with sewage.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Hydrogen is produced when the bacteria exchanges a proton for an electron at the anode. The proton becomes the hydrogen.
thus it is one for one. For every hydrogen produced you have one electron dropping through a 0.25v external potential.
If other processes are also transferring protons then that's still hydrogen. So one electron passed means some proton contianing species ended up on the electrode. as long as you can make sure that those are mainly hydrogen and not some weird thing (say a metal or sodium or soduim), then you dont care.
So basically its a 0.25 volt cost atom produced.
Now to the numbers: One mole of electrons is the same as 96,500 Coulombs. So producing 96,500 would require about 25 kilo joules of energy. A mole of hydrogen, if I recall correctly, contains 280KJ of energy of which 230KJ is extracable as work (rest has to to to heat to pay the boltzman tax).
Of course the bacteria can also produce hydrogen on it's own. THe problem is the build up of reaction products that shut down the process. the current is used to help the bacteria get rid of these so the reaction can go to completetion producing hydrogen. Thus if I read this right in steady state we are indeed exchaning electrons for each hydrogen. The problem would then be if the bacteria is instead exchanging electrons for methane or something we dont want.
I cant quite figure out the abstract of the science paper but it sounds like they get about 80% of what they want.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You, sir, are a god among editorial retards.
Not only was I frustrated with the Slashdot summary regurgitating the absolute stupidity that was the original article, I was also beginning to think that the article was flat-out lying when they said the paper was "released onto the internet". No such niceties like, say, linking to the actual god-damn paper. Not that we haven't been able to do that on the internet since, oh, 1990.
At a certain part of the article it is stated that one tenth of the energy required for electrolysis is required here. How I got it from the context, that means you get 10 times the amount of hydrogen for your power input here, then compared to standard electrolysis. If true, waste water can help alleviate getting hydrogen, for any devices we would like to run on hydrogen.
Ps, The reason for this is likely that the microbes are using the carbohydrates in the waste water to power themselves, and the electric charge is for nothing else but getting them past their usual fermentation stopping point, thus allowing water to be cleaned more and more hydrogen to be collected.
the 0.25 v is the potential drop per hydrogen atom produced. it scales. a 100 gallon reactor would have the same potential drop as a 1 gallon reactor. the cost scales too. just multiply atoms per second * 0.25v / 1.6e18 (atoms/coulomb). you dont need to know the current just the voltage and you can compute the power per volume.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
to own a "BEAMR" ("The researchers call their hydrogen-producing MFC a BioElectrochemically-Assisted Microbial Reactor or BEAMR. The BEAMR not only produces hydrogen but simultaneously cleans the wastewater used as its feedstock. It uses about one-tenth of the voltage needed for electrolysis, the process that uses electricity to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.") powered Beemer (BMW) Slow day...
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
At a certain part of the article it is stated that one tenth of the energy required for electrolysis is required here. How I got it from the context, that means you get 10 times the amount of hydrogen for your power input here, then compared to standard electrolysis. If true, waste water can help alleviate getting hydrogen, for any devices we would like to run on hydrogen.
Thanks for the insightful post, AC. That is a very good factoid that I had not noticed when I read TFA. It definitely raises the potential for the invention in terms of practicality.
Ps, The reason for this is likely that the microbes are using the carbohydrates in the waste water to power themselves
Good point. The question remains: what fraction of the energy latent in the carbohydrates is being converted to hydrogen? As you insightfully indicate, the microbes consume some of the energy themselves (probably generating a mix of carbon dioxide, water, ethanol, methanol, methane, etc. and a certain amount of waste heat as they make more microrobes) The electricity juices the microbes into producing more hydrogen and perhaps converting more of the fuel in the slurry. In addition to the microbe tax and electrical power needed, we would also need some estimate of the energy required to grow, harvest, and process the biomass.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That is, a hydrogen economy that is not dependant on oil for its source of hydrogen in the first place. Bush and Co. will never let that happen and you know it. This is purely a novelty since it doesn't make Halliburton more money.
It is a terrible pity that they can't invent a hydrogen fuel cell which runs off paranoia. Perhaps a design incorporating bacteria and a tin foil hat would work.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
"The amount of electricity" - would that be amps, volts, or watts?
"Less than the amount required to power a cell phone" - really now, and even if I scale up the process by a factor of 10, it will still take the same amount? AMAZING!
That is a very good factoid that I had not noticed when I read TFA. It definitely raises the potential for the invention in terms of practicality.
At very least, it's probably worth the cost of improving waste water treatment plants. Energy and resources are going to be used regardless, so if we can get something extra in return, why not?
It uses 1 tenth of the electricity required to do eletrolysis, meaning the same amount of hydrogen using 1 tenth of the previously required energy, not to mention the benefit of cleaning the water. I wonder if these anaerobic microorganisms can be genetically engineered...
Almost every wastewater plant you see has a big flame stack in the back where they burn off the excess methane not used for heating the biomass or the building. It seems to work quite well, so why don't we just convert that to electricity or put it in gas mains?
Is this process inherently more efficient in producing hydrogen instead?
I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
Metrics are a tricky beast. Does it require more electricity or less electricity to produce a fuel that will produce an amount of electricity? In other words, does it harness the biological forces for electricity or is it still a negative gain?
Totally missing from the article, and the abstract:
Does the process produce as much fuel as is necessary to fuel the process? More? Less?
What's that you say? The article cleary states that this process is cheaper than the old process?
Great! But is it cheap *enough*?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/ Please stop spreading misinformation. Hydrogen is not a viable fuel source. It is a waste of time, money, and energy. It could be likened to the 'cars of the future' of the 50s. Please stop acting like 1950's corn balls. It would make my quality of life better... Thanks in advance. SnowB http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/
Whoops! Misread that headline.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
If this scales, and somebody can build a cost-competitive box that takes wastewater, bacteria, and a little power in, and puts hydrogen and clean water out, that may well solve one of the biggest problems of transitioning to an H2 economy - the distribution network. Every cow/pig/chicken farmer in the world could become his own fuel station!
Brandishing Dangerous Logic
Environmental engineers at Penn State University and a research scientist at Ion Power Inc. have created an electrically-assisted microbial fuel cell that can be used to produce hydrogen from organic material.
Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.
And how can you make this assumption. TFA said nothing about ONE electron. It could have been dozens or millions of electrons for every useful hydrogen atom produced. Somehow you're describing some sort of pump to circulate reaction products. Nothing says mechanical pumps move one reaction-product-per-electron, and nothing says your elaborate pump does either.
luv
-AC
I didn't get it either, Bacteria produce methane as a waste product. The only thing I could think of is somehow they are grabing the hydrogen during the methane production. However, the the methyl carbocations would be so acidic that the bacteria would be killed by their own waste. Not to mention that product is virtually impossible to make. maybe the are using somekind of enzyme to modify the waste products so that H2, and something else is made -- mabey Formaldahyde and H2. Who knows.
So go cower in your tinfoil lined basement, shut the fuck up, and let the men invent the future, you whiny little pussy.
Volts x Amps = Watts.
Electricity is measured in watts. That is why your electric bill is measured in watts. (and not volts.)
The article did not tell us enough to determine whether there had indeed been a boost in the ideal efficiency of hydrogen production.
If it had said 1 watt and 1 lb of lawn clippings had been used by the microbes to store 1 kilowatt hour's worth of hydrogen then that would be pretty interesting. For those who care.
"0.25 volts" could be measuring 0.25 volts at 30 amps or at 1000 amps. The article didn't mention amps. And even if it had, it didn't tell us how much hydrogen was generated. Nor did it tell us what percent efficiency the reaction had been. Nor did it give us a comparison between microbial hydrogen production's efficiency and that of standard electrical electrolysis.
Anyhow, perhaps there was a genuine breakthrough, but the article doesnt describe enough to get me excited.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
So basically its a 0.25 volt cost atom produced.
That's wonderful. Now, 0.25 volts at how many AMPS??
Volts and Amps mean nothing without the other. Give me the number of Watts (Volts * Amps = Watts) per (pick a unit of Hydrogen) and I'll be much happier.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
I'm still waiting on the Mr. Fusion.
Yeah, hydrogen is a farce to keep our attention off more immediate solutions to the problem. While I agree fuel cell research is interesting for other reasons. The truth is hydrogen is very easy to get from a nuclear reactor, either by electrolysis, or other means. Hydrogen fuel cells are getting better but their are huge issues in many areas, I agree a car is far off at least 100 years if ever it becomes viable. But fuel cells have other valuable uses but compared to conventional automobiles they are inefficient given the methods used to gain hydrogen other than getting it from natural gas a power source in its own right. The conversion from some other source to hydrogen to electricity to kinetic energy is highly inefficient. Nowhere near the efficiency of a diesel electric hybrid, using biodiesel built of engineered materials.
The truth is the solution to our problems comes in the form of more efficient mass transportation systems, more efficient cars and DIESEL yes DIESEL as the EUROPEANS have been pushing since the 1970's.
Slashdot is not a news site. It is a news aggregation and community site.
I think you meant to say it is a press-release aggregation and community site.
[
and Congress might actually produce some useful output...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
If you go burn hydrogen you get h20. You still get the NOx stuff too. There's nothing magic about hydrogen except that it is all buzzwordy.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...but a review written last year. Lame.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
the Watt is a unit of power, not a unit of energy exchanged. The Joule is (although most electric utilities will bill you a number of *Watt-Hours*, which is homogeneous to joules but gives less scary numbers).
Next, if you're trying to so some science, try looking up a unit called 'kilogram' to measure the mass of your lawn clippings.
Why isn't the hydrogen and helium produced at nuclear waste sites harvested and used commercially. Especially the Helium. It's my understanding that eventually we'll run out of helium since it's extracted from oil wells, being the product of long years of radioactive materials releasing alpha particles.
Would it be excessivly expensive to harvest the stuff from nuclear waste sites? They have to have some kind of allowance for offgassing due to the buildup of flammable hydrogen. Why not build somthing to sit at the offgas vents and collect Hydrogen and helium?
Of course IANANE (I am not a nuclear engineer)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
This quite old "news" seem somehow related:0 8/221212&tid=216
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/
Electrolysis of water is usually NOT done with distilled / deionized water, but with rather concentrated KOH solution.
Ah... here's the cause of the confusion. What we have here is 0.25 electronvolts per hydrogen atom produced. The electronvolt is a well-known quantity of energy commonly used in nuclear and particle physics, and 0.25 eV is about 4 x 10^-20 J. Multiplying by Avogadro's Constant, that comes to about 24,000 joules per gram of hydrogen, as you said, and I'll take your word for it on the rest.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
One more step towards Mr. Fusion becoming a reality!
The blurb is talking about protons that need to be reduced to make hydrogen, so it's only natural to assume that the input electricity all goes into reducing the protons to hydrogen, at one electron per hydrogen atom.
Incorrect: you want a number of joules per unit of hydrogen. If it was watts, you'd get a unit of hydrogen per unit time.
As it is, it's 0.25 electronvolts per hydrogen atom. Unit of energy per unit of output gas. Happy?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
glossary scientific unit names:
1 amp = 1 Coulomb per second
1 watt = 1 Joule per second
1 gram = 1 Mole of hydrogen
See it was all written there on the page.
Yes Apparently. You must have slept through the part where an electronVolt is defined as a unit of energy.
And I thought I did well in physics.
No that was in your dream while you slept.
Garlic pills work well, too. "No odor from breath or pores!" said the bottle. They didn't mention the other possibility...good lord, that was rank.
Thanks for the salient data; it's definitely what the reporters should have included. But inquiring minds still want to know: is that a 20% gain on energy input, or a 20% loss??
Assuming you're right, using that number we can compare the cost of getting energy from hydrogen obtained via this method vs. the cost of using the energy without going through this method (in other words, its efficiency).
24000 joules per gram means 150 grams per kWh. A quick google search says H2 is good for 39kWh/kg, so with that 1kWh you'd get .15kg of H2 which in turn gives you 5.85kWh of energy out. huh?
I'd appreciate someone doublechecking my work!
The ScienceDaily article mentions "...when the bacteria eat biomass..." - is that where the majority of the energy is coming from? If so I find it amazing that they hardly touched on this.
If I'd said "1 watt-hour" and "a lb of lawn clippings at earth's sea level," (pre global warming) that would have been a more precise description of the hypothetical case described.
Meanwhile the point I was making remains untouched. My point was that the article didn't provide the right information to warrant too much excitement about the new method of hydrogen production.
It's too bad about your "-1 tone," or more people would have read your informative amending post. Your factual correction was appropriate. The hostility was not.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer