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Hydrogen-Emitting Microbe Examined
Concerned Onlooker wrote to mention an article at Science Daily discussing a microbe that lives in volcanic environments, which emits Hydrogen gas as a waste product. "As the world increasingly considers hydrogen as a potential biofuel, technology could benefit from having the genomes of such microbes. 'C. hydrogenoformans is one of the fastest-growing microbes that can convert water and carbon monoxide to hydrogen," remarks TIGR evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, senior author of the PLoS Genetics study. "So if you're interested in making clean fuels, this microbe makes an excellent starting point.'"
So, while you might be quick to think "we still need to burn fossil fuels to produce this hydrogen", the point is, currently it's a WASTE material.
That's in the eye of the beholder. Solid oxide fuel cells can use carbon monoxide as fuel just as well as hydrogen. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance. The guy who first prepared it in 1776 by heating ZnO and coke even thought he had made hydrogen because the blue flame it produces is so similar. I don't have numbers for CO and H2 handy, and if I did I'd be too lazy to check, but I'd suspect that burning a mole of CO releases more energy than burning a mole of H2, just by virtue of the fact that this bacterium makes its living converting H2O + CO -> CO2 + H2.
I assume they're carbon based life forms
Of course they are. Carbon monoxide is a fairly energy rich substance and is surprisingly inert. It kills you by forming a stable complex with the hemoglobin in your blood. It adheres to binding sites meant for oxygen (cyanide has an even greater affinity) and ruins the entire hemoglobin molecule. Bacteria generally have no use for oxygen binding and transport proteins, and do not use hemoglobin or any other heme-containing protein (except for nitrogen-fixing bacteria), so in general one would not expect them to care about carbon monoxide- although being able to eat it is impressive.