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Microbes Churn Out Hydrogen at Record Rate
FiReaNGeL writes to mention that Penn State Researchers have improved on their original microbial electrolysis cell design bringing the resulting system up to better than 80 percent efficiency when considering all energy inputs and outputs. "By tweaking their design, improving conditions for the bacteria, and adding a small jolt of electricity, they increased the hydrogen yield to a new record for this type of system. 'We achieved the highest hydrogen yields ever obtained with this approach from different sources of organic matter, such as yields of 91 percent using vinegar (acetic acid) and 68 percent using cellulose,' said Logan. In certain configurations, nearly all of the hydrogen contained in the molecules of source material converted to usable hydrogen gas, an efficiency that could eventually open the door to bacterial hydrogen production on a larger scale."
From the PSU Press Release:
"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added to the process," says Logan.
That illustrates just how big the jump in efficiency is here. These bacteria are amazing little energy multipliers. It's quite astonishing!
I got a catholic block.
Hydrogen beats the crap out of batteries as far as energy storage
;)
Not currently it doesn't. Top-of-the-line hydrogen-powered vehicles are about on par, range-wise, with top-of-the-line lithium-ion powered vehicles (for vehicles released this fall, say, compare a Roadster with an Equinox -- both 200 mile range). But they're notably less thermodynamically efficient and have worse performance. Honda has a prototype FCX that they say will be able to get 350 miles by using an undisclosed storage material, but storage materials always raise issues of their own (such as how much energy it takes to get the hydrogen in and out -- thus hurting the thermodynamic efficiency even more), and if you want to count vehicles that don't exist yet... Of course, if your energy source is hydrogen *to begin with*, sure, hydrogen would be a better choice present-day. We'll have to see how each respective technology advances. Personally, I'd rather we be driving largely on grid power instead of trying to store all our energy on the vehicle
Getting this sort of tech as a backyard/rooftop energy generator could be insanely useful
You want them to eat your roof? You did read the article (or even the summary) and realize that these aren't photosynthetic bacteria, right? That will almost certainly come in the future, but that's not what we're dealing with here.
A biological system would (probably) be lower setup than a solar system as well, at least given current tech.
But maintenance can be very tricky. Bacteria mutate, get attacked, and so on. Plus, you need to keep feeding them and removing waste products. This is certainly viable, present-day, in industrial scale applications, but it probably won't scale down very well any time soon.
I will agree with you on one thing:
Wow. And 80% efficiency is pretty damn good, for a line of research that is still pretty primitive.
It sure is.
And I'd like to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat.
I believe the tradition is that carbon neutral means into the air in modern times.
When you burn fossil fuels, you release carbon into the air that was not fixed into the fuel in modern times. So you release 'new' carbon into the air. Carbon positive.
When you burn these fuels, you re-release carbon into the air which was fixed in the last year. This is carbon neutral (no change to atmospheric carbon over short time horizon).
If you take some plants that have fixed some carbon and bury them under a continental fold, that's carbon negative.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
There are a few reasons to not worry about this:
(1) The volume of the earths oceans is enough that if we were destroying water in them at the rate at which we burn oil, it would take a few hundred million years to run out. We wouldn't be destroying it at that rate (I would guess, since you can make a lot of hydrogen from just a little water), but even if we were we have a while to figure out a solution.
(2) Hydrogen and ozone react really well -- the hydrogen wouldn't make it out of the atmosphere before it got bound back up as water.
The down side of (2) is that we could damage the ozone layer with leaked hydrogen (http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/effects_climate.html)