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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."
Quick, block and ban this article before the boss sees it.
If he had his way he will fill the water cooler with vinegar to try to increase our productivity.
(If you are working at EA I'm afraid its too late)
liqbase
This reminds me a lot of some Asimov books. So, are we getting there ?
This is absolutely horrible, and I demand it be stopped! These researchers are advocating the mass enslavement of innocent microbes. These microbes will be forced to work nonstop on Hydrogen production from the moment they are born to the moment they are finally literally worked to death. Multiple generations of microbes will toil endlessly in these bacterial concentration camps, with no relief in sight!
We must stop the senseless abuse of microbial rights! We must fight for the smallest and most vulnerable among us! Stop this horror now!
I have a high hydrocarbon yield from beer. Does that help?
Cabbage consumption increases yield dramatically!
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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.
The 80% figure is impressive. But beware of the efficiency numbers they quote. This isn't the full fuel cycle. You've still got to compress and distribute hydrogen, which takes a lot (gases take lots of work to compress). For a vehicle, burning it isn't too efficient maybe 30-40%, and fuel cells aren't quite there yet.
Additionally, with any kind of electrolytically-driven process like this one, there's a HUGE efficiency penalty once you increase the flow rates to be anything substantial. And you need to, because otherwise the amount of hydrogen produced per fuel cell area would be tiny. And then, at that point, you've got the problem of lots of carbon to dispose of. Guess what -- this working microbial fuel cell takes C,H,O in as vinegar or cellulose, and outputs H2 and CO2! Do you really call that 'carbon neutral' as a fuel source? It's still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, just less of it per Joule of useful energy.
Still, this is a great direction for them to keep going... there are very interesting things you can do with hydrogen, even to extend existing liquid fuel stocks (i.e. crude oil to gasoline) by hydrogenation. (Much cheaper than building lots of fuel cells... but not carbon-neutral.)
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Just what we need. An economy powered by bacteria farts.
Anyone questioning their flippant use of Efficiency. They mix two modes together. The efficiency energy wise and the efficiency molecule wise. We are 91 % efficient at getting the hydrogen out of the mixture, vs we are able to extract 91% of the energy from the Hydrogen we created that we used to create the Vinegar or Cellulose + the energy needed to maintain the bacteria. Hopefully the bacteria maintain themselves and don't start converting me into Hydrogen.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
Sure, they'll have it rough for a while. Then they'll form the Organization of Hydrogen Electrolysing Microbes and we'll all be screwed to the wall.
Considering the byproduct is CO2 we would have to come up with a solution to that problem as well. Granted it is better than having CO2 spewed from each tailpipe concetrated at a single powerplant and in theory contained in some way but for what use?
In America, researchers apply a jolt of electricity to their wastewater bacteria. In Soviet Russia, the brew tases you! Don't Tase me, brew!
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
bringing the resulting system up to better than 80 percent efficiency when considering all energy inputs and outputs. (emphasis added)
So like, dudes, where does that other 20% of the energy go? The Phantom Zone? No, wait, that'd be an energy output too.
Maybe the system just gets heavier.
-- Alastair
When there is talk of the difficulty in compressing the hydrogen to store in usable form, could this process not be done deep under the sea where the great pressures would then compress the gas for you? Just a thought...
The referenced article is at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website.
fava
Why not just burn the hydogen onsite for electricity generation? Then you don't have to spend energy compressing or moving the hydrogen. Just put the new electricity on the grid. We'll all be driving plug in electric cars before the portable hydrogen economy ever gets going.
In order to get the energy back out of it you convert it back into water, or if you leave it alone it will do it itself in the atmosphere, if you want to be afraid of loosing a gas, be sad for helium. It mostly non-reactive and too light for our atmosphere, all those helium balloons of the world are loosing helium to space, with little to no replenishment, and none that's effectively used.
Here's one possible solution:
Bubble it into water in which you release into shallow man-made ponds in order to accelerate algae growth. Harvest the resultant algae, squeeze the oil out of it and make biodiesel. Put the leftovers from that into a fermenter and get what amount of ethanol you can from it. Then dump whatever is leftover from that onto fields to decompose and enrich the soil.
Yes, you are eventually liberating the carbon again in multiple paths, but it comes down to whether you want to actually sequester the carbon, or are willing to recycle it through a number of diversified fuels as many times as possible.
Funniest thing I've seen it the last two weeks, hands down. I'm laughing so hard, I'm pissing myself...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Just a thought here, but once this system reached a one-to-one ratio with our current fossil-fuel usage, it may only take a single asshat to engineer and deploy a virus capable of crippling an entire country.
Somehow, I doubt a city/state/country-wide quarantine on vehicles (and other devices) using such a system would be a trivial task.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Even if we converted 500 million barrels of water per day into pure hydrogen and launched it into space directly it would take over 40 million years before we ran out.
/365
3.26x10^20 gallons of water on earth
divided by
(5.00x10^8 x 42) gallons used per day
~42 million.
Not on my list of priorities to worry about.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
My guess is that we have enough H in our oceans to keep us going for quite a while. If somebody asked me which molecules I'd be happiest "wasting" in the pursuit of energy, I'd probably go for H2O. We have lots of it, as long as whatever we're doing with it also provides us enough energy to efficiently extract it from sea water.
Anybody want to run the numbers to figure out what percentage of our water we'd be losing per year to sustain our current level of energy use assuming the efficiencies quoted in the article and JimboFBX's suggested 1% hydrogen loss?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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)
Hiya,
I'm fairly experienced with these things, so I figure I'll offer up what it looks like to me in terms of efficiency.
The 80% number is the ratio of the energy contained in the hydrogen gas to the energy contained in the acetic acid plus the energy used in the form of electricity. However, the stated claim that this is more efficient than ethanol is not really justified based on the actual paper (which I read).
While it may well be better than ethanol (most things are), if we calculate out the actual efficiency of conversion between ethanol and hydrogen typically reported in the literature (Kugai and Deluga are the best papers IMO) we get around -165kJ/mol theoretical energy loss per mol of ethanol converted to hydrogen and carbon dioxide. For comparison, ethanol contains about 1145kJ/mol of energy to start with. That gives an efficiency of around 86%.
Of course, the "hidden" (not very well) cost of ethanol is that it takes massive amounts of energy to produce before you get to the stage of conversion into hydrogen. In the end, you get something between -30% and 30% efficiency converting seeds into ethanol (one well-known paper reported an actual energy loss, ignoring the energy from the sun of course, which will always mean an energy loss in conversion). This is not very good. However, this sort of analysis was *not* done in this paper, and wasn't claimed to have been done in the paper. It is very likely that this process is better than ethanol (most things seem to be), but the summary (and press release) are overstating the case, unless there is information they have that wasn't included in the actual paper.
And to clarify, carbon-neutral does not mean it produces zero CO2. It means that all the CO2 produced at one point came from the atmosphere instead of from fossil fuels. As long as the process is net energy positive, you can use the extra energy to fulfil the energy needs of the process, and remove the need for fossil fuels.
Methane from natural gas is the primary hydrogen source for fixing atmospheric nitrogen to form ammonia. And that in turn is the primary contribution of fossil fuel deposits to fertilizer.
I asked my astronomy teacher about this in high school, apparently hydrogen is so reactive that it'll combine with atmospheric O2 before it gets high enough in the atmosphere to escape. Helium on the other hand will eventually leave earth as it has escape velocity at the temperatures at the highest level of the atmosphere.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
RTFA. This process has nothing to do with electrolysis, they're converting cellulose (loads of carbon) and glucose (C6H12O6) into hydrogen. Neither of those are water.
If we can manipulate microbes to produce hydrogen in record amounts, can we manipulate some that take IN CO2 in impacting amounts as well?
Regarding the tag...what ever happened to that guy?
Max.
To do that you need the infrastructure to distribute and dispense it. It's never been an issue of making enough H2, but of getting it into the cars.
That is all.
That's easy. You just distill the H2 into a liquid and mix it with something like xanthan gum to make it gelatinous.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Precisely. Thank you.
-- Alastair
until the microbes form a union. Numbering in the Bazillions they will have huge political clout !
Its not the years, its the mileage
You're forgetting, these days
War is Peace
FREEDOM is SLAVERY
Ignorance is Strength
Thank you for your comment, because I had (and voiced here previously) concerns on new technology trend that could leave our ecosystem robbed of water and with too high oxygen level after a while.
Hmm, does that also mean that we could "treat" low-altitude ozone (photochemical smog) pollution by releasing small amounts (controlled concentration to avoid build up and explosions) of hydrogen near the sources (photocopier/laser printer rooms, arcing electric machinery, streets with high traffic) or near "victims" (into our immediate environment, e.g. rooms, offices, etc.)?
If we were at the point that we were burning large amounts of H2 for energy, you could just put a condenser on the exhaust and have lots of pretty clean water. You could then use that water for input into the system or for drinking.
You know that is overly simplistic but here is another formula that would also solve the problem.
6,631,110,367 current est population of humans on Earth
If we lauched 500million of them per day into space
it would only take 140 days(accounting for some record birth rates and low Death(on Earth I am assuming the 500mil launched wouldnt likely survive it))
If the sources for the cellulose are fast growing plants like Hemp, then it *is* carbon neutral. (Seriously, dude, you just have to think ahead just 1 more step.)
"adding a small jolt of electricity, they increased the hydrogen yield to a new record for this type of system" Just wot we all need; a jolt to the nads to increase productivity..
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
Efficiencey:
The original post said it took into account all energy inputs and outputs to come up with the 80% efficiency. That simply means they looked at all the energy going into the system and coming out of the system and 80% of the energy coming in was converted to useful work, not waste heat. If they didn't look at 'all' the energy going into the system (i.e. it was done in sunlight), the 80% figure might not represent the actual efficiency for this conversion.
Yes, but the hydrogen is used to fuel your car / transported from point A to point B where my concern comes from.
Thanks for the responses, I never thought about it combining with O2 in the atmosphere on its own. I suppose there is enough O2 that H2 + 202 = 2H20, rather than having any of it escape.