BEYOND ALGAE

Getting the Bugs Out, a New Approach to Renewable Fuels
Gayathri Vaidyanathan, April 30, 2010 (NY Times)

"The Geobacter bacterium could be the biofuel-generating machine of the future, producing energy-rich butanol costing as little as $2 per gallon…A project seeking to accomplish this, headed by Derek Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, received $1 million in funding…from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)…[one of] 37 projects receiving $106 million to further their research…

"The Geobacter project is part of a new wave of biofuel generation experiments that feed electricity into tiny critters and generate valuable ‘electrofuels’ as a product…They replace an older generation of research in which the power of photosynthesis is processed into biofuels, either directly from plants like sugar beet or indirectly from organisms such as algae."

The apparatus to perform miracles. (click to enlarge)

[Jeffrey Way, scientist, Wyss Institute/Harvard Medical School:] "This is so novel that it doesn't even have a name, but let's call it a reverse fuel cell…"

"A Harvard project using the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis got about $4 million of the federal stimulus money. It hopes to generate the energy-rich fuel octanol…[O]n a rooftop at UMass, the researchers grow bacteria on the surface of a graphite electrode. A nearby solar panel captures energy and delivers it to the bacteria-laden electrode…"

From Umas via YouTube

"Geobacter and Shewanella are uniquely constructed, in that they generate electricity…[Protein molecules] conduct electricity from inside the bacterium to the outside…[R]esearchers reverse-engineer these [bacteria] to make…[into] tiny fuel cells. A little genetic modification to assemble a photosynthetic pathway within the organism makes them take in carbon dioxide to produce the right-sized fuel, such as butanol or octanol.

"Such engineering is at the frontier of synthetic biology…Even on a sunny day, light-harvesting pigments don't capture light very efficiently. And in the subsequent enzymatic steps of photosynthesis, much of the energy is lost as heat. The efficiency of capture is only about 1 percent…A solar panel is 100 times more efficient at capturing the sunlight…[so] a bacterial system can be used to convert electricity to 'electrofuels.'"