SUPER BUG: Geobacter could be the biofuel-generating machine of the future, producing energy-rich butanol costing as little as $2 per gallon.
Image: PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY
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 today from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). It was not even the largest grant, with 37 projects receiving $106 million to further their research in this second round of funding.
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.
"This is so novel that it doesn't even have a name, but let's call it a reverse fuel cell," said Jeffrey Way, a scientist at Harvard Medical School's Wyss Institute. 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.
'Magic' done on a rooftop
"With standard photosynthesis, there are many steps along the way, and you need arable land," said Lovley. "This you can run on a rooftop."
And so, on 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.
Geobacter and Shewanella are uniquely constructed, in that they generate electricity. The bacteria make long protein tubes that jut out of their blob-shaped bodies. In the middle of these tubes are protein molecules that conduct electricity from inside the bacterium to the outside.
When researchers reverse-engineer these tubes to make them take up electrons from the graphite electrodes, the bacteria become 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, a field that aims to create novel biological systems from scratch.
"If that sounds like magic, it kinda is," said Way from the Wyss Institute.
This is true, especially in comparison with photosynthetic energy capture. 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.
Zapping bacteria to create 'electrofuels'
A solar panel is 100 times more efficient at capturing the sunlight, according to Lovley. Using this input energy, a bacterial system can be used to convert electricity to "electrofuels."
The funding under ARPA-E is for three years, which places the researchers on a tight timeline to bring their projects to fruition before the money runs out, said Wyss.
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8 Comments
Add CommentThis bacteria sounds too proficient and not costly enough...it will not be allowed to come to market. If they can stagnate a high performance battery, can you imagine what they will do to a high performance bacteria that you can grow on your roof?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhat HP battery?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's see, if they can make fuel for less than $2.00 per gallon, their getting close. All they have to do is get the cost of it down to about one quarter of that, down to about 50 cents, then after the taxes are added so that the roadways and other public services such as police, maintenance, emergency service, that we expect in order to use our transportation system will be adequately supported, it will be finally competitive, provided nobody is making any profit from it, except the guys with the algae....hmmmmm?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this$2 per gallon?! Americans - your fuel is really cheap if you think that is four times more than it should be. I live in Manchester in the UK, currently 1 litre (around 0.2 gallons) is £1.20 (that is $1.83 to you) at the pump. That is 17.5% VAT (purchase tax) plus another 57p/litre fuel tax so the actual cost of the fuel is about 45p/litre so $2 per gallon before tax is about the same as petrol costs now in the UK.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIan, consider what the actual cost is to extract oil from the field...pennies, really. I'd love to see algae do that, because really, I'd love to see an end to dirty oil being used as fuel. It's such usefull stuff and such a pity to simply burn it .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<<< The funding under ARPA-E is for three years, which places the researchers on a tight timeline to bring their projects to fruition before the money runs out, said Wyss. >>>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis makes it sound like they just want more funding.
Photosynthesis cannot be that inefficient, as it is the best method that billions of years of evolution has come up with. It is also very robust and can be used in many climate zones. Biomass pyrolysis is for the moment the only economically viable method of extracting CO2 from the air and converting it into bioenergies. Indeed the technique will soon be adopted and mass-produced by chinese industrialists. See www.eprida.com for full details.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo I gather we'd use electricity to grow bacteria, and either solar or coal to make electricity, so as we run out of petroleum, and don't have enough solar to go around, we've found another reason for burning coal. Am I missing something? I tend to think any energy production or conservation gains we make will just be an excuse for continuing to grow the economy.
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