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Any hope for relief from soaring gas prices was dashed by hurricane Katrina. But as this ScienCentral News video explains, scientists say a future replacement may be found in an unlikely place — your local pond.
Pond Scum Promise
Picture a fish-shaped submarine wandering past Red Sea coral, later surfacing to Antarctic ice. It's easier to do that today than in 1870, when Jules Verne penned 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Then, there were no submarines, let alone one like Verne's Nautilus, powered by electricity from seawater. The hunt for what Verne imagined, a renewable, environmentally friendly fuel, continues. Scientists are even looking in places you'd least expect, your local pond, where common algae tap sunlight to produce hydrogen gas.
But first, his team has to jump a major hurdle. Like all plants, algae produce hydrogen along with oxygen when converting sunlight into energy during a process called photosynthesis. "Oxygen is an inhibitor of the enzyme hydrogenase," a protein that drives the chemical reaction in cells that allows them to start producing hydrogen, explains Seibert.
So he and University of Illinois researchers are using supercomputers to generate simulations that help reveal how the protein behaves and how to unlock ways to block oxygen from going where the enzyme is. They've already discovered two pathways oxygen takes to get to hydrogenase. "The core problem is that there's a hole or a channel, in the protein, in the hydrogenase, that allows oxygen to get into the enzyme and destroy it," Seibert says. "What we're doing is… trying to button up that pathway."
Discover Magazine reporters describe harnessing pond scum in this way as "genetically hijacking photosynthesis." If, as Seibert imagines, his mutant algae were shipped to large farms, what would happen if the organisms escaped into the wild? Environmental catastrophe? "The answer is very simple," says Seibert. "To survive in the wild under limited resources, organisms have to compete with each other and if you have algae that are doing normal photosynthesis, fixing carbon dioxide and making sugars, and using this stored energy to reproduce and make more algae, you're going to have a successful organism. If you have an organism in the wild that is using all its energy to make hydrogen and thereby can't store materials to reproduce it will disappear."
Presently, we generate nearly ten million tons of hydrogen by other means, through reforming natural gas, says Seibert. But that still leaves us tied to fossil fuels. If we can produce hydrogen by using renewable resources, like algae, it might liberate us. Here's how: Imagine increasing hydrogen production from today's levels to ten times that amount, or 100 million tons. Seibert says we'll have enough hydrogen to power our light vehicle fleet, about 236 million passenger vehicles, assuming we drive fuel cell cars that run on hydrogen — they're already in development. Special bioreactors with rooftops that allow sun to enter would span 10,000 square miles, a space the size of Massachusetts, most likely in the desert southwest where light is plentiful. Pipes would catch the hydrogen and channel it to a pipeline similar to what already exists to transport natural gas, then it's onto your local filling station. Jules Verne would certainly appreciate this kind of imagination.
Back in real time, as storms like Katrina push gas prices up, we're reminded that relying on fossil fuels is to our peril. Says Seibert: "There's not an infinite amount of fossil fuel down there and utilization of fossil fuels produces pollutants, as well as carbon dioxide, which have long-term global change effects. If we were to convert to using hydrogen from a renewable source there would be no pollutants produced. The byproduct of burning hydrogen or using hydrogen in a fuel cell is water."
The U.S. government is inching towards giving more funding to researchers like Seibert. In 2003 the Bush administration earmarked $1.2 billion for hydrogen-fuel research. But for now, the science simply isn't there yet. Seibert admits that in his approach, "we have to improve the efficiencies by at least a factor of ten and perhaps even by a factor of a hundred before a commercially viable system might be considered." That's assuming a few lucky breaks, he says, predicting a different picture in ten to 20 years.
In the meantime, he asks that you consider this plea, "We all have to do our best to conserve what fuels and resources that we have now so that the scientific community has the lead-time to produce these new processes."
So until the promise of the green gunk in pond scum is realized, your greenbacks are likely to keep disappearing at the pump.
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