14 DAY TRIAL // It is pretty clear that, in this rhythm, very few of us will have any money to buy petrol. That's why the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is trying to develop new means through which chemically manipulated algae generate renewable fuels, such as hydrogen gas for example.
"We believe there is a fundamental advantage in looking at the production of hydrogen by photosynthesis as a renewable fuel. Right now, ethanol is being produced from corn, but generating ethanol from corn is a thermodynamically much more inefficient process," says senior chemist at DoE, David Tiede.
There are some species of algae, the unicellular plant type, which can create small amounts of hydrogen gas with the help of an enzyme called hydrogenase. It is believed that the algae use this enzyme to remove the reducing equivalents excess which is generated in high light conditions. However, this process is hardly beneficial for the organism.
Tiede argues that he can find a way through which this enzyme can be used to create hydrogen gas during the photosynthesis process and maybe even to produce some amounts of oxygen. "Biology can do it, but it's making it do is at 5-10 percent yield, that's the problem. What we would like to do is take that catalyst out of hydrogenase and put into the photosynthetic protein framework. We are fortunate to have professor Thomas Rauchfuss as a collaborator from the University of Illonois at Champaign-Urbana who is an expert on the synthesis of hydrogenase active site mimics," said Tiede.
Opposed to corn biofuel, algae biofuel can be grown almost anywhere, regardless of the climate, food, or soil fertility. Alternatively, harvesting algae is much simpler than harvesting corn. "If you have terrestrial plants like corn, you are restricted to where you could grow them. There is a problem now with biofuel crops competing with food crops because they are both using the same space. Algae provide an alternative, which can be grown in a closed photobioreactor analogous to a microbial fermentor that you could move any place," added Tiede.