Scientists use sunlight to make liquid fuel
Daniel Nocera became an instant celebrity in renewable energy circles
in 2011 when he invented the artificial leaf.
More an idea than an actual leaf, the Harvard professor came up with
a way to harness sunlight with silicon to split water into oxygen and
hydrogen. From there, it was theorized, it was just a step further to
create hydrogen fuel cells.It seemed too good to be true. Finally,
someone had found a way to use the power of the sun to produce a clean
fuel source. But there was a slight problem. The infrastructure for a
hydrogen-fueled economy didn't exist then and, to this day, still is
nowhere close to becoming a reality.So, Nocera went back to the drawing
board.
Taking his artificial leaf idea, he teamed up with several other
researchers at Harvard including Jeffery Way and Pamela Silver. They
took the hydrogen from the photovoltaic cells of the artificial leaf and
fed it to the soil bacterium Ralstonia eutropha. The microbe combined
the hydrogen with carbon dioxide from another source and, for the first
time, produced liquid fuel."This is sort of the next step moving beyond
hydrogen to make a fuel that is integratable with our current
infrastructure," Nocera, a co-author on a study that appeared in the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , told .
"I can't convince an entire society to change over their
infrastructure to use hydrogen," he said. "Instead of fighting it, this
is sort of going with the flow to so speak." But while thrilled with his
team's discovery, Nocera admitted they still face a challenge of
improving the efficiency of the process so that fuel could be produced
commercially. Currently, they are only able to convert 1 percent of the
sunlight into liquid fuel, which falls far short of the 10 percent
efficiency needed to establish a viable, sustainable solar fuel
industry.Nocera is part of a band of scientists trying to crack the nut
that is solar fuels.If successful, they would produce a fuel that gives
the United States energy independence, helps combat global warming by
finding a replacement for fossil fuels and avoids the concerns of
biofuels, which often compete with food for land.
Among those investing heavily in solar fuel technology is the
Department of Energy, which is spending $1.22 million over five years on
the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. Since 2010, the center
has been the nation's largest research program dedicated to the
development of an artificial solar-fuel generation technology.But it was
another DOE program that helped inspire the latest breakthrough. Called
the electrofuels program at the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency,
it is tasked with using microorganisms to create liquid fuel for
transportation.
Out of the program came the microbe used in the latest research to
produce liquid fuel."The idea was, could you take a bug like Ralstonia
eutropha and mess around with its guts, do a bunch of genetic
engineering so that bug will take hydrogen, carbon dioxide and make
liquid fuel," said Eric J. Toone, who founded the electrofuels program
but is now the director of the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Initiative.
"When you really get this worked out and do this at scale you can do
it more efficiently than plants do it and it doesn't compete with
resources we use to make food," he said. "It doesn't use land and water,
those scarce resources." But not everyone is convinced that this
approach makes much sense.Stephen Mayfield, director of the California
Center for Algae Biotechnology, said he saw this more like a "solution
looking for a problem."
"I can't tell you how many studies start off by defining the problems
as something like this paper has: We need to make liquid fuel from
electricity from [photovoltaic] cells! So they solve the problem of
turning electrons into biomass (already done many times, by the way,
using that exact bug) and then exclaim, eureka, we have solved the
problem!" he said. "Our problem is not that we have too much H2 and O2
sitting around generated by PV cells that we need to convert it to
liquid fuels. Our problem is that fossil fuels were cheap so we burned a
boat load of them and now we have problems with our climate."
Moreover, Mayfield questioned whether this process would ever truly
be carbon neutral."It takes energy to make the PV cells, it takes energy
to build the fermentor to grow the bacteria, it takes energy to grow the
bacteria a lot, it takes energy to purify the fuel, it takes nutrients
like nitrogen and phosphate to feed the bacteria, " he said.
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