Plants created the hydrocarbons which are polluting the world. Now they’re about to provide the hydrogen, without the carbons. Scientists have duplicated the photosynthetic processes of algae.
Using nanotechnology, with a platinum catalyst,
they’ve produced hydrogen. Algae are the simplest plants. They reproduce in trillions on a few photovolts of sunlight. As clean energy goes, including production processes, it can’t get a lot cleaner than this.
Professor of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology at UT Knoxville Barry Bruce successfully isolated the photosynthetic processes of various species of algae. Using the platinum catalyst, these materials can produce a “steady supply” of hydrogen.
The importance of hydrogen as a fuel is that it’s one of the few possible sources which readily combusts and readily forms part of the natural cycle. One of the ramifications of the new process is that it frees up industry from dependency on hydrocarbons as a source of hydrogen. Ironically, the world’s most polluting and the world’s cleanest fuels, in combinations, are still subject to the fossil fuel industry.
This is “high temperature” algae, thermophilic species which can handle temperatures up to 131F or 55 Celsius. The temperature barrier has previously been a problem for using photosynthesis as an energy source. Interestingly, the process became up to 10 times more efficient as the heat rose.
This useful,intelligent bit of thinking potentially goes much further than producing hydrogen. The harnessing of a source of catalytic action of this kind in plants could produce a range of easily renewable sources of materials.
Plants are extremely efficient energy converters. Their tissues, too, can support complex highly chemical processes. This may be the beginning of a Green Revolution that even the optimists never considered.
It's also an interestingly appropriate vindication of the role nanotechnology might play in biologically based production of practically any industrial materials. This is an active process, and a complex one. It hasn't been done before, and it wasn't easy.
The human race has spent a long time imitating natural production processes, and doing it inefficiently. Nano is extremely efficient, in terms of quantities of materials, use of space, and business economics. Added to natural processes, the link to Nature's scale of production capabilities may be closer than anyone thought.
