Posted on 07/08/2008 6:58:10 AM PDT by Red Badger
An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. Scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics.
When members of the Russian Academy of Sciences isolated a rare archaeal microorganism that breaks down cellulose and produces hydrogen, Biswarup Mukhopadhyay, an assistant professor with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, saw an opportunity to open a door for development of a cellulose-based high-temperature hydrogen production process. “Hydrogen can be easily converted to electrical and mechanical energy without any production of carbon dioxide,” said Mukhopadhyay, whose lab specializes in very high temperature or hyperthermophilic archaea and in energy production.
Elizaveta Bonch-Osmolovskaya and her colleagues at the Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered the rare archaeon that can chew up cellulose and exhale hydrogen. They found Desulfurococcus fermentans in the Uzon Caldera on the Kamchatka Peninsula, an isolated spit of land in eastern Siberia that is full of volcanoes and their remnants. D. fermentans degrades cellulose from the higher plants that fall in the caldera. Meanwhile, this renegade archaeon’s four closest relatives do not degrade cellulose or make hydrogen, Bonch-Osmolovskaya wrote in the February 2005 edition of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. Like most such organisms, these relatives reduce sulfur to hydrogen sulfide (think rotten eggs).
“Since hydrogen blocks the growth for most fermenting archaea, they rarely produce hydrogen,” said Mukhopadhyay. “But D. fermentans is not bothered by hydrogen. We want to discover why
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Hydrogen ping!.........
Learning to control the mechanisms of life will have a bigger impact than controlling the atom....X1000.
But isn't water vapor an even bigger greenhouse gas?
The high temperature part of this may still mean that production of hydrogen still consumes more energy that the hydrogen product provides.
If the scientists are good, the by-product will be beer.
When the cellulose is broken down to produce the hydrogen, what happens to the carbon? For every Kilogram of hydrogen in cellulose, there is 7.2 kg of carbon.
Allow me to be the first to link this to the Tunguska Event of 1908.
I’d assume that the organism uses the carbon for building its own structure reproducing itself.............
Hydrogen bubbles in your beer?.........NO SMOKING!................
Well, they might be able to use the hydrogen to make beer fizzy, without carbonation. However, I suspect the desire is to produce large quantities of hydrogen for fuel cells.
Bingo!
Now suppose we produce Hydrogen by the quadzillion cubic foot per year. Some of that Hydrogen is going to escape, and go into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and even be lost into space, since it is so light. Then the oxygen that would normally be bound to that hydrogen will be left sitting around with nothing to do.
So, what is going to have a greater effect on life and the environment, elevated inert CO2 or hightly reactive Oxygen?
Did anyone figure the effect of all that new water vapor?
This guy's name even sounds like a digestive process....
Wow.
This is a highly significant finding.
Shhhh!!! You'll spoil all the fun!
Isn't water vapor the mother of all greenhouse gasses?
I would not make such an assumption.
It seems to me an article claiming a reduction in Carbon Dioxide output via this method would at least give a clue where the carbon goes.
If consumed by the organism, does it grow forever larger? Or does it cycle and die off. If it dies, what happens to the carbon as the organism breaks down.
This is the same fallacy of using trees as a carbon sink. Only if the lumber is harvest and forever kept intact is the carbon contained. If the wood eventually rots, the carbon is released as Carbon Dioxide.
The source of the Oxygen in cellulose is first pulled from the air and water. It is only cycling that which already exists.
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