Biobatteries get hydrogen boost

It’s an old trick in science class to make an LED light glow using a potato as the battery, but bacterial fuel cells and biological batteries have come a long way in recent years. We’ve known for ages that some bacteria and plant enzymes can liberate electrons from bio feedstocks, but it’s been almost impossible to turn those lab experiments into useful devices or energy sources.

Until now. The first signal that a breakthrough was on the horizon emerged in 2023, when Australian scientists isolated an enzyme that efficiently turns ambient hydrogen directly into electricity.

In fact, the hydrogen fuel cellin-a-plant cell could even power up from the minute traces of hydrogen in the atmosphere. Just exposing it to air was sufficient to generate and maintain a tiny charge.

Since then, scientists have used CRISPR cut-and-paste genetic editing tech to refine and improve the enzyme so that it can harvest hydrogen from common sources such as natural gas or biogas, and turn it into usable power. In the past, we had to burn fuels to drive turbines, or waste a lot of power on electrolysis to make hydrogen for fuel cells. Now we can get microbes to turn gas into electricity, naturally.

And the best news is it’s easy to scale up production of this new enzyme. The bacterium that produces it thrives on farm waste, sewage and similar bio feedstocks. Like leftovers from a canning factory. So it’s a winning solution for pollution too.

This will be a game-changer for new energy companies producing biofuels, green hydrogen and fuel cells, cutting out the high costs of handling and transport, and moving to an energyon-demand model instead. As with any new technology, there will be winners and losers, but ultimately we all benefit from cheaper, cleaner and more abundant energy. /First published in Mindbullets on March 23 2023

BIO-ENGINEERING MAKES SUSTAINABILITY SUSTAINABLE 27 July 2027

The past five years have seen a perfect storm of crises in energy, food, industry and the environment.. We were barely over the worst of Covid-19 when Russia’s attack on Ukraine sent Europe — and the world — into a maelstrom of rising prices and short supply. And then the heatwaves of 2022 brought the focus back to climate change.

Of course, sustainability was always about more than the climate; plastic pollution, resource depletion and environmental degradation were equally at crisis levels, and action was urgently needed. Fortunately, the most important resource was abundant: human ingenuity. And there’s nothing like a disaster to spark innovative solutions.

Dozens of scientific start-ups quickly embraced the lucrative opportunities these crises presented, chasing everything from green ammonia to better hydroponics. But a handful of them hit on the ultimate innovation: using nature’s own capacity for sustainability and employing biomimetics and bio-engineering techniques.

Now we have sci-tech companies developing enzymes and bio-agents to reclaim precious metals from electronic waste, including phones and solar panels. Others are eliminating PET plastic pollution with microbes that “eat” plastic bottles and regurgitate chemical feedstocks. Yet another is coaxing microorganisms to turn sunlight and rubbish into diesel and jet fuel. Using genes from marine molluscs, we can make bio-ceramics stronger and lighter than steel or Kevlar.

“This is exciting,” says biotechnologist Kyle Larsen, “because we’re implementing large-scale biofactories using a variety of microbes, not only algae, to convert waste into valuable products.”

With the latest CRISPR geneediting tools, and artificial intelligence to help identify and optimise microbes and enzymes, the applications for bio-engineering are limitless. And because the systems require no mining or crops, they contribute to the circular economy, relying on creation, not extraction.

Putting nature to work — that’s how you make sustainability sustainable! /First published on Mindbullets July 28 2022

Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.

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