H2 Production via Biology
In fermentation-based systems, microorganisms, such as bacteria, break down organic matter to produce hydrogen. The organic matter can be refined sugars, raw biomass sources such as corn stover, and even wastewater. Because no light is required, these methods are sometimes called "dark fermentation" methods...
Why Is This Pathway Being Considered? Biomass is an abundant domestic resource, and many microbes have evolved to efficiently break down biomass to produce hydrogen and other products. Fermentation has already been used as an industrial technology to generate biofuels and other products, and many of the challenges to scaling up systems have been addressed for different products, allowing hydrogen researchers to focus on the challenges unique to hydrogen production. MEC-based systems have the potential to produce hydrogen from resources that otherwise can’t be used for fuel production, and could reduce the large amount of energy normally needed for wastewater treatment while producing a valuable fuel in the form of hydrogen. These two pathways can be combined to maximize the hydrogen yield from the starting biomass feedstock.
Designer bacteria could fuel the future with cheap hydrogen.. Macquarie synthetic biologists have made a breakthrough in renewable energy production by creating genetically-engineered sugar-loving bacteria that can produce on-demand, zero-emission hydrogen fuel..
The genetic engineering of the microbes is partly funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Australian Government’s Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and supported by industry partners BOC Australia and Bioplatforms Australia.
'This is renewable energy that uses a two-part system; first, the bacteria consume the sugar and as it digests the sugar it produces the hydrogen gas,' [researcher] explains...
Farming bacteria to produce hydrogen also has economic and environmental advantages – in the right setting, bacteria rapidly multiply, they are cheap to create and don’t need much space...
The University team has used genetic engineering approaches to change the DNA of certain strains of E. coli bacteria to produce hydrogen from sugars.
By accelerating the metabolism of the bacteria and finding the optimum conditions for production, they have produced a strain that makes hydrogen at rates higher than any previous published rates of bacterial bio-hydrogen.
There is an evergrowing demand for environment-friendly processes to synthesize ammonia (NH3) from atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Although diazotrophic N2 fixation represents an undeniably “green” process of NH3 synthesis, the slow reaction rate makes it less suitable for industrially meaningful large-scale production. Here, we report the photoinduced N2 fixation using a hybrid system composed of colloidal quantum dots (QDs) and aerobic N2-fixing bacteria, Azotobacter vinelandii
Researchers have engineered a common soil bacteria to steadily secrete ammonia... One day, these novel engineered microbes could replace the chemical fertilizers that are ubiquitous on farmland.. the researchers introduce their star candidate: a bacteria called Azotobacter vinelandii which is part of the diazotroph family. Diazotrophs are biologically equipped to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, turning it into the compound known as ammonia, which it leaches out in varied and typically low concentrations.
Because ammonia is so fundamental to the growth of plants, A. vinelandii has long been of interest to researchers, who had also identified a particular gene in this bacteria that seems to be involved in regulating its natural ammonia production. But, until now no one has understood exactly how this gene drives the ammonia-excreting behavior—which would be the key to controlling it, and perhaps boosting ammonia production to make it functionally useful for crops.
The researchers set out to discover this by experimentally tweaking the gene to see how that impacted its functioning. Through this they discovered they could influence the bacteria to start producing ammonia—and critically, they could dial up its production to create larger quantities than before..
Biohydrogen is H2 that is produced biologically..The biological hydrogen production with algae is a method of photobiological water splitting which is done in a closed photobioreactor based on the production of hydrogen as a solar fuel by algae. Algae produce hydrogen under certain conditions. In 2000 it was discovered that if C. reinhardtii algae are deprived of sulfur they will switch from the production of oxygen, as in normal photosynthesis, to the production of hydrogen.