Research scientists from Stanford and Penn State are hoping a day will soon come when airplanes, ships and other vehicles can be fueled with natural gas made from “clean” methane. The research teams are growing colonies of microbes known as methanogens that posses the unique ability to produce methane from electrical energy. Methane is the key ingredient of natural gas.
The goal, say scientists, is to build huge “microbial factories” that will convert electrical energy from clean sources like wind and solar into methane for fueling transportation and making other chemical compounds for industrial processes. Methane is 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but the methane produced in these microbial factories will be captured and stored, with little of it leaking into the atmosphere, says Alfred Spormann, professor of chemical, civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
“The whole microbial process is carbon neutral,” he explained. “All of the carbon dioxide released during combustion is derived from the atmosphere, and all of the electrical energy comes from renewables or nuclear power, which are also carbon dioxide-free.”
Instead of fracking and drilling for natural gas, Spormann and his colleagues envision a transportation fleet fueled with truly “green” natural gas made from colonies of methanogens that will metabolize carbon dioxide into methane using emissions-free sources of electricity. From there the gas can be stockpiled and distributed using existing infrastructure. Burning the microbial gas recycles the CO2 back into the atmosphere from whence it came.
“Microbial methane is much more ecofriendly than ethanol and other biofuels,” Spormann said. “Corn ethanol, for example, requires acres of cropland, as well as fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and fermentation. Methanogens are much more efficient, because they metabolize methane in just a few quick steps.”
Renewable energy storage
Another promising avenue of this research into methanogens addresses one of the more daunting challenges in scaling up renewable energy: storage. Using these microbes to “metabolize electrical energy into chemical energy,” says Spromann, could be a “game changer” if a way is found to “engineer methanogens to produce methane at scale.”
Better living through microbes
Though the concept is simple, significant challenges remain before the technology becomes commercially viable. ”That’s because the underlying science of how these organisms convert electrons into chemical energy is poorly understood,” says Bruce Logan of Penn State. Nonetheless, researchers like Spormann and Logan work at the cutting-edge of using microbes as a source of clean energy. In an earlier post Revmodo covered Logan’s research in creating energy from wastewater.
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Video credit: Stanford University