On 4/15/2010 1:47 PM, Keith Hudson wrote:
But they will need large quantities of water and this will necessarily
expropriate a great deal of water that's presently used for intensive
food production.
Couldn't some of the energy (if large return is achieved) be used to
desalinate sea water?
Steve
Steve,
There's a lot of research going on now with several organic
approaches. There's Nobel prizewinner Hamilton Smith's team at the
JCVI, Rockville, Maryland trying to hybridize a photosynthetic
bacterium with a H-producing bacterium so that the energy from the
former drives the latter. In Sweden they've discovered a new super
bacterium (Caldicellulosiruptor) which emits twice as much hydrogen
than any other discovered so far. Then, rather like the titanium
oxide-coated leaf approach of your link, a team at MIT are using an
iridium oxide-virus complex on which to build organic photosynthetic
units.
It wasn't until only five or six years ago when Craig Venter started
taking ocean samples that a whole new ecosystem was discovered -- in
the top 1/100of an inch of sea water -- containing scores of thousands
of different types of bacteria that hadn't been known before. Almost
all are big consumers of CO2 and some of them are emitters of H.
The potential is immense -- and the need for H is immense -- so I
reckon that bacterial production of H will swing into high gear in the
next decade or so with large production facilities. But they will need
large quantities of water and this will necessarily expropriate a
great deal of water that's presently used for intensive food production.
Keith
At 10:37 15/04/2010 -0400, you wrote:
Wonder what the EROEI will look like if they ever get it working on a
practical basis. Sounds pretty labor intensive at this point.
Steve
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/100326_leaf
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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