Alternative Fuel Microbes

Imagine a world where high-efficiency, low-cost alternative fuels were as easy to obtain as the oxygen in the air around us. Well, thanks to the collaboration of the US Department of Energy and a team of researchers at Duke University, we might have a microorganism that can make this dream a reality. Recent years have seen great strides in the area of alternative fuels (like ethanol from corn and sugar cane). Unfortunately, these methods have proven inefficient and given rise to a lot of criticism like cutting into the food and land supply. Recently, scientists have been able to come up with electrofuels that are designed to harness solar energy without cutting into the food, water, or land supplies as most of the existing alternative fuels do.In addition to its low energy need, tiny microbes can efficiently and effectively synthesize these electrofuels in a lab. These electrofuel microbes have been isolated and found living in non-photosynthetic bacteria. Using the electrons in the soil as food, the microbes eat up the energy to produce butanol when exposed to electricity and carbon dioxide. Using this knowledge, scientists extract the genes to complete this photosynthesis substitute and inject them into lab-grown bacteria allowing them to produce butanol in large amounts. Butanol is now being seen as the better alternative to both ethanol and gasoline for a variety of reasons. As a much larger molecule, butanol has a larger energy-carrying capacity than ethanol and doesn’t absorb water, so it can be placed directly in the gas tanks of any car and transported through the existing gasoline pipelines. These butanol microbes are very promising for the future of alternative fuels.