Cyanobacteria: The Next Big Biofuel?
Could cyanobacteria eventually become a more popular biofuel than corn, sugarcane, or even algae? Quite possibly. According to Science Daily, cyanobacteria can convert up to 10 percent of the sun’s energy into biomass.
This is a drastic improvement over the 1 percent rate of crops like corn and sugarcane, as well as the 5 percent rate of algae. With such a high conversion rate, cyanobacteria could replace a hefty amount of fossil fuels without taking up too much land.
- » See also: US Arpa-E Funding Enlisting Cyanobacteria to Make Fuel For Humans
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At a recent conference organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF), participants discussed how photosynthesis evolved by cyanobacteria produced our current fossil fuel supply. Now the objective is to use those same reactions to produce more fuel—without taking fossil fuels out of the ground.
These reactions could theoretically be created with an artificial leaf system consisting of self-assembling nanodevices that regenerate themselves much like real plants and cyanobacteria do.
But we won’t see such a system on the market anytime soon— the technology will be in development for another 10 to 20 years. In the meantime, however, algae appears to be the most promising biofuel contender.
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Biofuel is cool.
Solarenergy and windenergy is the future
Cyanobacteria is usually, somewhat incorrectly, referred to as algae. Most experiments to extract fuel from “algae” are technically growing cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, blue-green bacteria or Cyanophyta, is a phylum of bacteria that obtain their energy through photosynthesis.
Only one study in this article and no companies that are currently working on this…back up your article.
Algenol is one company that is developing processes to make ethanol from cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae.
http://www.algenolbiofuels.com/
What a wonderful idea. It would be great if it works.
Willy: Thanks for the link to Algenol Biofuels. The carbon-capture angle for their business is enticing. Turning coal plant emissions into plastics is a great idea. As for general fuel production, I’d think that solar thermal plants generating power for electric cars would be more efficient than using the same land and money to produce algae biofuels.
I think algal will be very promising. They grow like crazy and have a great ability to chew up CO2.
The methane from the BS in Washington DC could heat the Eastern Seaboard at least, but getting plans through Congress would require huge amounts of very expensive Castor oil and specially fitted grease guns for the application. We should call in NASA, this could be harder than hitting the moon, and probably more dangerous!
In deed Cyanobacteria have a vast scope. Their latest application seems to be as bio fuel.
Webpag: purshotam.kaushik.googlepages.com
I think we need to use Humans as fuel. Too many humans in this world. Cheap and easy to make.