The search for a worthy alternative and renewable solution to the continuous dependence on the use of fossil fuels, has led scientists to embark on a number of explorative experimentations. In the post titled Sustainable Energy: Electrified Road That Charges Electric Vehicles As They Are Driven Along which I had the honour of authoring some 2 days back, I gave a detailed discussion of electrified roads which use either inductive or conductive charging technology to power moving electric vehicles, and thus proved to be a more suitable alternative to the use of fossil fuels when finally embraced globally. Today, we will be looking at how liquid fuels that can power automobiles and other industrial machineries, could be produced via interaction between the trio of solar energy, bionic leaf and bacteria.

_{[Source: Pixabay commons. CC0 licensed]}

From our study of biology, we know that plants use the miracle of photosynthesis — a biochemical process in which plant's chlorophyll uses solar energy to transform carbon dioxide and water into organic compounds that are essential for plant and animal life — to make its own food. Motivated by this, scientists were able to engineer a way to convert solar energy into electrical energy. However, our aim here is not to produce electricity from solar energy but to produce liquid fuels directly from sunlight. Achieving such a feat will enable us to have a more suitable alternative to power automobiles and other machineries that are dependent on liquid fuels, for instance, while also ensuring our less dependent on fossil fuels.

The feat achieved at Harvard University

After a retinue of experiments and counter experiments, the question of whether it's possible to produce liquid fuels directly from sunlight, was finally answered, and unambiguously so by a team of Harvard University researchers and their collaborators. The team created a system that integrates bionic leaf and sunlight to cause break up of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The released hydrogen then combined with carbon dioxide in an engineered bacterium catalyzed reaction to produce isopropanol, a liquid fuel.

_{[The bionic leaf is a system for converting solar energy into liquid fuel developed by the labs of Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silver at Harvard text. Source: wikimedia commons. Author: Jessica Polka. CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed]}

The procedure is an improvement on the existing "artificial leaf", which was developed by a senior author of the study, Daniel Nocera. The original "artificial leaf" by mimicking real leaves of plants, can cause the split up of water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. This is essentially what happened during the natural process of photosynthesis.

But the researchers took this step a little further by first transforming "artificial leaf" to "bionic leaf" status so that the engineered bacterium is able to interact with hydrogen so released from splitting up of water molecules, and combine it with carbon dioxide in a catalyzed reaction to produce isopropanol which is the liquid fuel.

The bacterium used in the study was Ralstonia eutropha and its activities were central to the success of the study. The researchers have since engineered new pathways to encourage seamless production of isopropanol by the bacterium mainly as a byproduct of its natural biochemical processes.

"This is a proof of concept that you can have a way of harvesting solar energy and storing it in the form of a liquid fuel," said Pamela Silver, one of the study's authors. "Dan's formidable discovery of the catalyst really set this off, and we had a mission of wanting to interface some kinds of organisms with the harvesting of solar energy. It was a perfect match." _Source

The findings of this research were published in PNAS in 2015.

_{[Chloroplast (standalone version). Source: Wikimedia commons. Author: Kelvinsong. CC BY 3.0 licensed]}

The problem encountered during the procedure and how it was solved in later years

The successful demonstration of the procedure in which liquid fuel was generated from the sunlight, was not without a hitch. In the beginning, the bionic leaf was so efficient in conversion of solar energy into liquid fuel that the authors expected it to work at a far better efficiency than the efficiency of a natural photosynthetic process which operates at 1%efficiency. The bionic leaf initially worked so well that it was expected to surpass the natural efficiency of photosynthesis, which operates at 1% efficiency. However, the system was later found to be operating at a much lower efficiency the following initial success. The cause of this was to be traced to the nickel-molybdenum-zinc catalyst used to effect water splitting process in the first phase of the procedure. The catalyst was discovered to have poisoning effects on the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha.

This occurrence compelled the researchers to start looking for a way to overcome the pitfall, which would inevitably require them to build a more effective bionic leaf. In 2016, the researchers reported in the Journal Science that they have solved that problem by using a different catalyst — an alloy of cobalt and phosphorus, resulting in an increased efficiency at generating alcohol fuels. Using this new catalyst, the system was able to convert about one-10th of the energy in the captured sunlight into liquid fuel [1].

_{[Source: Pixabay commons. CC0 licensed]}

Conclusion

What is most amazing in this new concept of generating liquid fuel is not even the fact that the bionic leaf system was able to make use of sunlight to synthesize the fuel, but that it does so at a much greater efficiency (of 10%) in using the trapped solar energy. This is something natural photosynthetic process (which operates at 1% of using trapped solar energy) could not achieve! This is truly amazing!

With the way science is discovering different alternative energy sources, I strongly believe that in the next 50 years, world's dependence on fossil fuels will have been greatly reduced by more than 90%, a development that would make atmospheric pollution a thing of the past. Until then, let's keep Steeming. Thanks for reading.

References for further reading

• _{[1] Bionic Leaf converts solar energy into liquid fuel}
• _{Bionic Leaf uses bacteria to convert solar energy into liquid fuel}
• _{Bionic Leaf can convert solar energy into liquid fuel: better than solar cells?}
• _{Bionic Leaf: researchers use bacteria to convert solar energy into liquid fuel}
• _{New "bionic" leaf is roughly 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis}
• _{A bionic leaf to convert the sun's energy into fuel for water}

Your truly,
@eurogee

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