Making Energy Out of Thin Air

A very exciting breakthrough has been made in the production of biofuel cells. Oxford University scientists have built a fuel cell which produces electricity from ordinary air spiked with small amounts of hydrogen.

The prototype biofuel cell consists of electrodes coated with some naturally-occurring bacteria and placed in a container of air plus 3 percent added hydrogen. This fuel cell produces enough electricity to power small electronic products which require only a small amount of power to run. But the future could be much bigger for the technology.

What's wrong with the current fuel cells?

To date, the talk surrounding hydrogen energy as our energy future has been based primarily on the very costly platinum-based fuel cell.

But platinum is a precious metal, and worse, it is in short supply. Recent prices topped the $1,000 per ounce mark, making it a more expensive metal than gold. This makes the conventional fuel cell expensive to produce, and eventually an unsustainable solution to the problem of energy production.

Additionally, the use of platinum catalysts can be easily thwarted by the very carbon monoxide that the chemical reaction produces, often poisoning the process. That carbon monoxide can be removed, but, of course, it makes the entire process even more expensive.

The New Biofuel Cell

The biofuel cell produced by the Oxford researchers will run on enzymes called hydrogenases, naturally-occurring bacteria which can be produced and reproduced cheaply. The only waste product produced when combining hydrogen and oxygen is water; there is no carbon monoxide poisoning problem.

There is also no need for an expensive barrier to keep the fuels separate, as in conventional fuel cells, because the enzymes work together with the hydrogen and oxygen in the cell.

Best of all, the hydrogenases produce electricity at about the same rate as the expensive platinum-based catalysts.

Future Energy with the Biofuel Cell

Fraser Armstrong, Ph.D., headed the research group at Oxford University which developed this power prototype. According to him, "The technology is immensely developable. We are at the tip of a large iceberg, with important consequences for the future . . . "

This pioneering biofuel cell technology is potentially our future energy solution, cheap and sustainable. We need to encourage our lawmakers to spend money wisely in researching the production of fuel cells.

(The new biofuel cell technology was unveiled on 3/26/2007 at the symposium, "Catalysis Relevant to Energy and Sustainability.", during the week-long national meeting of the American Chemical Society.)