This has to be the geekiest and coolest piece of news related to the alternative fuel industry that has come out in a while. A hydrogen fuel cell is one very clean way to generate electricity on the fly in a car, eliminating the need for long waits for recharge times. But the hydrogen has to be generated first and that also requires alot of energy. One of the best sources of hydrogen is water, as it is so abundant. In fact, water is a byproduct of the fuel cell electricity generation process.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could store the water in the car and just synthesize it into hydrogen and oxygen on the fly? The fundamental laws of physics says that this is not possible as you cannot create energy out of nothing. It would take alot of energy to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. There are many who claim to have ‘broken’ this law, such as the massive Hydroxene and LMG tie-up publicity that happened quite a while back in our very own Bolehland.
Researchers are looking for more and more ways to create hydrogen in a cheaper way in terms of energy expenditure than existing methods and the latest is an effort by a team in MIT. It is basically artificial photosynthesis using a modified virus and sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. An engineered bacterial virus called M13 binds with the molecules of a catalyst (iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zing porphyrins). They become wire-like devices that can efficiently split oxygen and hydrogen from water. The virii are encapsulated in a microgel matrix to maintain a uniform arrangement, keeping them stable.
“The role of the pigments is to act as an antenna to capture the light. and then transfer the energy down the length of the virus, like a wire. The virus is a very efficient harvester of light, with these porphyrins attached,” says Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering.
Right now what the system does is extract the oxygen, but the hydrogen atoms get split into their component protons and electrons. A second part of the system is still under development that will combine these hydrogen atom components back into proper atoms and molecules. They also need to find a cheaper catalyst.
This artificial photosynthetis still has a long way to go however. According to DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University Thomas Mallouk, for this system to be cost-competitive with other approaches to solar power, it has to be at least ten times more efficient than natural photosynthesis, be repeatable a billion times, and use less expensive materials.
This isn’t going to happen in the new feature, but the ideas that this research project has brought up could help with the big picture of alternative fuel! For now, a prototype device than can carry out the splitting of water into oxygen and hydrogen should be able to be ready in two years, according to Professor Belcher.
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Nice idea, but I am not sure how much virus you need to power a very powerful car.
in future when shipping the virus worldwide by sea i wonder what will happen if there is mass leaking of virus into the sea water…
big explosion happen when ignited? as there will be tons of hydrogen and oxygen..
:D
good!.
I just want to say something like this too!..
omg!
spread into river and sea.
no water to drink anymore haha..
Good lo, Game Over.. hit the earth’s reset button.
AE86 – No explosion. Hydrogen and Oxygen exist in the atmosphere around you and needs an energy source hot enough to ignite them.
Hydrogen doesn’t exist naturally in our atmosphere………………………………………………………
it does, atmosphere contains 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% of various gasses including dust, water vapor and you guessed it, hydrogen… although it’s less than 1% it still exist…
I think extracting dissolved plutonium from seawater for nuclear power generator is way more production then extracting hydrogen from atmosphere.
And if a hot enough energy source is all what we need to ignite them like Dabido said, we will see nuclear mushroom cloud everywhere whenever people trying to lite a ciggy.
Near future fuel will be still be known as V-Power (stands for virus power)
Hahaha! Good one!
Science, engineering technology has its Pros and Cons.
I’m looking it in the “Resident Evil” point of view.
Someone asked a good question up there, what will happen if the virus leaked into our natural water sources?
I have a better one, I quote:-
“The virii are encapsulated in a microgel matrix to maintain a uniform arrangement, keeping them stable.”
The statement above really frightens me, what they meant by ‘stable’? Stability of the virus configuration to do the artificial photosynthesis or the virus has some undisclosed side effect?
I always believe humanity will have to pay hefty price to “play-like-god” project.
Perhaps movies such as Resident Evil (Milla Jovovich), I’m Legend (Will Smith), 28 Days, 28 Weeks and many more virus-cause-zombie movies makes sense!
The virus need catalyst to react. Therefor the chances of hazards due to the virus is practically low.
a car with this virus system crashed.. the virus leaked.. several people infected..
1 hour later, a horde of zombies is roaming the city. NOOOO!!!!!
LOL..
ambik sekali H1N1 punya virus nih, menyemak saja haha
Now this kind of innovation is something to the world is waiting for ;) Hope it can be materialize in 5 – 10 years later.
However, sorry Paul Tan, but you actually using the phrase “Bolehland” in this article doesn’t really do you good justice as a professional automobile journalist. No offence intended. TQ! :)
wth?
Replacing expensive petro with another expensive hydrogen fuel cell, we still hv to pay for Hydrogen, definitely this would not be good solution. EV that using Lithium is more saving & practical. Just have to wait for few years for manufacture to shrink the size of Lithium to smaller size, portable and inter changable battery EV cars. this would be the future.
Lithium drive 100k then will kong… Every 100k u buy new car? (Replacing the lithium is as expensive as buy new car for the current EV)
where’s the source saying every 100k u gotto replace the lithium battery. very interesting claim. i like to knw.
Sorry, was something i read way back in time. 100k “miles” was the max then. Now they’ve manage to main it 180k miles. I agree in the future we will go EV but i dun think is lithium, power/weight ratio is bad. There is another interesting tech, Carbon Nanotubes. Anyway, these things are still to expensive to implemented yet. The cost is too much for us to bare.
Exactly, things are developing so fast nowadays so leave the outdated quotes behind.
Still EV need electrical power that is generated by (guess what?) petroleum n coal to recharge.So what they’re doing is to be independent of these raw material that soon will be depleted. Fuel Cell is the future…though a very far one.
Exactly.. EV uses electricity from power plants, which use as much energy and emit greenhouse gases. Unless power plants are powered by nuclear then EV is not a good solution.
Hello kawan, just break the way you’re thinking. The virus mentioned above is called ‘good virus’ that have been specially develop to catalyze the hydrogen generation. just like microbs, algae, and whatever cendawan that play a major rule to digest our sewage and effluent treatment and bio-diesel plant.
Go green..
virus is not like bacteria which some bacteria is benefitial i thnk…virus change the structure in our gene…so i dun thnk it is a good idea
not really.. virus have a very specific target.. for instance, a virus that only attacks bacteria is harmless to humans. Have you heard of phage therapy? It’s a method where virus will be used instead of antibiotics to kill bacteria.
is the virus contagious?
If the virus succeed, woulf the next generation face chronic water shortage? Is there any other alternative to mining precious water to get hydrogen?
The fuel cell puts the hydrogen and oxygen back together to form water vapor, which is then released back into the environment and follows the water cycle to streams, lakes, and oceans.
a good explanation bro. indeed hydro and the oxy will recycle back to form h2o. so theres no issue shortage of water=] but of course sooner or later, we will discover the cons of using this virus. who knoes
First there is some sort of virus/ bacteria that eats crude oil !
Now they wanna creates virus to split H2o ?!!
what if these technologies fall into wrong hands, the world will be doom !
the world is coming to an end anyway, “whatever will be will be…” the best part is all the happy living corrupted cronnies are goin to hell – BIH (burn in hell)
The best way is to use electricity from solar, wind, dam or even nuclear reaktor to turn water to hydrogen + oxygen. That is more efficient & let those sucker in OPEC keep their oil:)
For Bolehland….we need to wait until Proton come up with an EV or hydrogen car b4 we can even imagine putting our finger on those fancy hybrid car & not lelong our house to do so…..
China is more aggressive. 80% of bike there is electric powered (I read this somewhere)
Here in Bolehland, JPJ & Kastam will put us in lot of trouble for those innovation!!
yup. bike in china r majority electric powered. but unlikely 100% foolproof. had an experience in beijing n shanghai, my electric bike failed at Ebay office ground during winter. reason: too cold for the battery to stand operative.
The problems with this type of contemporary articles about science are the lack of details and the accuracy of journalist’s interpretation. If this piece of news is true then this is potentially a distruptive innovation, those thing that happen once in a century. Producing hydrogen from water is a no brainer because of the density of hydrogen atom per molecules is the highest in water based on per unit mass. bear in mind that carbon – hydrogen bonding is very stable and a lot of energy needed to break from thermodynamics aspect. If there is a catalysy, organic or non organic can lower the activation energy of the O – H bonding, the amount of energy needed would be lower. The idea of using conventional energy resourses like nuclear or solar to break this sort of bond is not good because the initial efficiency of producing those energy in the first place is low. You wont be able to get the benefit of positive energy input based on mass and energy balance. This is not green at all.
Utilising virus is certainly a novel method (virus is much smaller than bacteria and they have simple genetic makeup, not necessarily dangerous) and the article suggested that the pore iszes of the matrix is small enough to retain the virus in place but allows the water molecule and liberated hydrogen to permeate the matrix. There is another way to this, is to chemically tethered the virus to the polymer matrix to lower the possibility of leaching which highly unlike to happen since the product must be in gas phase (unless in high pressure system).
Great Stuff! Easily explainable from thermodynamics POV.
Basically it means that this “modified photosynthesis” have to be at least better then sugar cane or oil palm in order to be any practical.
And then it is the hydrogen storage problem. Which have to be bulky to carry a reasonable amount of compressed hydrogen and if liquid hydrogen is needed, a much higher tech fuel tank is required.
We are not even looking at the price of H2 yet.
“The idea of using conventional energy resourses like nuclear or solar to break this sort of bond is not good because the initial efficiency of producing those energy in the first place is low. You wont be able to get the benefit of positive energy input based on mass and energy balance. ”
Please explain further. It does not make sense.
think about the long term effects first. soon will be “selsema hydrogen”
there will be other virus that can affect this good-virus..so you need to protect your car from this infection… if one of your ofismate’s car been affected by the bad virus…. then all staff need to come to office with lrt…since all car need to be quarantine to avoid from spreading..
Malaysians, always the pessimists. Well, I for one think it’s a cool tech, very futuristic. Of course those scientists will make sure that it’s harmless to humans, it’s too ridiculous if they don’t consider this possibility first and foremost. Besides, we already have millions of friendly microbes living in our body helping us in various ways.
that is some wicked news i’ve heard in a long time.
so in the future ppl will begin to use this as an excuse to ponteng work:
“cannot come la today boss, i got infected by my car’s virus when i sent it to service yesterday”
LOL
This has got to be one of the coolest applications of biotech ever.
I really hope it works. Genetic engineering is already producing medicines. So why not use it to produce hydrogen? IN fact, it’s already used to manafacture biological agents in industry, so this idea is not far fetched at all!
B1N1 virus is more powerfull.
Now this is really make me feel like a mix of Final Fantasy movie and Resident Evil material.
Let’s see if “the system” is any better then a black secret box that split H2O into O2 + 2H2.
Get some scientist to research on modified bacteria with nerve cell dna that can convert sugar into direct electric pulse too. Yes I am friggin serious, they have already made a Trilogy blockbuster out of it.
i’d be dang if the thang ever worked its way here… :-)