Go Wet, Young Friend

April 3, 2013 |


aquamanAs bio, solar and computing inaugurate a spectacular Age of Convergence — the long-term opportunities in energy may well lie at sea.

One of the perplexities of our time: why solar systems are so photon-efficient and so troubled in energy storage; conversely, how biomass systems are so photon-inefficient yet have magnificently dense energy storage options via fats and hydrocarbons. And how to harness the two to blend their respective advantages.

That’s, in many ways, the underlying quest of the electrofuels — bypassing photosynthesis altogether, and finding ways to use electrical energy to stimulate the production of complex molecules.

In turn, the quest is on to find organisms — or upgrade them — to the task of the synthesis of CO2 and water (or hydrogen gas), using electricity as an energy source, into molecules of choice.

Land, water, storage

Of course, there’s work on photosynthesis itself — in the pages of the Digest this week, we have seen work from research labs and universities producing strategies such as: varying the length of light-capturing antennae in cells (so that they won’t over-capture light and dissipate it as heat), or providing more oil storage within the plant and thereby to reduce its tendency to underproduce when stressed.

Another perplexity of our time — how to move water with a minimal expenditure of energy. We have seen the problem in algae harvest and extraction — but the problem is embedded elsewhere in the natural world — for example, in drought, in finding suitable hydroelectric sites. Conversely, when Nature moves water for us, we struggle — for instance, we have yet to find a way to harness the kinetic energy of rain.

Another perplexity, the cost of land and tendency of improvements in agriculture to result in transferring wealth upstream to the landowner, rather than downstream to the markets. For example, the abundant recent increases in agricultural productivity in, say, corn, have not translated into cheap food and feedstock — rather they have resulted in land prices soaring across the Midwest.

Though there are a hundred perplexities and complexities in energy production and the broad field of sustainability — which we define as a state where economic, social and environmental forces are in optimal balance — here in Digestville we see the photosynthetic problem, the water problem and the land problem as fundamental. Yet linked.

The Sea, long in all the right ways

Some time ago, a young person asked what field of study would be the most important in the future, and we replied “the law of the sea”.

For it seems inevitable to us that we will turn our eyes from the stars and the land and see that there are roughly 46 billion gallons of seawater for every person on earth. That we live in a world that is short land, short freshwater, short phosphorus, short free hydrogen; but long in CO2 and seawater.

We may well find that whatever best combinations we may find in an all-of-the-above energy strategy in the short term — and terrestrial biomass will take its place there, now and for a long time to come, as it has since humans first tamed fire — in the long-term we need distributed energy abundance to make a sustainable world.

We may well find that in combinations, at sea, of the power to harness photons and generate electricity, translated into energy storage in the form of fats and hydrocarbons.

Little sea-based critters are bound to be of assistance here – perhaps among the eukaryotes (count here the algae and fungi) or among the prokaryotes (count here the archaea and bacteria). They have long experience of the sea — and we may find that their skills will serve nicely there. Skills not dissimilar to those lately developed for the “raging fireball” of biofuels, pyrococchus furiosus.

The Age of Convergence arriveth

We also may see recent advances in science — in particular, the convergence of computing and biology (just as much as the convergence of bio and solar) — playing a role.

We take note that, this month, with the announcement out of Stanford that researchers there have developed a biological transistor (dubbed a “transcriptor”), capable of controlling (via enzymes) RNA polymerase – like an electron, as it travels along a strand of DNA, like a wire. And have harnessed combinations of transcriptors into logic gates (which, ahem, they have dubbed “BIL gates”) that can undertake a form of computation within a living cell.

With that advance — and the previous development of systems for storing information of DNA and a system using the M13 virus to move strands of DNA from one cell to another — we have the means of establishing bio-based computers. Eventually, they will undertake work within living cells to optimize their behavior — for example, their response to stress, or to change the products they produce from fats to hydrocarbons, as needed. Or even, a response to disease, pests, predators and competitors — and there, think not only microbial or plant cells, think yours.

The worlds of science, are rapidly converging in exciting ways. For energy, and for the long term, we predict that the sea offers the long term energy platform that the planet needs. Wells today, fields tomorrow — but the sea for the long term. The answer lies in the wild, wild wet.

Therefore, with a nod to Horace Greeley and “Go, West”:

Go wet, young friend, go wet and grow up with the planet.

 

READ MORE: Algae biofuels and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

READ MORE: Biofuels from a raging fireball? No fossil energy, no light, no biomass, no sugars. No kidding.

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READ MORE: The Hydrogen Problem

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