Oct 14 - Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR)

Two Oregon State University researchers are guiding an effort in Corvallis to harness photosynthetic microbes that use solar energy to split water molecules and produce hydrogen fuel.

Roger Ely and Frank Chaplen, professors in the university's Department of Bioengineering at both the College of Agricultural Sciences and College of Engineering, are intrigued by the hydrogen- generating potential of a large group of photosynthetic microorganisms called cyanobacteria.

Ely believes cyanobacteria, which naturally generate energy from sunlight and under some conditions can produce hydrogen rather than sugars, may be a perfect source for the sustainable production of hydrogen for fuel.

Imagine an ideal energy device, Ely said. It wouldn't burn fossil fuels, and it wouldn't pollute. It would be made of low-cost, nontoxic materials, would run on the power of the sun and would be safe, clean and economical.

Hydrogen fuel when burned produces only water, not the greenhouse gasses generated by the fossil fuels gasoline and coal. But current hydrogen generation methods require energy and typically use those very fossil fuels.

To produce hydrogen fuel without emitting greenhouse gasses, a renewable form of energy would need to be used.

Ely and Chaplen believe they're on the right track to getting there, and they've got a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that they're using to help fund their research.

Nature has been conducting research and development on solar energy capture for about 3 1/2 billion years and can teach us much, Ely said. From looking to nature, we already know three key things: visible light constitutes most of the energy reaching the Earth, we know how organisms capture it, and we know how they convert it into chemical energy.

The researchers face one major hurdle, Ely said. In natural systems, during photosynthesis, he said, cyanobacteria stop making hydrogen when oxygen is present.

In the organism we are studying, oxygen interferes with the production of hydrogen by gumming up the works, so to speak, he said.

With the grant, Ely and Chaplen hope to develop, via metabolic engineering, oxygen-tolerant strains of bacteria that can continuously produce hydrogen in the light. After developing sun- harnessing, hydrogen-producing strains, the plan is to grow them by the millions in systems that could also store the generated hydrogen. Using the fuel cells, the researchers believe, the hydrogen could be converted into electricity on demand.

These systems can be designed to be relatively simple and economical and could serve as decentralized sources of clean electrical energy, Ely said. The process will have one input, sunlight and two outputs, electricity and heat. It will be safe, will operate at relatively low temperatures and could be made in a range of sizes, from home- to industry-scale, from abundant, inexpensive materials, mostly from carbon and silica.