Dateline: 23 March 2028
It’s an old trick in science class to make an LED light glow using just a potato as the battery, but bacterial fuel cells and biological batteries have come a long way in recent years. We’ve known for ages that some bacteria and plant enzymes can liberate electrons from bio feedstocks, but it’s been almost impossible to turn those lab experiments into useful devices or energy sources.
Until now. The first signal that a breakthrough was on the horizon emerged in 2023, when Australian scientists successfully isolated an enzyme that efficiently turns ambient hydrogen directly into electricity. In fact, the hydrogen fuel cell-in-a-plant cell could even power up from the minute traces of hydrogen in the atmosphere. Just exposing it to air was sufficient to generate and maintain a tiny charge.
Since then, scientists have used CRISPR cut-and-paste genetic editing tech to refine and improve the enzyme so that it can harvest hydrogen from common sources such as natural gas or biogas, and turn it into usable power. In the past, we had to burn fuels to drive turbines, or waste a lot of power on electrolysis to make hydrogen for fuel cells. Now we can get microbes to turn gas into electricity, naturally.
And the best news is it’s easy to scale up production of this new enzyme. The bacterium that produces it thrives on farm waste, sewage and similar bio feedstocks. Like the leftovers from a canning factory. So it’s a winning solution for pollution too.
This will be a game-changer for new energy companies producing biofuels, green hydrogen and fuel cells, cutting out the high costs of handling and transport, and moving to an energy-on-demand model instead. As with any new technology, there will be winners and losers, but ultimately we all benefit from cheaper, cleaner and more abundant energy. /First published on Mindbullets 23 March 2023
Making nature work again
Bio-engineering makes sustainability sustainable
Dateline: 27 July 2027
The last five years have seen a perfect storm of crises in energy, food, industry and on the environmental front. We were barely over the worst of the Covid-19 crunch when Russia’s attack on Ukraine sent Europe — and the world — into a maelstrom of rising prices and short supply. And then the heatwaves of 2022 brought the focus back to climate change.
Of course, sustainability was always about more than the climate; plastic pollution, resource depletion and environmental degradation were equally at crisis levels, and action was urgently needed. Fortunately, the most important resource was infinitely abundant: human ingenuity. And there’s nothing like a real disaster to spark innovative solutions.
Dozens of scientific start-ups quickly embraced the smorgasbord of lucrative opportunities these crises presented, chasing everything from green ammonia to better hydroponics. But a handful of them hit upon the ultimate innovation — using nature’s own capacity for sustainability and employing biomimetics and bio-engineering techniques.
Now we have sci-tech companies developing enzymes and bio-agents to reclaim precious metals from electronic waste, including phones and solar panels. Others are eliminating PET plastic pollution with microbes that “eat” plastic bottles and regurgitate chemical feedstocks. Yet another is coaxing micro-organisms to turn sunlight and garbage into diesel and jet fuel. Using genes from marine molluscs, we can make bio-ceramics stronger and lighter than steel or Kevlar.
“This is exciting,” says biotechnologist Kyle Larsen, “because we’re implementing large-scale biofactories using a variety of microbes, not only algae, to convert waste into valuable products.”
With the latest CRISPR gene-editing tools, and artificial intelligence systems to help us identify and optimise microbes and enzymes, the applications for bio-engineering are limitless. And because these systems require no mining or crops, they contribute to the circular economy, relying on creation rather than extraction.
Putting nature to work — that’s how you make sustainability sustainable! /First published on Mindbullets 28 July 2022
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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