Oil-eating microbes excrete the world’s cheapest “clean” hydrogen

Texan company Cemvita is promising clean hydrogen at less than US$1/kg, after testing a fascinating new technique in the lab and the field. The idea is to pump specially developed microbes into depleted oil wells, where they’ll eat oil and excrete hydrogen.Humans have been harnessing tiny single-celled and multicellular organisms to perform work for much longer than we’ve known what they were. The earliest beers known to history were brewed some 13,000 years ago, making systematic use of a microscopic fungus called yeast, and its habit of eating sugars and starches and excreting carbon dioxide and ethanol. That’s about 7,000 years before recorded history was known to history.Microbes can be incredibly hard workers – Louis Pasteur once described yeast’s work on glucose as the equivalent of a 200-pound person chopping two million pounds of wood in two days. But their ability to party…

Read more…