Gizmos & Gadgets: Bionic Leaf Converts CO2 to Alcohol-based Fuel

June 5, 2016 – Professor Daniel Nocera  is known for having created an artificial leaf made of silicon. It converts sunlight five times more efficiently than plant leaves. The byproducts are hydrogen and oxygen.

Now he is gone one better by genetically engineering bacteria and combining it with its silicon predecessor. The conversion efficiency doubles and the byproducts are alcohol-based fuels such as isopropanol, isobutanol and isopetanol.

The bacteria is raistonia eutropha seen in the image below.

Nocera is a Professor of Energy at University of Chicago. He developed the artificial leaf while at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What the bacteria actually does is convert hydrogen into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is nature’s energy molecule. By genetically altering raistonia eutropha, Nocera gets the ATP to convert to alcohol which the bacteria excretes. States Nocera, “light in, and these things just excrete it out.” 

The bacteria produces biomass at 10.6% efficiency and alcohol at 6.4%. The biomass can be used to make fuel while the alcohol can immediately be burned to generate energy. But the real future lies not in creating fuels but developing antibiotics, fertilizer and pharamaceuticals.

This is no small achievement. It took evolution 2.6 billion years to perfect chlorophyll with its amazing ability to convert the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. It has taken Dr. Nocera and his colleagues not much more than a couple of years to match and improve upon nature by a factor of ten.