Archaea, which were discovered by American scientists four decades ago as a distinct domain of life, its green energy application is gaining traction as European customers suffer with record high gas prices
FREMONT, CA: Scientists and investors are looking to a billion-year-old home brew to satisfy Europe's future natural gas needs as well as providing a mechanism to store and utilize extra energy generated by solar and wind power. European energy corporations are depending on single-celled creatures called archaea to ferment carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methane, the major component of natural gas, in the same way that brewers utilize living yeast to transform sugar and starch into beer. The concept is to capture CO2 released when industries burn fossil fuels and use it to make additional fuel, thus preventing global warming emissions from escaping into the atmosphere.
The microbes that catalyze the process may be found in some of the world's inhospitable environments, including deep underground gas reservoirs, where they can be fed a regular diet of industrial pollutants and green hydrogen to refill fuel stocks and store energy. The methane can then be injected into existing gas infrastructure and supplied to factories, or it can be stored underground and used as a geological battery. Alexander Krajete, a chemist who has patents on the fermentation process stated that archaea are 4 billion years old and have the world's oldest metabolism.
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Archaea, which were discovered by American scientists four decades ago as a distinct domain of life, live in oxygen-deprived, high-pressure environments miles deep and beneath. Their green energy application is gaining traction as European customers suffer with record gas prices. Geopolitical concerns with Russia, Europe's largest fuel source, are hastening the search for more long-term, sustainable energy alternatives. Doris Hafenbradl, managing director of Electrochaea GmbH, a German firm trying to scale up the technology stated that they want to replace the natural gas that Mr. Putin and others bring over renewable energy.
To become commercially competitive, the technology still requires billions of euros of additional investment. While the technique provides a sustainable methane cycle by recycling hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen molecules in a closed loop, there remains the possibility of renegade emissions. Users that use the fuel but do not account for or collect their pollutants are still contributing to global warming.