[HN Gopher] Bacteria generate electricity from wastewater
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Bacteria generate electricity from wastewater
Author : geox
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-09-14 12:18 UTC (10 hours ago)
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| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Bill Gates will drink the results.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Processor
| jokoon wrote:
| Science magic saving us from climate change
| toolz wrote:
| I can be a bit of an over-optimistic person, but I've always
| been of the opinion that mass extinction events are always
| going to occur without intervention and while humans certainly
| seem to have contributed towards speeding up the timeline
| heading towards the next extinction event, we're more
| importantly the only species with potential to mitigate these
| extinction events all-together.
|
| Without humans extinction events will occur (at least history
| suggests this is the case). With humans, they might not. For
| all of our flaws, I think humans are the most beautiful species
| to come into existence. We have seemingly boundless potential.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Depends a lot on the timeline and extinction event.
|
| In the case of human caused global warming, human harvesting
| of forests and top soil, endocrine interfering plastics, or
| global thermonuclear extinction where there is a causal link,
| those specific events would not happen without human
| industrialization (and exponential reproduction).
|
| The Sun will one day consume the earth, the possibility of an
| asteroid (that humans can't destroy) is still there, the
| magma/volcanic cycle of heating and cooling is there.
|
| I'm curious what extinction events you're so sure humans are
| capable of preventing that haven't been directly caused by
| humans (whales, eagles, buffalo, cfcs). And I don't think
| bacteria or viruses we've experienced qualify to have been
| extinction level events.
| toolz wrote:
| I'm not sure of anything but our potential. It's only been
| roughly 150 years since the first internal combustion
| engine. Today a 50lbs machine mows my lawn by itself by
| communicating invisibly with hunks of metal in outer space
| traveling at 17,000mph around earth to determine its
| position on the face of the planet within roughly a few
| centimeters. This machine cost me roughly a week of labor.
|
| I think the much more interesting question is what sorts of
| extinction events do you think we will be incapable of
| preventing in 1,000 years?
| worik wrote:
| > Science magic saving us from climate change
|
| I hope you are joking
|
| Something to "save" us is not what we need
|
| We have all we need and if we can adjust are economic and
| social relationships we do not need saving, we can look after
| ourselves
|
| A big if.
| eggy wrote:
| I'll have to finish the read, but my first thoughts were the
| number of organisms we are bioengineering to do specific things,
| and how they might crossover with other naturally occurring or
| bioengineered microbes. I remember the plastic-eating microbes
| found in colder climates[1]. There are other plastic-eating
| microbes, but they need hotter temps ~86F. These work in cold
| climates. Visions of the blob with lightning and plastic-eating
| powers ;)
|
| [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plastic-eating-microbes-from-
| on...
| ende wrote:
| It's about time they did something useful!
| Rygian wrote:
| From the "supplemental information" [1] part of the actual paper
| [2], the levels of current are measured in mA and tenths of volts
| (ie. in the order of mW of power).
|
| What is fully unclear to me is how (or whether) that power can be
| harvested and put to any electrical use. Or perhaps it is only of
| chemical interest?
|
| [1]
| https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.joule.2023.08.006/attachm...
| [2]
| https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00352-5?_r...
| kendalf89 wrote:
| From the video it looks like they are just using a few mils of
| liquid volume. My question would be how well does this method
| scale up? Maybe waste water treatment plants could offset their
| carbon footprint a significant amount or even become a power
| plant if this technology gets better.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most waste water treatment plants are already 'carbon
| negative' - since they're getting fossil-fuel-free turds and
| normally turn it into methane for energy generation.
|
| On official charts, it shows as 'biogas' - although usually
| in statistics the biogas from waste water treatment processes
| isn't separated from the biogas generated from municipal
| landfills.
| KarlKode wrote:
| I was skeptical about your claim but I turns out that you
| are right! I knew about agricultural biogas production but
| never though about the potential of methane production from
| waste water treatment.
|
| Even more surprising is that the generated biogas is used
| in the municipital gas supply in my town[1]. So I literally
| cook with fecal products.
|
| [1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/energie/de/index/heizen-
| kuehlen...
| dopa42365 wrote:
| You eat what you ate!
| schainks wrote:
| Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOT4xkkDAc
| domtron_vox wrote:
| We have e. coli as part of our gut biome right? Curious how
| dangerous, if at all, it would be to get this modified version in
| there. I have a hard time beliving it is very efficent so doubt
| it would somehow electrocute you from the inside, but could cause
| other issues.
|
| I wonder how it compares to something like methane digesters in
| production and ease to maintain. Seems like it would produce less
| energy and not make nearly as good fertilizer, but be much less
| finicky and not require an anaerobic environment or careful
| temperature control.
| zackmorris wrote:
| One helpful way to think of it is that having a wide variety of
| bacteria is what matters for a healthy gut biome.
|
| If one species like e. coli flares up, maybe from food
| poisoning, it can overwhelm the immune system. The other type
| of food poisoning (like with botulism I think?) is where the
| bacteria have already contaminated food with their waste and it
| overwhelms the organs so the toxin reaches the body. But with
| so many variations of e. coli already in existence, I would
| expect the risk from an engineered version to be low.
|
| -
|
| That said, I lost my gut health in late 2018 due to a number of
| factors including work stress, too many beers/cocktails and
| ignoring my body's response when I ate stuff like almond butter
| which I didn't know I was sensitive to. That punched holes
| through my intestines and gave me leaky gut. Which allowed
| gluten, lectins and lactose to pass the gut lining and trigger
| my immune system. Now I'm sensitive to foods containing those
| compounds, and they are in almost everything and especially
| processed foods. It took me at least 3 years to recover and I
| must largely avoid wheat and fast food now, which is.. annoying
| to say the least.
|
| Gluten sensitivity has reached such levels that many people can
| only drink hard seltzer now, not beer. And having to offer
| gluten-free options has become a burden on restaurants. What
| most people don't realize is that gluten sensitivity can occur
| at any age unexpectedly. I look at it now like smoking: every
| time we eat grains, we run a small risk of becoming sensitized.
| IMHO that's mostly due to the increased use of wheat and gluten
| in processed foods, incentivized by the lowered cost of GMO
| crops:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-between-incr...
|
| This was all predicted by a small minority of scientists in the
| 1990s and armchair activists like me who warned that GMOs would
| have unintended consequences. TANSTAAFL except with GMO foods..
| right.
|
| I'd choose GMOs for industry over messing with our food supply
| any day.
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| Engineered microbes are almost always far less fit than wild-
| type. They will survive best in a monoculture, and if they are
| forced to compete with less hobbled strains they will usually
| find a way to get rid of the engineered modifications in order
| to grow faster.
| worik wrote:
| > Engineered microbes are almost always far less fit than
| wild-type. They will survive best in a monoculture
|
| True
|
| But the article did not address this, it should have.
|
| It will be the big question before deployment
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I've always wondered how quickly this effect would ruin the
| monoculture.
|
| Suppose you're treating the engineered microbes like
| sourdough starter: Add them to nutrient solution, wait for
| desired effect, take a small sample, add to next batch.
|
| You'd expect a selective pressure away from the engineered
| outcome, such that after X batches, your samples are overrun
| by wild-ish type mutants. But is that a merely academic
| concern, something that might happen after 500 batches, or
| are you out of luck by batch three?
| etskinner wrote:
| How exactly do you 'wire up' E. coli bacteria? Is the idea here
| that we could somehow string a bunch of them together into a tiny
| battery? Or is it more like using them as the electrolyte in a
| battery?
| p1mrx wrote:
| They turn hydrogen+carbon and oxygen into protons, electrons,
| and CO2.
|
| The protons and electrons serve the same role as hydrogen in a
| fuel cell.
| schainks wrote:
| It's more like using them as an electrolyte, but it acts like a
| battery (you charge by adding waste, discharge by extracting
| electrons), I guess? You run the bioreactor with some special
| electrodes that bacteria like to touch, and then directly
| harvest electrons from the medium as the little ones grow.
|
| Mohammed and Melania (the lead researchers on the paper) are
| both super talented scientists. I had the pleasure of meeting
| them both in SF last year when they were on the west coast for
| a conference.
| m1n1 wrote:
| One step closer to AI robots that can subsist by eating. :)
| mpreda wrote:
| I think researching in the opposite direction has more potential.
| Let me explain:
|
| what we want isn't to generate electricity through bacteria that
| digests wastewater -- what we want is to feed electricity to the
| bacteria that digests wastewater, just to enable that bacteria to
| do it better, faster, and "wider".
|
| Let's imagine I have a septic tank behind the house. I don't need
| to find out how I can run a LED light from the bacteria in the
| tank. What I want is to plug that biosystem to electrical power,
| so that the septic tank biorection is 100x speeded up, in a 10x
| smaller tank. Even if it uses up a few Watts of power.
|
| And, once we do that, think of the possibilities that open up:
| once you feed power into the biosystem, it becomes energetically
| possible to drive bioreactions in the opposite direction from the
| energy gradient, basically driving the reaction "up the hill"
| with electrical power. Now that's something!
| rcxdude wrote:
| One important version of this idea is using electricity to
| drive photosynthesis. If this manages to be even 10% efficient
| it could massively increase the amount of calories available
| without much increase in land usage (or ecosystem damage). Of
| course I suspect this wouldn't produce particularly good food,
| so it would probably be something of last resort.
| adolph wrote:
| > using electricity to drive photosynthesis
|
| Like using electric lights in a shady warehouse?
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Or blasting UV light in perfectly legitimate warehouses.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9551646/
| whatshisface wrote:
| You could check the idea by throwing sugar into the septic
| tank.
| mpreda wrote:
| Yes, and that might help the reaction. Also heating the tank
| to the optimum temperature (for the particular bacteria)
| helps, optimum pH, etc. helps. But the point is to provide
| the "help" with electricity directly.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What the sugar and electricity have in common that the pH
| and temperature don't is the possibility of setting up an
| ecosystem that crowds out the original one for nutrients
| but doesn't process the waste, due to having another more
| effective energy source.
| ashin wrote:
| You can do this to some degree with a septic tank aerator pump.
| KarlKode wrote:
| We actually do this as the basins populated with bacteria that
| process our waste are heated to improve their metabolic
| activity and speed up the process.
|
| edit: in regular waste processing plants
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