Microbes are hungry all the time. They’re everywhere in enormous numbers. Perhaps the secret to change is so simple, it’s almost impossible to imagine for us: the fact that—just as countless other living organisms—we are related.
From the tiniest microscopically to the biggest blue whales; everything needs food. Food can include pretty much anything for microbes. So some microbes eat apples, some prefer the milk sugars (lactose) and help us make yoghurt and cheese; many, many microbes like the taste of waste.
When it comes to cleaning our sewage water for example this is very helpful indeed. Microbial biomass in wastewater treatment plants happily consumes billions of puzzle pieces (in the form of nutrients) of the storey disassembling in the water we send down the drain. It also decreases our risk of becoming ill and improves the quality of surface water.Pretty amazing, right?
There are certain microbes on our planet that can turn our food into our fuels. They, too, feed on waste. For four years I’ve studied microbes that eat carbon monoxide, a highly toxic, highly flammable gas that’s produced, among other things, in large amounts during steel production.
Tiny chemists
I studied the carbon monoxide consuming microbes that make ethanol, the biofuel that’s part of our normal fuels, already mixed in to make them a bit greener for several decades.
But most bioethanol produced in the world comes from crops for food.
I put these little microbes in 3 litre glass vessels called bioreactors and let them grow.
My microbes live in bubbles of precious carbon monoxide contained in each bioreactor, a type of food for them. I managed how much carbon monoxide they were allowed to eat, and how fast they were growing. I could add extra food supplies, watch how the microbes reacted to sudden shocks of carbon monoxide or a constant stream of it. Having all of this control I could push my microbes to the very limits of the carbon monoxide eating capacities.
In fact, it’s something that can be scalable in the real world. Full scale factories for converting off gas and other waste streams into bioethanol are being done by a US company LanzaTech. All of that is made possible by microbes, tiny little chemists that we cannot even see with the naked eye: As LanzaTech puts it — ‘Recycling carbon with biology.’
Microbes are small. Yet they can make huge changes, and help us to regain a more circular society, where waste is returned to value.
Reference: Maximilienne Toetie Allaart. Meet the microbes that transform toxic carbon monoxide into valuable biofuel
