Dr. Barry Bruce was cleaning his car and a science magazine fell on the ground. On the page that it opened to was an article about a study of photosynthetic hydrogen production, conducted by Elias Greenbaum.
As Bruce read this article, inspiration struck when he realized that Greenbaum’s study was very closely related to his own work as a graduate student. After reading the article, Bruce purified Greenbaum’s system and brought it to Greenbaum, resulting in the 2001 paper, Nanoscale Photosynthesis.
“Probably, if I hadn’t been washing the car and had this fall out right to the center,” Bruce said, “I wouldn’t have had these thoughts.”
Bruce has been working on photosynthesis since 1975. He created his first photosynthetic complex as an undergraduate student at the University of California.
In his lab, which studies two aspects of membrane biochemistry related to photosynthesis, Bruce and his team of graduate and undergraduate students are working on what they like to call “applied photosynthesis.”
“We take the elements that allow algae capable of converting sunlight into chemical energy and we take it out and put it into a new context,” Bruce said.
This process can take the system plants have for creating energy and create an electric current or even create molecular hydrogen.
“The beauty of that is there is virtually no pollution; you just use water,” Bruce said.
Bruce feels that we could use the hydrogen that the system produces as a new alternative energy source.
Bruce ran his catalytic system for 90 days without any loss of activity.
“We’re talking about a pretty robust system that could work,” Bruce said. “Maybe not forever, but maybe for a year.”
Bruce thinks this system could be used in the summer, when there is the greatest solar intensity. Because the panels would be renewable and biodegradable, you could potentially just throw them out after the summer.
Solar panels today have a shelf life of 30 years, but what many people do not know is that it takes seven to ten years of running to pay back the initial cost of making them. Bruce is hoping that his system will take less energy to produce but last a lot shorter.
Though Bruce does not know exactly how cost-effective his process is because he is still in the laboratory scale, he said that many of the techniques they use in the lab are simple and could be done in a relatively low-tech fashion.
The other major problem with solar panels today is that they use rare metals. When researchers talk about how much energy can come from solar panels, they talk about hundreds of square miles, but this might not even be possible due to limited resources on the planet.
“This could be one place that we have a renewable resource,” Bruce said.
There are many potential uses for the system that Bruce and his team are creating. This could become a viable source of environmentally friendly energy.
“If it’s more efficient, then I think it’s a good idea, and yes I’d use them,” Melanie Daley, freshman in biological sciences, said.
