Using cyanobacteria to produce hydrogen seems to be a good idea for future energy alternative. People have been working on this for many years. What do you think is biggest problem need to address in the future?
If it will work on a large scale I believe that safety will become an issue.
In my opinion, future challenges are more related to scaling-up of processes, large scale production facilities, hydrogen storage, economic contraints, ...and less to the biology.
Agreed. Hydrogen gas requires a much larger volume to store compared to liquid fuels - liquid fuels thus have a very high energy density. Hydrogen production from cyanobacteria would also typically require anaerobic photobioreactors, which are very expensive to build, maintain and run on a large scale. An essential metric is the net-energy ratio - does the bioreactor produce more energy than it consumes (including energy costs of equipment) ?
I totally agree with Norma, safety concerns needs to be addressed first. How safe is hydrogen? It requires only one tenth of energy required by gasoline to ignite, chances of explosion are very high and it produces an invisible flame.
Three different hydrogenase enzymes have been identifi ed and studied in
cyanobacteria; nitrogenase, a reversible bidirectional hydrogenase (Hox), and an uptake hydrogenase (Hup).Cyanobacterial enzymes participating in hydrogen metabolism. Cyanobacteria, depending upon the species, can contain up to three different enzymes capable of participating in hydrogen metabolism. you can try and research about Reversible Hydrogenase. Then you can proceed further.
Hydrogen could be a viable alternative provided two main issues can be addressed: Production and storage. Currently, all "truly" green production processes including cyanobacteria are still at developmental stage.
In terms of yield and efficiency ( g H2 / L / hr), hydrogen production by algae and cyanobacteria is way too low. This could be a bottleneck for commercialization. One alternative and more efficient approach is to conver sugar or biomass to H2 by some bacteria or enzymes.
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