Publication Date:
2019-10-22
Description:
normous amounts of potential energy lie buried in marine sediments in the form of reduced carbon compounds. The most familiar form of this vast energy reserve is petroleum, which drives the lion's share of today's energy economy. The next most obvious submarine energy reserve, even more abundant than petroleum, is methane. At deep-sea conditions of low temperature and high pressure, large amounts of this natural gas are found in sub-seafloor reservoirs of frozen methane hydrates [1]. Yet there is another abundant, but less obvious, marine energy reserve: sediment-associated organic carbon, which represents about 2% of the dry weight of marine sediments along continental margins. Is it possible to tap into this vast, dispersed form of submarine energy? If so, how? The answer, in part, is that microbes already have tapped into this large energy reserve. Now, in two papers, one in this issue [2] and the other in a previous issue of Science [3], researchers harness microbially generated power by constructing a fuel cell that can exploit the naturally occurring voltage gradient created by microbial activity in marine sediments.
Type:
Article
,
PeerReviewed
Format:
text
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