Powering the Future with Microbes

How to generate energy using microbes

By JACK M. CACKLER

Published: Wednesday, November 07, 2012

It’s a bright new day in America, filled with challenges and opportunities for the future. A key challenge we face as a species is generating enough energy to sustain and enhance our lives—and doing so in a way that can be relied on indefinitely. Currently, 77.6 percent of the energy produced in the U.S. comes from non-renewable fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, coal, and crude oil. Nuclear plants generate 10.6 percent of our energy, and the remaining 11.8 percent comes from renewable sources. Since global stores of non-renewable resources deplete over time, until we find a way to send organic matter back in time a few million years, we need to plan for a future in which they exist in far fewer quantities. This much is obvious before we even consider the impacts of harvesting and using non-renewables.

Still, renewable energy sources cannot presently meet global demand for energy. I often hear one of two diametrically opposed responses to this information: that fossil fuels are the only effective solution at present and that investment in renewable resources is wasteful, or that fossil fuels are destroying the planet and we should transition entirely to renewable energy immediately.

I would offer a compromise between the two: We should recognize that fossil fuels will compose a significant portion of our energy production in the near-term while at the same time investing considerable resources into making renewable energy abundant, efficient, and safe. While wind, solar, and nuclear energy get considerable attention, another promising solution to the Herculean task of global energy production lies in the hands of our smallest relatives, the humble microbes.