Termites

These little wood-eating pests may seem like an unnecessary nuisance when your house has to be fumigated to get rid of them, but those same bugs have great potential in new, renewable energy sources.

Biomimicry

As I mentioned in my earlier post, biomimicry is learning from the designs of nature and applying that to solve problems.

Why Termites?

Termites are a strange sort; they live in the dark much of the time, eating the parts of plants that most animals find inedible. To accomplish this, they rely on microorganisms in their stomachs that secrete enzymes to digest wood matter.

One of the things that these enzymes convert wood into is hydrogen - which can be used in hydrogen fuel cells to create energy. Termites can convert a single sheet of paper into two liters of hydrogen, and are among the most efficient bioreactors in the world.

Another thing that termites create in their stomachs is acetate, a kind of alcohol, which they use for energy. If we could harness the enzymes that perform this miraculous task, we could convert large amounts of plant matter directly into ethanol, a much cleaner fuel that has gained some interest in recent years.

The enzymes are catalysts, chemicals that speed up chemical reactions, for converting the plant matter, called cellulose, into alcohol. Cellulose is different from plant matter that we eat, like corn, because it's the part of the plant that we normally can't eat. This includes things like wood and corn husks, which would normally be disposed of or burned. Because the enzymes work well with even the parts that we don't eat, instead of corn or sugar cane - which we do eat, using it doesn't effect our food supply, and there is more food to go around for everyone.