This is weird…
Will termites replace fossil fuels as a power source?
From Wikipedia:
One of the US Department of Energy’s most enduring goals is to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of cleaner energy, such as hydrogen produced from plant biomass fermentation. Termites may help reach this goal through metagenomics.
Termites are capable of producing up to two liters of hydrogen from fermenting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the planet’s most efficient bioreactors.
Termites achieve this high degree of efficiency by exploiting the metabolic capabilities of about 200 different species of microbes that inhabit their hindguts.
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The microbial community in the termite gut efficiently manufactures large quantities of clean hydrogen. By sequencing the termite’s microbial community, it may be possible to get a better understanding of these biochemical pathways.
Termites eat wood, but cannot extract energy from the complex lignocellulose polymers within it. These polymers are broken down into simple sugars by fermenting bacteria in the termite’s gut, using enzymes that produce hydrogen as a byproduct. A second wave of bacteria uses the simple sugars and hydrogen to make the acetate the termite requires for energy. If it can be figured out which enzymes are used to create hydrogen, and which genes produce them, this process could be scaled up with bioreactors to generate hydrogen from woody biomass, such as poplar, in commercial quantities.
Sceptics regard this as unlikely to be a carbon-neutral commercial process due to the energy inputs. For decades, researchers have sought to house termites on a commercial scale (like worm farms) to break down woody debris and paper but funding has been scarce and the problems of developing a continuous process that does not disrupt the termites’ homeostasis have not been overcome.
So it looks doubtful that termites will become the source of a fossil fuel revolution, but they could be one piece of the puzzle toward finding alternative energy sources in future.
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