Team:Victoria Wellington/Inspiration

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Victoria

Inspiration

Background:

Batteries have become a crucial tool in the lives of humans. The ability to store electrical energy as chemical energy, is not only critical in the running of our everyday lives, for example, to power our phones and laptops, but also, batteries provide a vital source of back-up energy, which allows society to recover when the normal power supply is interrupted (RELiON, 2018). On earth today, two types of secondary batteries dominate the market; the Lithium-ion battery and the Lead-Acid battery, and their demand is only on the rise:

Fig 1. The predicted annual energy demand required from batteries until 2030, from Bloomberg New Energy Finances. This increase is mainly due to the increased production of electric vehicles (EV)

Fig 2. The predicted annual energy demand from just EVs alone until the year 2030. This is catalysed by the reduction in the cost of batteries. Bloomberg New Energy Finances. (Desjardins, 2016)

However, both Lithium-ion and Lead-Acid batteries have challenges associated with them that will make their continued use in the future problematic and the need for a replacement apparent. Finding this replacement is the goal of our iGEM project.

The Problems with Lithium-ion and Lead-Acid Batteries

Lithium-ion is the industries go to battery for lightweight and powerful cells, for example, in household electrics, grid storage and EVs (RELiON, 2018). However, this battery has a weak link in its supply chain: cobalt. Cobalt is a rare metal that is primarily used by the industry to construct the cathodes of Lithium-ion batteries, with other secondary uses including the construction of powerful magnets and alloys (Battery University, 2018). For context on how cobalt demanding the Lithium-ion industry is, China is the largest consumer of cobalt on the planet, with 80% of their total cobalt consumption being used by the battery industry alone (US Geological Survey, 2018).

The Mineral Commodities Summary of 2019 predicts the planets current total Cobalt reserves amount to 6,900,000 metric tons, with 140,000 metric tons mined in 2018. Therefore, if we assume the demand for cobalt will not increase from its 2018 level (which is certainly will), then we will be out of cobalt in 50 years. Furthermore, Bloomberg New Energy Finances (BNEF) predicts there will be a notable supply shortage of Cobalt by 2025 due to increasing demand (Andrews, 2018).

Fig 3. Global demand for Cobalt, in thousands of metric tons, by sector (Andrews, 2018).

To complicate matters, 60% of the planets total Cobalt reserves are situated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a politically unstable country with, according to the UN World Report of 2019, at least 140 currently active armed groups operating within its territory (UNWR, 2019). This not only makes the supply of cobalt unreliable, but its acquisition dangerous as well.

Fig 4. Mine production from the Congo from 1980 to 2016 (Andrews, 2018). Note the effect of various wars affecting the Cobalt supply, for example, the 1992-1993 civil war.

When it comes to the lead acid battery, the immediate issue of concern is disposal and recycling, rather than supply. About 90% of our used lead acid batteries are recycled, mainly by developing countries in South America, Asia and Africa (Zafar, 2018 and EPA, 2019). However, this recycling process is dangerous, and lead poisoning claims the lives of roughly 3 million workers a year (Zafar, 2018).

Furthermore, the lead and sulphuric acid of improperly disposed batteries can contaminate the ground water with dissolved lead particles (Zafar, 2018).

Project Goals

To the iGEM team at Victoria Wellington, it was clear that we wanted to base our project on a resolution to this battery crisis. Thus, we decided on our project goals to be:

1. Make a powerful and long-lasting energy cell that can fill a niche in the market.
2. Make both the acquisition of the raw materials and the production of the energy cell sustainable.

We decided on these project goals because of an interview we had with Ashwath Sundaresan, the Senior Commercialisation Manager at Viclink. He gave us many insights which helped us craft our project goals. To summarise the interview, he said:

• The project cannot be sold on sustainability alone. It must be able to rival what is already on the market with preferably some sort of competitive advantage. Ineffective or unreliable products fail, even if they are sustainable.
• The project must fill a niche already in the market. Investors do not want to redesign entire ideas to fit your new power source. Work with the market, not against it.
• The project would be at an advantage if it used manufacturing techniques and materials already in abundance. This will keep costs low.
• Different power sources suit different tasks. See what your power source is strong at, then market it off its strengths.

With these in mind we designed our project.

Project Idea

Our project idea is to make an Enzymatic Fuel Cell (EFC) which oxidises glycerol to carbon dioxide in order to create electricity. As the name suggests, the oxidation is carried out by a variety of enzymes in an enzymatic pathway, which is different to standard batteries that use inorganic chemistry to oxidise metals. We decided to make our fuel of choice glycerol for two reasons:

1. Glycerol is a byproduct of biodiesel production and is currently in huge surplus. For every 100 Kg of biodiesel produced, 10 Kg of glycerol by-product is also produced. This is due to the trans-esterification of fats with methanol. In 2012, 22.7 million metric tons of biodiesel was produced worldwide, yielding 2.27 million metric tons of glycerol. This is predicted to increase to 36.9 million metric tons of biodiesel produced worldwide by 2020. Glycerol does have uses in various industries; however, its surplus has become such a concern that some biodiesel producers now consider it a waste product and burn it on site for power (Bhaskar, 2018). By using the surplus waste of an existing market, we hope to make our EFC more economically viable, which helps in achieving our first goal, while also putting a waste product to better use, which helps in achieving our second goal.

   Fig 5. Transesterification of fats to esters for biodiesel.

   Furthermore, using glycerol we can also make our fuel cell carbon neutral, which helps us achieve our second goal of sustainability. The oxidation of glycerol for electricity creates carbon dioxide, which can then be taken up by plants who use it to make fats (vegetable oils). These can then be farmed for their fats to make biodiesel, completing the cycle.


Fig 6. Schematic of the theoretical carbon neutrality of the Enzymatic Fuel Cell.

2. The second reason why glycerol was chosen is because of its relative simplicity. Glycerol is a 3 carbon, non-cyclic molecule, common to most organisms. Therefore, there are lots of enzymes that can work with glycerol, which gives us a lot of options when designing our enzymatic pathway.

The enzyme pathway the EFC will use is not a natural one and will be synthetically constructed by the iGEM team. The desired enzyme producing genes will be synthetically created and then cloned into E.coli for enzyme production. The enzymes can then be extracted to build the EFC.

We will attempt to improve the catalytic efficiency and half-life of our enzymes using the process of error prone PCR. By copying our gene repeatedly with a process that makes mistakes, we hope to introduce beneficial mutations into the genes, in turn creating more valuable enzymes. We will detect these beneficial mutations with screens.

Project Inspiration and Why Our Project is a Useful Application of Synthetic Biology.

This idea was inspired by an EFC we saw in Nature by Zhang et al (2014). Their EFC system was built to oxidise maltodextrin (a glucose polymer) to carbon dioxide using 13 enzymes that form a synthetic pathway. The paper inspired us to take on an EFC project of our own, mainly because, we knew iGEM is a multi-disciplinary competition, and that this project offered so many different areas of research for biologists, electrochemists, engineers and more.

Another inspiration for the team is the EFCs produced by the Minteer group, who blend inorganic and organic chemistry to make better fuel cells (Minteer, 2017). We have also taken this idea up into the design of our own fuel cells to improve them.

Fig 7. The Maltodextrin Enzymatic Pathway. The main inspiration for our iGEM project. (12)

References:

iGEM Victoria 2019