Cars running on thin air
The cars might run on air with the help of an enzyme found in the roots of soybeans.
It is called Vanadium Nitrogenase, and it usually produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, but can also turn carbon monoxide into propane, which is the gas that is burning in the stoves. Most scientists say that the research is only at the beginning, but it is very important because it could be an alternative to the traditional fuel solutions and might produce environmentally friendly fuel and gasoline from air. Markus Ribbe, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine, says that it is a very common soil bacteria and that they observed it has an unusual behavior when being in the soil around the roots of nitrogen fixing plants like soybeans, so it was studied in connection with Azotobacter vinelandii, which uses some enzymes to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia and other chemicals, which are used by the plants because they help them grow. One of the enzymes, vanadium nitrogenase, was isolated by the researchers in order to produce ammonia, and they removed the nitrogen and oxygen that the enzyme commonly uses and replaced them with carbon monoxide. Lacking oxygen and nitrogen, vanadium nitrogenase started to turn the carbon monoxide into short chains of carbon two and three atoms long.
The three carbon chain is called propane, which is exactly the gas used for cooking in all the United States kitchens. Jonas Peters, a scientist at Cal Tech, says that the new discovery related to vanadium nitrogenase is a scientific breakthrough and that it will surely have some major economic and industrial implications. This means that if they find ways to make longer carbon chains there is the possibility that synthetic liquid fuels are created. Ribbe thinks that he will be able to modify the enzyme so that it can produce longer strands of carbon which might create liquid gasoline. If this discovery proves to be working, cars might work in the future only by extracting gas from the air around them and will not need oil any more. But Ribbe and Peters say that this will not come any time soon, because there is more research to be done and it is quite difficult to extract vanadium nitrogenase. This enzyme was widely known to the scientists because it is very important for agriculture, but the technology that allows them to extract, grow and store large quantities of vanadium nitrogenase has recently developed, so further research will be needed before cars will be able to run on air.
