A consortium of six UK universities is building biological fuel cells that generate electricity directly from waste water, glucose, and hydrogen gas using living microbes or purified enzymes. This matters because current fuel cells often rely on expensive precious metals like platinum and energy-intensive chemical processes. Biological fuel cells offer a greener alternative by harnessing biological catalysts—either whole microorganisms or isolated enzymes—to convert organic materials into electricity at potentially lower cost and environmental impact. If the research succeeds, it could transform how we treat waste water and generate power simultaneously. Water treatment plants might one day produce electricity while cleaning sewage, reducing both energy bills and reliance on fossil fuels. The technology could also enable portable power from biological sources, cutting the need for rare metals in electronics and hydrogen production. The consortium combines microbiology, electrochemistry, materials science, and computational modelling to tackle fundamental challenges: understanding how microbial communities interact with electrodes, optimising enzyme attachment, and designing synthetic enzyme mimics. An industrial club with partners in water management and fuel cells will help steer the work toward real-world applications.
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A consortium of teams from 6 universities aims to achieve major advances in a technology that potentially produces electricity directly from sustainable biological materials and air, in devices known as biological fuel cells. These devices are of two main types: in microbial fuel cells micro-organisms convert organic materials into fuels that can be oxidised in electrochemical cells, and in enzymatic fuel cells electricity is produced as a result of the action of an enzyme (a biological catalyst). Fuels that can be used include (1) pure biochemicals such as glucose, (2) hydrogen gas and (3) organic chemicals present in waste water.The Consortium programme involves a unique combination of microbiology, enzymology, electrochemistry, materials science and computational modelling. Key challenges that the Consortium will face include modelling and understanding the interaction of an electrochemical cell and a population of micro-organisms, attaching and optimising appropriate enzymes, developing and studying synthetic assemblies that contain the active site of a natural enzyme, optimising electrode materials for this application, and designing, building and testing novel biological fuel cells.A Biofuel Cells Industrial Club is to be formed, with industrial partners active in water management, porous materials, microbiology, biological catalysis and fuel cell technology. The programme and its outcomes will be significant steps towards producing electricity from materials and techniques originating in the life sciences. The technology is likely to be perceived as greener than use of solely chemical and engineering approaches, and there is considerable potential for spin off in changed technologies (e.g. cost reductions, reduction in the need for precious metals, biological catalysts for production of hydrogen by electrolysis).
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