Injecting Tiny Proteins Into the Hunt for ‘Clean Coal’

As big engineering fixes go, “clean coal” has proved an elusive concept. Carbon capture projects remain experimental, expensive and energy intensive. But working with some of the tiniest things in nature, scientists are engineering proteins found in living things to trap carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.

“Biomimetic design” is the idea of using nature as a template to create new technologies. Trees are among nature’s most efficient carbon sequestration systems. They trap carbon dioxide and convert it to glucose, placing it in a form in which it stays stable for geologically significant durations.

But at the biochemical level, they are still too slow, according to Michael Drummond, a scientist at the University of North Texas who is trying to identify new “carbon capture” enzymes.

When plants spend about three and half seconds to convert carbon dioxide to glucose during photosynthesis, they are spending an inordinate amount of time. The problem is that an enzyme called RuBisCO, which catalyzes the process, is highly inefficient.

But the basic idea of using biological molecules to capture atmospheric carbon is sound enough to get grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Scientists are studying faster enzymes. One that is getting much new attention is carbonic anhydrase — a protein found in blood, among other places, that captures carbon dioxide exhaled by cells. In one second, the enzyme can change a million molecules of the gas into harmless bicarbonate, according to Jonathan Carley, the vice president of business development at CO2 Solution, a Montreal-based company that is one among the few working on biomimetic design.

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