Making water by combining its components, oxygen and hydrogen, requires a process we know very well from Chemistry textbooks, However, we do not know how to control this process in a way to safely manage the large amount of energy that the process releases. (see post dated November 9, 2010).Aerobic RespirationAll living things (Animals, humans, fungi, algae, bacteria and plants) breathe i.e. take in oxygen from the environment. Their body's biological process breaks down glucose in tissues to release energy.
This process can be over-simplistically described by the following equation: Glucose + Oxygen = Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy
and chemically represented as follows:
C6H12O6 + 6 O2 → 6 CO2 + 6 H2O + Energy
As shown in the above equation, this process creates water as a by-product while releasing energy in the form of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate)
ATP is the main energy source for cell functions. About 30 molecules of ATP are produced from oxidation of 1 molecule of glucose. Some of the water released hydrolyzes ATP to ADP but the rest remains as water in a cell.
If we could synthetically perform the above, we will be creating water using a biological process that Nature perfected a long long time ago.Of course, the biological process of aerobic Respiration is not as simple as shown above and is better represented as follows:
This is the challenge faced by the emerging science of Synthetic Biology when the task is to replicate, scale up and commercially extract water from the atmosphere.
Image Sources: Solarnavigator.net; library.thinkquest.org, Wikipedia
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