Transcript for Roger Ely

I'm Roger Ely. And here at OSU

I'm an Associate Professor in the department of

Biological and Ecological Engineering.

Starting about seven or eight years ago,

about eight years ago, I wanted to get into

research dealing with sustainable energy, renewable energy.

And- so what we're doing now is what some people

call bio-solar hydrogen production.

Other people call it photo-biological hydrogen production.

But what that means is really that we work

with bacteria that use solar energy

to split water and make hydrogen.

Hydrogen is a very energy-rich compound.

It's about three times more energy-rich

on a pound basis- mass basis, than gasoline.

In general, we're working with organisms

called cyanobacteria.

And cyano is kind of like cyan the color,

you know a blue-green.

And the reason that we work with them is

that first of all they have a full complement

of photosynthetic capabilities. So they have

all of the photosynthetic enzymes that allow

them to carry out all of the functions of photosynthesis,

oxygenic photosynthesis, which means

they split water and make oxygen

Everything that we do is so dependent

on energy. And you look around you and

you know- this camera that's recording this,

if you were to actually look at

the amount of energy that's embodied in that camera

from the mining and the manufacturing of

whatever metals are there and whatever plastics

and etcetera, etcetera,

all the way to the marketing and getting it

to the store and buying it and all that.

There's a lot of energy that's there

that we don't think about.

And so I started think about issues

around the world and everything

came back to energy.