In our last episode of the Bloom video series, we saw how biofuel is made from food waste. The worldwide concern about climate change is making us think about new and creative solutions. Now we are back in Andalusia, in Spain, at the University of Córdoba. My name is Raquel and this time I will visit researchers who are working with microalgae and we will hear how these magical microorganisms can create energy in the form of hydrogen. Most of us have heard about hydrogen. It has captured the attention of many researchers and there are many new technologies that will see it becoming an everyday fuel. Yet there are no natural sources of hydrogen. It has to be made or extracted and today more than 95% of this gas comes from fossil-based sources, which means it is not sustainable nor carbon-free because CO2 is released when it is produced. But a small percentage comes from natural or renewable resources such as wind or solar energy. This is known as green hydrogen. And as we will see in this video, our tiny friends microalgae are experts in making hydrogen. We are working with one microalgae which is able to produce hydrogen. It's able to use the sunlight and use that energy to produce hydrogen. But let me briefly explain what microalgae are. Microalgae are like the algae we can see when we go to the beach, but just much, much smaller. But they grow very quickly thanks to the huge amounts of CO2 they consume. You can think of them as little bioreactors that produce a lot of good stuff. And besides, they are extremely flexible and can adapt to many situations. They can even live in polluted water and, as they grow, make the water less polluted. Microalgae can produce different kinds of biofuels. For example, biodiesel from accumulation of lipids, bioethanol. Very interesting also, they produce hydrogen. Hydrogen is a different kind of biofuel which is 100% clean. It's supposed to be the biofuels of the future. For me it's very interesting and exciting to see that a unicellular very small cell is able to use the sunlight, just water and CO2 to produce hydrogen. So it's a very easy way to get a biofuel. What would it happen if I drink something of this microalgae? It would be a great experiment, but I am not going to taste it. The green stuff is the microalgae and they release an invisible gas which is hydrogen. Microalgae are photosynthetic organisms and they are able to harness the solar energy and fix CO2 and this allows a process of electron transfer within the cell that with proton is able at the end to produce hydrogen. There are different ways to make this gas. The research is about finding the optimal conditions to make the process really efficient. The researchers here are working with a combination of freshwater algae and a specific bacteria which are able to produce hydrogen too. In the growing room they control a variety of parameters. They first grow the microalgae for a few days and then trigger the hydrogen production process. Neda Fakhimi shows us how you can test the result, the amount of hydrogen. how you can test the result, the amount of hydrogen. So we count the amount of each component in this amount of headspace. So, here we now have hydrogen, but is it ready to be used as fuel for transport? Yes, it can be stored in a tank and be used in electric cars equipped with fuel cells. In these fuel cells, hydrogen is used to produce electricity, which then powers the car. As David said before, hydrogen itself is 100% clean because it does not have any CO2 emissions. Simply put, when this gas reacts with oxygen, it produces two things, electricity and water. So, hydrogen is a zero-emission fuel that will propel cars, trucks, trains and even planes and rockets. It is very important for many industries too. To find out more about the future of this fuel the Blum team spoke to hydrogen expert Horst Steinmüller from the Austrian Research and Development Center on Renewable Gases called BIFA. Hydrogen will be one of the solutions for a carbon-free economy because you can use hydrogen in different kinds of our industrial life. You can use it as fuel in cars or ships, you can use it as a reduction medium in the industry, but you can also use it as storage material. If you want really to decarbonize our economy, then this hydrogen has to come from renewable sources. Otherwise, if you stick to the fossil, you will not decarbonize it. So, the research in Cordoba is to bring about efficiency needed for the microalgae to produce lots of hydrogen so that it becomes an important source of green hydrogen, just like the one we get from wind, water and solar power. Thanks microalgae! And it's nature engineered that on its own. Imagine what the future would look like. Billions of microalgae living in large tanks and giving us the gift of hydrogen and many other sustainable materials. And it is even possible that they will help us clean polluted water during this process. If your wishes come true, what does it look like? We are not going to grow the algae just for hydro production. We are going to use algae for many different things. We can produce cosmetics, we can do bioremediation, we can produce other biofuels. So it will be like a multi-factory. And that is what bioeconomy is about. To make optimal use of a natural resource and to close the loops between what we produce and what we consume. So join us for a bioeconomy future. Perhaps the next pass you take might use fuel that is made by nature.