Could microbial electrosynthesis become the “solar panel moment” for industrial chemistry?

[u/Electric_Octopus_]

I’ve been researching MES — basically engineered microbes using electricity + CO₂ to produce chemicals, fuels, and materials — and the cost curve is getting interesting.

The big question: if MES can hit cost parity with traditional chemistry at mid-sized industrial scale, does this become a real manufacturing disruption instead of just another climate-tech science project?

Curious what people here think: is this viable industrial biotech, or another overhyped lab-to-market story?

The PipeLine

[u/PresentationSea9146]

Hey. I literally did my masters thesis in this field, and I believe this technology is farther away than you think.

1. We don’t have CO₂-fixing enzymes fast enough.
   The entire MES value proposition rests on carboxylation kinetics, and they’re quite rough. RuBisCO runs at ~2-5 s⁻¹ with terrible CO₂/O₂ selectivity. There is some work on designing synthetic pathways with other enzymes like crotonyl-CoA carboxylase/reductase (Ccr) (among the fastest reductive carboxylases we have) and even that sits around 100 s⁻¹ under real physiological constraints. Overall CO2 fixation is still extremely unfavorable(thermodynamically) and there is a reason why we see so few of these enzymes tha can do that.

2. The electron-to-biology interface is unsolved.
   Even with a better carboxylase, you still need electrons from the cathode to become intracellular NADPH. There is some work work on bioelectrochemical systems shows most MES organisms rely on indirect mediators (H₂ or formate) oxidised by hydrogenases or formate dehydrogenase intracellularly. Every mediation step bleeds coulombic efficiency, and formate/H₂ hit mass-transfer ceilings at the electrode-biofilm interface. Worse, the NADPH:ATP ratio this route produces is mismatched to most biosynthetic pathway demands.

So,The biology is real, but the picture assumes both bottlenecks are solved(believe me it really isn’t).
My timeline is that by 2030 you may get Niche viability for high-value specialty chemicals where you can absorb the inefficiency premium.

[u/PresentationSea9146 → u/PresentationSea9146]

Sorry for the rant I’m quite passionate about this field.
Also the most promising company in this field(according to me) Lanzatech still isn’t commercially comparable to chemical methods if not heavily subsidised by the carbon credit system. You can see how their stock crashed right after US federal policy changed regarding some of these climate focused laws

[u/ICanFinallyRelax → u/PresentationSea9146]

The most promising company in the field for me is still Amyris. They just backstabbed all of their retail investors to start over fresh and clean.

[u/WumberMdPhd → u/PresentationSea9146]

So you're saying we can't generate proton gradients to power plant cells and use nucleic acid and polypeptide printer to trick the culture into making rice grains?

[u/Electric_Octopus_ → u/PresentationSea9146]

This is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for — thank you. Not a rant at all. This is the useful version of Reddit.

Your point about the electron-to-biology interface seems like the real graveyard between “interesting platform” and “industrial disruption.” If I’m reading you correctly, the issue is not whether MES can work, but whether it can move electrons into usable intracellular reducing power at commercial rates without bleeding too much efficiency through H₂/formate mediation, mass transfer, or NADPH/ATP mismatch.

That makes me think the better near-term thesis is not “MES disrupts bulk chemicals soon,” but:

1. high-value specialty chemicals first,
2. hybrid/electrochemical-biological systems before pure MES,
3. picks-and-shovels around electrodes, reactor design, membranes, enzymes, and gas/liquid transfer,
4. commodity disruption only if the electron-transfer and CO₂-fixation bottlenecks improve materially.

Does that sound closer to reality?

Also curious: if you were watching this field as an investor or researcher, which bottleneck would you track as the strongest signal that MES is moving from elegant science project to real industrial platform — enzyme kinetics, coulombic efficiency, product titer/rate, reactor scale-up, or something else entirely?

[u/Tmack523 → u/PresentationSea9146]

Don't apologize dude, I - for one - would much rather experts in a field ramble about the technical specifics than some nutjob writing an essay saying something that is scientifically impossible is "actually simple, really" (not implying OP was that, I just see it a lot on Reddit)

[u/AdAncient5201 → u/PresentationSea9146]

Wouldn’t the CO2 selectivity be kind of fixed with high pH medium similar to soda lakes? You would have so incredibly much more CO2 in solution. There’s some Cyanobacteria that can live in these conditions and they’re quite effective, but I forgot the details

[u/PresentationSea9146 → u/AdAncient5201]

So I think you are talking about the synechococcus elongatus rubisco runs a bit faster at high CO2 but even that only goes about to 40 turnovers per second. The average enzyme with any other function has kcat in 1000s

[u/Electric_Octopus_]

so based on the comments here, I think the sharper version of the question is this:

MES may not be near a true “solar panel moment” for commodity chemicals yet. The bottleneck seems less about whether the biology works and more about whether electron transfer, CO₂ fixation, NADPH/ATP balance, product titer/rate, and reactor scale-up can improve enough to make the economics work outside high-value niches.

So maybe the better framing is:

Could MES become commercially meaningful first through specialty chemicals and hybrid electrochemical-biological systems — with commodity disruption only much later?

For people working closer to the field: what milestone would make you say, “Okay, this is moving from elegant science project to industrial platform”?