Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel
news.uic.edu
news.uic.edu
Especially since UC Berkeley announced a similar breakthrough last year.[1] Wikipedia points out that artificial photosynthesis was first achieved in 1912, and some of the same claims were made back then. There are lots of artificial photosynthesis projects. One of the best was in 2011, the first "artificial leaf"[3]. It ran for 44 hours.
The usual questions apply. How efficient is this? Does the catalyst get used up, or crud up with contaminants, and if so, how fast? What limits the life of the system? What are the costs like? (Excessive catalyst cost has been a problem.) Is this better than all the other groups doing similar work?
Artificial photosynthesis may be useful someday, but this probably isn't the big breakthrough that makes it a commercial product. That may come, though.
[1] http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/04/16/major-advance-in-artifi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis [3] https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...
To be fair, making statements like that can help you get to that stage. It sucks that this is how it works, but playing the game is understandable.
They don't really say that they are cost comparable to gasoline, they just make the obvious statement that if something were as cheap as gasoline that would be a big deal.
I guess hyping these advances is supposed to make it easier to get funding for further research in the area. The sceptic in me expects them to hit the market right after the first fusion power plant comes online (another technology that is hyped for decades as "just around the corner").
The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.
We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype.
There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. Here's a shady group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation that used the hype to raise money: In 1977, Executive Director Morris Levitt asserted that nuclear fusion power plants could be built by 1990 if the U.S. spent $50 to $100 billion on research.
I was at the NY world's fair, I think it was 1960 (56 yrs ago). I remember walking through an exhibit that showed fusion. They had a chitload of capacitors in a bank that dumped all the power into a big electric spark. It looked impressive and sounded great. They implied fusion was almost ready.
Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it.
Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc...
Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields.
An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in!
Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries.
Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk.
The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.
Deaths from fusion and nuclear on the other hand are very unpredictable. It is easy to imagine that year after year, no people die. And then suddenly millions of people die. That means that equating actual danger with observed-deaths-so-far is just not possible.
Also, I am not sure of the choice of the Poisson distribution suggested above. Roofers are experienced at walking on rooftops, and die due to, well, accidents. That and roofing work is fairly consistent. This number would follow some sort of normal or Poisson distribution, but homeowners are typically only used to a ladder to clean rain gutters out, not roofing or rooftop walking.
Death of roofers/installers during initial installation were the numbers I was quoting from Australia. I think homeowner fatalities will top the roofers in areas with increasing solar panel installations. I would think a Weibul distribution with a Beta of 0.5 would better suit this scenario to model all of the inexperienced homeowners cleaning their solar panels monthly, and then dropping off (no pun intended) after reports and education on working at heights diffuses into the populace.
Yes, and they have been saying that for 50 years . . .
Fission was first done in 1938, by 1956 there was a commercial reactor.
Given that sort of time frame and the fact that fusion research was well underway it seemed that a decade or two was all that was needed.
Then you had breakthroughs with Tokomaks and so on, each time it seemed that fusion was potentially close.
There's a really good book called 'The Sun in a Bottle' that goes into more detail.
http://www.americansecurityproject.org/lockheed-martin-outli...
If not there really should be
I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.
Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.
I do agree that the university press release isn't going to critically evaluate the work of its own researchers. That's too bad, perhaps, but it hardly renders the original result uninteresting.
Artificial photosynthesis may be old, but the advances in this work appear aimed at overcoming precisely the problems Animats raised, like catalyst preservation and efficiency.
Put another way, just because a university gushes about the work of its faculty doesn't mean the faculty's work is crap.
Slashdot voting options!
There are startups in this area. Here's HyperSolar. They have their own proprietary "nanoparticle" technology.[2] They announced success in 2012. No product yet.
That's why reports of "breakthroughs" in this area have to be viewed skeptically. There have been a lot of claimed breakthroughs that didn't pan out.
This problem looks more like a long, slow slog to something that works well enough to use. Silicon solar cells were like that. Efficiency has slowly improved since the 1950s. Manufacturing processes have slowly improved. There was no "breakthrough"; the curves of efficiency and cost per unit over time are smooth, not discontinuous.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-09-efficiency-solar-hydrogen-produ... [2] http://www.hypersolar.com/application.php
The number of solar cell 'breakthroughs' that you read about in a given year is >= 5 or so, but 3 years later nobody even remembers what they were about. Meanwhile, the real improvements are incremental and process cost related, and those improvements then get eaten up by tariffs.
If you had actually read the whole article before commenting you would know the answer to these questions. Your questions about efficiency are however valid.
'20x cheaper than some other catalysts' what does that mean exactly?
'special fluid keeps catalyst sites clean' does it get used up in the process? Is the fluid expensive and hard to manufacture?
The devil is in the detail here.
How exactly does this compare to other state of the art similar approaches? 10x cheaper? 2x cheaper? on par?
I think it's pretty valid to argue the article is doing some vague hand waving without actually saying if this is meaningfully better than other approaches.
Probably that's because plants are typically only 2-3% efficient when it comes to their use of sunlight, and then it's still a long way (energetically and logistically) to usable fuel or electricity. Plants are really not a good comparison benchmark here.
1. tungsten diselenide
2. an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate
Just offhand I see selenium in #1, and fluorine and boron going into #2. There's some expense there, and some handling and exposure dangers. If you have a lot of these cells around, are there public health dangers either in handling or in disposing/recycling old ones?
> In fact, he said, the new catalyst is 1,000 times faster than noble-metal catalysts — and about 20 times cheaper.
> The combination of water and the ionic liquid makes a co-catalyst that preserves the catalyst’s active sites under the harsh reduction reaction conditions,
No mention of efficiency compared to photovoltaic cells.
Conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) into fuels is an attractive solution to many energy and environmental challenges. However, the chemical inertness of CO2 renders many electrochemical and photochemical conversion processes inefficient. We report a transition metal dichalcogenide nanoarchitecture for catalytic electrochemical CO2 conversion to carbon monoxide (CO) in an ionic liquid. We found that tungsten diselenide nanoflakes show a current density of 18.95 milliamperes per square centimeter, CO faradaic efficiency of 24%, and CO formation turnover frequency of 0.28 per second at a low overpotential of 54 millivolts. We also applied this catalyst in a light-harvesting artificial leaf platform that concurrently oxidized water in the absence of any external potential.
Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
I agree with all the rest of your factors, though high CO2 is likely not a mark in Alaska's favor. My main concerns with Alaska would be suitably large cleared land area to collect sunlight without damaging the environment, and not having panels get covered in snow in the winter.
From the paper, " We also calculated the solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency (SFE) for our photochemical process (Fig. 2C), obtaining a value of ~4.6% limited by the maximum efficiency of the PV-a-si-3jn cell (~6.0%) (13, 20). This SFE is higher than that of the water-splitting reaction (~2.5%) previously measured using an identical triple-junction photovoltaic (PV-a-si-3jn) cell (20). "
https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/sci/353/6298/4...
We're surrounded by life forms that turn water, CO2 and sunlight into energy. I figure there must be some way to harness this process.
I wonder how much power a large tree takes in from its leaves. If we could interface with its root system, perhaps we could extract newly created starch, and either store it or burn it off.
Image a huge concrete power plant with large trees growing out of it.
[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109739/is-plant-p...
To the GP's point, the total cost of ownership of a plant that makes gasoline-level fuel is going to be more about water and land than anything else.
But the efficiency of solar panels, considering their subsidies, the rare minerals used in their manufacture, their delivery and their maintenance... I'm confident it's a lot less than e.g. coal, even accounting for pollution costs, because if it really were cheaper all-around we'd be using it everywhere!
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...
Well, for any kind of industrial operation you'll want to plant the trees.. then there is the 10-20 year growth period that's kind of a problem for planning flexibility.. and then you need to chop them down and move them to the power plant which is a non-trivial and costly logistical constraint.
All the while the solar cell sits there and produces energy without any intervention. That's a big difference.. Also, wood does not scale well, there is just so much space for forests.
Plants are a pretty neat technology, all told.
For some forestry applications, seeding is done from the air.
Note that if you're growing wood for fuel, you're not worried about grafting stock, or the net health (much), or overcrowding (you can thin later if necessary), etc.
Planting orchards is, as it happens, pretty expensive. But that's also a pretty high-end case, and the expected life is generally 20-50+ years. Upwards of 300 in cases (olives, grapes, and citrus).
The problem is that however much humans need electrical energy, they need food a hell of a lot more. Electrical energy has to come from the land we're not feeding ourselves from, i.e. deserts, grasslands, rooftops.
1. Plant tree 2. Wait 20 years 3. Chop tree 4. Burn tree in steam engine and generate electricity.
However, that's a long time for a relatively small amount of energy (not even counting logistics losses here). Most trees are just not very efficient at converting solar energy/CO2 into fuel (wood). There are better results being looked in with algae that might result in fuel some time, but it's still in research.
You literally just cut it down, let it dry for a bit, and throw it into the exact same plants that burn coal.
It's not going to replace other power sources, but it is commonly done.
For this reason, I'm always skeptical of atmospheric capture projects. It's just got to be more efficient to capture from a mixture with 20% (or more) CO2 than from a mixture with 0.04%.
The real advantage of atmosphere capture is you can do the capture where the cost is lowest, not where the CO2 is emitted.
Indeed. This brings us to the issue of volumes. A useful carbon capture plant needs to capture at least 100 000 tons of CO2 per year (then we need "just" ~ 10 000 such plants). This means each of these minimal plants has to process an air volume of 250 billion cubic meters of air per year. At an air speed of 1 m/s (you can't flow too fast or there is no time for reaction), and assuming a wildly optimistic 50% capture from the filtered air, you need a reaction area of over 15 000 square meters.
Mind you, that's the area of the membrane which processes air. Add the auxiliary stuff around it, you can add at least another factor of 100 to the area, so each of your 10 000 plants have to be 1.5x the maximum planned size of the Tesla Gigafactory. And we're being optimistic.
> The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.
Doesn't actually say that this is at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline :)
Sly words.
100W/m2 is highly unusual for any place on Earth. Take the most overcast midday conditions you can imagine and they'll exceed 100W/m2 by a comfortable margin. That can be in Germany, Canada, Colombia, or Antarctica. If it's sunny, it's very close to 1000, no matter where you are. Partly cloudy can even exceed 1000, since clouds can reflect additional sunlight onto the ground.
Then there's of course nighttime, which is 0 W/m2.
You will have to work really hard to find conditions of 100 W/m2, which is why they standardize on 1000, itself quite straightforward to find anywhere on Earth.
"10% sounds right" is specious.
If they meant it, it seems like an odd comparison without data if the cell scales with power. If it doesn't, it can't properly utilize bright days and would miss out on most of that average power.
You're only counting the peak hour of the day. And yes, there's also nighttime, morning, afternoon, and evening.
And guess what, nighttime is not zero. The moon gives off some light too.
1. http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/industry-professionals/insola...
And if we ever get batteries to be competitive, it's a long, long way of.
That said, for a little while at least, having liquid fuels is inherently given a bonus relative to electricity only. Of course, you can just make those from the original fossil fuel sources as well...
Honestly it seems like a bit of a mess since each team solving problems locally rarely has all the expertise needed to see the impact globally. I certainly don't, though I've been studying it for many years.
I very much appreciate that things like the CA-GREET models have been trying hard to make it easier to apply wide systems analysis expertise to understand a small part of the overall system without spending years doing the math. But probably it will end up needing to be solved by AlphaGo...
edit: I forgot what it took as input for a sec there..
You don't need a catalytic converter, you can just burn it. But breathing a sigh of relief that we can "safely" dispose of the CO in this way is missing the point rather badly.
"the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels."
Hydrogen and carbon dioxide are the feedstocks for the Fischer-Tropsch process, which produces conventional hydrocarbon fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
In other words, H2 and CO are exactly what you want!
Interesting. How does the CO fertilize the plants?
At the end, you'd just oxidize the CO back to CO2 before release, like a catalytic converter does, or use the CO as a chemical building block to produce hydrocarbons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas
I guess it won't be much different than natural gas from a safety standpoint.
It would be cool.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2014/08/26/mit-c...
It looks like these great promises never quite reach the level where they can get to market and create the impact they claim. Trust me, I really wish it were different, and I root for each and evey one of them to succeed. Maybe military and big corp. snatch the tech before they reach consumers (most likely).
If he can shut up about it containing liquid fuels that are synthesized on the spot, they'll eat it up and hail the finding of the battery holy grail.
Remember the carbon here is coming from the atmosphere, so it's carbon neutral and won't contribute to climate change.
If the process can be scaled up to produce a gallon of gasoline for less than the costs of extracting crude from the ground and refining it - then it will quickly kill off new investment into the fossil fuel extraction industry. As opposed to alternate energy technologies, like electric cars which will take a long time to replace internal combustion engine cars. It would use all of the existing infrastructure, so all it has to be is cheaper for market forces to work their magic.
That's a very big IF, however, so don't get your hopes up.
It's more like using sunlight to recycle CO2...
So, yes.
Is it called "A Tree"? Those things are ancient!
I wonder how many of the scientists who made this discovery would be banned from entering the United States by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
I hate to even further the discussion on this off-topic subject, but the above is simply not true. Here is the official statement (still published in it's original form) directly from Donald Trump's website:
> Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.
This is a far cry from "individuals coming from areas where terrorism is endemic". Regardless of your stance on politics, what that statement suggests is blanket discrimination based on religious belief.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...
Realistically campaigns of all stripes frequently change positions and policy is hardly set in stone. I expect we'll witness numerous "corrections" from all candidates as the election season moves along.
BTW during the Republican and Democrat conventions just concluded, both candidates mentioned policies of this kind. It might be worth the effort to listen to both party's candidates' acceptance speeches since that would represent their current positions.