Chemists create methane fuel from sun, carbon dioxide and water (2022)
news.uchicago.edu
news.uchicago.edu
A big problem with these methods, besides abysmal efficiency is that the light that drives the photochemical processes has some probability of generating side reactions that destroy the artificial enzyme. Nature overcomes this with unbelievably complex protein repair structures that literally swap out defective proteins for new ones. We have zero chance of replicating this type of thing anytime soon.
Bio oil from algae is much closer to practical utility than this tech. And electrochemical CO2 reduction will be an even more scalable and practical solution in the near term in my opinion.
Interesting. Mind if I get a link to read up more on the subject? c:
All of these original animations were done by Drew Berry, Veritasium just packaged a few of them in an easy to digest format
I can't find an accessible video on the topic, but you want to look up photosystem II repair. You need to search up D1 replacement in photosystem II.
To get a flavour of the nanomachine aspect of it all, check out this video on electron transport across membranes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4).
Electron transport in proteins is crazy complex and actually amounts to molecular circuits where energy is guided to different spots inside proteins complexes in a unidirectional fashion. This guy is the grand daddy of the field (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7m9-PEiB8).
H2O + CO2 > O2 + CH4
That is water and carbon dioxide in, oxygen and methane out. Good for life support in space. If you had infinite free energy you can easily synthesize methane out of air and water.
it's almost as if nature evolved nano-machines that are far more complex than any we humans can envision today, even with our technology!
“If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel when we find him a stupid mechanic who imitated others, and copied an art which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?“
From THE MEMORABILIA by By Xenophon, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1177/1177-h/1177-h.htm
“Socrates. But now if you had two sorts of things, the one of which presents no clue as to what it is for, and the other is obviously for some useful purpose—which would you judge to be the result of chance, which of design? Ar. Clearly that which is produced for some useful end is the work of design. Soc. Does it not strike you then that he who made man from the beginning (5) did for some useful end furnish him with his several senses—giving him eyes to behold the visible word, and ears to catch the intonations of sound? Or again, what good would there be in odours if nostrils had not been bestowed upon us? what perception of sweet things and pungent, and of all the pleasures of the palate, had not a tongue been fashioned in us as an interpreter of the same? And besides all this, do you not think this looks like a matter of foresight, this closing of the delicate orbs of sight with eyelids as with folding doors, which, when there is need to use them for any purpose, can be thrown wide open and firmly closed again in sleep? and, that even the winds of heaven may not visit them too roughly, this planting of the eyelashes as a protecting screen? (6) this coping of the region above the eyes with cornice-work of eyebrow so that no drop of sweat fall from the head and injure them? again this readiness of the ear to catch all sounds and yet not to be surcharged? this capacity of the front teeth of all animals to cut and of the "grinders" to receive the food and reduce it to pulp? the position of the mouth again, close to the eyes and nostrils as a portal of ingress for all the creature's supplies? and lastly, seeing that matter passing out (7) of the body is unpleasant, this hindward direction of the passages, and their removal to a distance from the avenues of sense? I ask you, when you see all these things constructed with such show of foresight can you doubt whether they are products of chance or intelligence?”
Then in «Against Physicists” by Sextus Empiricus this was cited as:
“Tell me, Aristodemus, are there some people you have admired for their wisdom? Yes, there are, he said. Who are they, then? Well, I have admired Homer for his poetry, Polyclitus for his sculpture, and Zeuxis of course for his painting. [93] And is it not because of the exceptional craftsmanship of their works that you approve of them? Yes, it is, he said. If Polyclitus’ statue, then, also took on life, would you not approve of the artist much more? Definitely. Well, given that when you saw a statue you said that it had been crafted by some skilled person, when you see a human being whose soul’s activity and whose body’s design are good, do you not think that he was crafted by some exceptional mind?”
Hello, fellow old!
I was hinting a bit to the lyrics of the song 'In the year 2525'.
Which is why we need tax credits for this
I’m being downvoted for suggesting we incentivize something that will help us get off fossil fuels
They are appropriate in the short term IF they cause sufficient innovation or economies of scale to kick in.
Often they cause more waste, because tax credits often benefit less efficient and more polluting solutions. Without a very deep and very careful analysis, your best proxy for measuring environmental harm is simply the amount spent.
For example: corn subsidies for ethanol production are significantly harmful for carbon dioxide pollution (via indirect effects like fertilizer production).
How much does abysmal efficiency matter when there are places in the world with virtually unlimited sunlight? Serious question.
That's food for thought... Even if we used all the forests and all the sea life we still wouldn't have enough energy. So we really need to be eat more efficient than natural systems.
This doesn't seem right. Estimates put total biomass at 500-600 billion tons of carbon, and annual biomass production at 100 billion tons of carbon. Meanwhile global carbon emissions from fossil fuels/industry are 35-40 billion tons per year.
Serious answer: Supplying sunlight isn't what's driving cost here.
The problem is that inefficient systems need to be large, and enlarging systems (even 'simple' ponds, etc) makes them more expensive.
gardeners replicate this type of thing daily.
my hunch is that the next big breakthrough will be when they can implement this machinery in a seed.
Aren't solar panels already more efficient at creating energy than photosynthesis?
It's true we haven't found an artificial method of photosynthesis that creates a fuel we can burn that is more efficient than nature, but do we want to?
Re-using the CO2 in the atmosphere certainly beats simply adding to it, I'm guessing that's the point here.
A ton of CO2 is produced by about $150 worth of fuel (oil). So if you can do carbon capture for less than $150/tCO2 it would make more sense to sell the fuel and capture more carbon.
How does this math work?
If it's $149 to recapture, who's paying for this $149? Is the person buying $150 worth of fuel now paying for it also, at ($150 + recapture cost)/gallon?
Or what the sibling suggests, you keep the money as profit / funds for growing the business so you displace traditional oil and you prevent the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere that way.
So if money = energy (which is a wrong assumption), buying that barrel would always be a loss
Solar panels convert light to electricity. Photosynthesis uses light to rebuild molecules into sugars.
Plants are about 1-2% efficient - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
Modern solar cells easily hit 20% efficiency under decent conditions.
> It's true we haven't found an artificial method of photosynthesis that creates a fuel we can burn that is more efficient than nature, but do we want to?
If we want to use airplanes to quickly travel long distances, yes. Or if we want to haul loads to many arbitrary locations.
Similarly most models of "grey goo" would functionally be this: machines autonomously covering the biosphere in more efficient light harvesters.
But, you could generate the entirety of US energy usage from less than 100,000 square miles of solar panels, and quite possibly from less than 50,000 square miles, if you consider wind + solar. That's a lot of land, in one respect, but it's less than, e.g., the amount of land (circa 60,000 square miles) we currently use just to produce ethanol that accounts for less than 10% of just our energy use for small internal combustion engines. The challenge with solar/wind isn't limits on their production due to land, or even infrastructure, it's that they produce intermittently, and only produce electricity, and electricity is challenging to store for extended periods of time so you can match production to demand over time scales from hours to years.
There's nothing but a lack of willpower preventing us from being on 100% solar and wind
It's limitless in that in a closed system not connected to the grid, it's not automatically a bad thing if you waste it. Waste some solar power, nothing happens. Waste some coal or oil and you either have a slick on the ground or a ton of new CO2 in the air
And then you'd have to factor in the fact that basically none of the planet can be covered in solar panels
And then the fact that you wouldn't be able to efficiently transport the energy to where we need it
So yes in theory you put a couple hundred sqkm of solar panels in the Sahara and you're golden, in practice it's much more complex
There's also some research on converting hydrogen and CO2 to edible carbohydrates, either chemically or through hydrogenotrophic or methanotrophic bacteria. That will be a huge revolution for either increasing the carrying capacity of the planet or decreasing humanity's impact on the planet. It will also be a huge boon for countries without much arable land to be able to feed their people without relying on imports. Electricity to food is not quite ready for scaling up yet, but synthetic fuels are absolutely ready to go as soon as solar electricity prices drop just a bit more or fossil fuel prices rise a bit more.
> single process.
Technically, biological photosynthesis consists of two different major processes. You’ve got a membrane complex called „photosystem“ (of which they are two types) and an enzyme called Rubisco. The former drives the light reactions oxidizing water into hydrogen and oxygen (and thereby creating reducing agents and a proton gradient). The latter drives the dark reactions reducing CO2 into various forms of sugar.
In some plants CO2 fixation runs at night and, hence, at a different time than the light reactions. In others, it happens in different cells and, hence, physically separated from the light reactions. CAM and C4 plants, respectively, are more efficient in hot or dry biotopes.
Our ability to release energy from matter is what we have built upon.
Simply so they can get to the more profitable oil.
Absolutely ridiculous waste and damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw
Very interesting stuff! As others already noted, this is probably a more efficient and more robust technology.
Recently Exxon quietly cancelled their algae fuel project. One wonders if it was ever supposed to achieve something or was it just greenwashing.
Short explainer video
https://coryton.com/lab/videos/how-can-we-decrease-carbon-em...
Longer discussion
Sustainable fuels; what are they & when will I be able to buy some?
Who the f* writes this articles?
Probably not good short term solution.
Good thing we split the atom.
Yes, it's a potent greenhouse gas - but it isn't a permanent one. Methane is oxidised in the atmosphere into CO2 eventually.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...
Practically, separating the hydrogen production from water step from the carbon dioxide reduction step is the more plausible route to industrially significant production. Fundamentally I'm pretty sure making what's called 'synthesis gas' (H2 + CO) and feeding that into the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process is the route to long hydrocarbons (i.e. jet fuel) starting with atmospheric CO2 and water, the challenge there is making the CO from the CO2 efficiently.
Alternatively, hydrogen and CO2 can be directly reacted over a cobalt catalyst, producing smaller hydrocarbons like methane and perhaps up to five-carbon molecules at present:
"Cobalt Catalysts Enable Selective Hydrogenation of CO2 toward Diverse Products: Recent Progress and Perspective (2021)"
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c03043
Trying to do it all in one go is scientifically interesting, but not very practical. Even plants break it down into the light reactions (splitting water while generating ATP and NADPH, energy-carrying coupler molecules) and dark reactions (capturing the CO2 and incorporating it into a bisphosphorylated sugar prior to feeding it into the reductive reactions that utilize the products of the light reactions).
It's also not too surprising that plants are not super-efficient at this process, they're under broad evolutionary pressure for a wide variety of processes, such as taking up water and nutrients, reproducing, etc. that don't necessarily revolve around fixing as much carbon as fast as they possibly can. It similar to industrial nitrogen fixation in that manner (of course, atmospheric N2 is 80% of the atmosphere while CO2 is only, what is it now, 420 parts per million).
Also gasoline combustion doesn't just produce CO2. Emissions include NOx, CO, unburnt hydrocarbons - even in this day and age it's a significant amount.
Basically electric cars are cheaper to drive than cars burning fossil fuels which in turn are cheaper to drive than cars burning synthetic fuels.
As prices of things like batteries and renewables come down. Synthetic fuels might become cheaper than fossil fuels since you typically need lots of energy for producing synthetic fuels. If the amount of energy gets low enough it might get close enough to simply charging a battery with the energy and using it. But we're a very long way from that.
(Don't you just love walled academia?)