Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
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Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#2It sure sounds promising, but it'd be good to see some more efficiency numbers. All there is in the article is this:
"A one-liter reactor full of Nocera’s bacteria can capture 500 liters of atmospheric CO2 per day, he said. For every kilowatt hour of energy they produce, they’ll remove 237 liters of CO2 from the air."
By my reckoning that works out to about 80 watts, continuous. Solar irradiance is roughly a kilowatt per square meter, so to get 80 watts at 10% efficiency you need nearly a square meter, which leaves your 1-liter reactor stretched to a millimeter thick. Hard to imagine a 1mm thick mat of bacteria absorbing 10% of the light.
The limiting factor really is area, not volume. By that metric, solar panels are still twice as efficient. Still, it would be good to have solar panels that grow themselves!
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#3FWIW,
“This isn’t solving your CO2 problem,” he said. ”I’m taking CO2 out of the air, you burn it and you put the CO2 back. So it’s carbon neutral. I’m not going to reverse 400 ppm of CO2. But you’re not going to use any more stuff out of the ground.”
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#4The headline is seriously misleading, the energy comes from sunlight which is used to split water into hydrogen. And the bacteria use the hydrogen as an energy source to create biomass from CO2. That biomass is mostly in burnable fuel.
The article is very interesting, but the headline makes it sound like a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics.
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#5FWIW, “This isn’t solving your CO2 problem,” he said. ”I’m taking CO2 out of the air, you burn it and you put the CO2 back. So it’s carbon neutral. I’m not going to reverse 400 ppm of CO2. But you’re not going to use any more stuff out of the ground.”
Except that we could a) store the alcohol that's produced, or b) find a way to convert the alcohol or biomass into something else (e.g. plastics).
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#6"The leaf hasn’t lived up to its promise, Nocera said, because the world isn’t ready for hydrogen fuel."
And probably won't be for transportation because battery tech is improving. But if this proves to be an effective way to produce liquid biofuel that can replace gasoline/diesel with simple engine conversions, then we can repurpose our existing liquid fuel infrastructure and existing cars instead of building a whole new hydrogen based system.
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#7Any mechanism to capture CO2 emissions is a huge win for the environment.
What is missing is an assessment of cost. If this is economically feasible at some point in time in the future, then goodbye oil and coal.
Open question is how to ensure these bio-engineered organisms don't seep into the environment and trigger some unintended consequences. There needs to be some kill switch in there as well.
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#8"The leaf hasn’t lived up to its promise, Nocera said, because the world isn’t ready for hydrogen fuel." And probably won't be for transportation because battery tech is improving. But if this proves to be an effective way to produce liquid biofuel that can replace gasoline/diesel with simple engine conversions, then we can repurpose our existing liquid fuel infrastructure and existing cars instead of building a whol…
Hydrogen fuel is indeed really difficult to manage. The Hindenburg accident come to mind, or the weight problems of fuel cell cars...
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#9Any mechanism to capture CO2 emissions is a huge win for the environment. What is missing is an assessment of cost. If this is economically feasible at some point in time in the future, then goodbye oil and coal. Open question is how to ensure these bio-engineered organisms don't seep into the environment and trigger some unintended consequences. There needs to be some kill switch in there as well.
He states that the purpose is not carbon capture but energy production, as all carbon consumed will be released upon combustion.
Re: Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy
#10The headline, while accurate, doesn't really describe the breakthrough here.
In itself, it's not surprising that sunlight, hydrogen from water and CO2 could be put together to make biomass. That's pretty much what plants (and many natural bacteria) do already.
The novel aspect of these bacteria is that they apparently do the job 10x more efficiently than natural organisms.