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So it's 20x cheaper than the noble gas version — what's the absolute cost? I assume it's not cheaper than pumping fossil fuels yet, but I'm curious to know how far away it is.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not likely to happen. Photosynthesis is pretty inefficient, typical plants have a radiant energy to chemical energy conversion efficiency between 0.1% and 2%. Most commercially available solar panels have more than 10 times this efficiency.[1] [1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109739/is-plant-p...
Sure, but I bet your solar panels don't manufacture and maintain themselves. 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. coa…
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...
I don't want to poo-poo this achievement, but is another burnable fuel really what we want at this point?
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.
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...
In addition to lack of performance numbers, they misstate the amount of sunlight hitting earth by a factor of 10- it's supposed to be 1000 W/m2, not 100.
1. http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/industry-professionals/insola...
This is wonderful! 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.
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.
Interesting that it's a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that it produces. Wonder what the safety implications are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas
I guess it won't be much different than natural gas from a safety standpoint.
Interesting that it's a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that it produces. Wonder what the safety implications are.
As it says in the article: "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,…
> Authors: Mohammad Asadi, Kibum Kim, Cong Liu, Aditya Venkata Addepalli, Pedram Abbasi, Poya Yasaei, Patrick Phillips, Amirhossein Behranginia, José M. Cerrato, Richard Haasch, Peter Zapol, Bijandra Kumar, Robert F. Klie, Jeremiah Abiade, Larry A. Curtiss, Amin Salehi-Khojin 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…