by miraji on 5/30/16, 2:15 PM with 91 comments
by Turing_Machine on 5/30/16, 2:59 PM
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.
by fabian2k on 5/30/16, 2:45 PM
The article is very interesting, but the headline makes it sound like a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics.
by smaili on 5/30/16, 2:39 PM
“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.”
by goda90 on 5/30/16, 2:50 PM
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.
by johngalt on 5/30/16, 11:30 PM
I wonder how far I'd get before people realized I was planting trees.
by riprowan on 5/30/16, 5:10 PM
He's probably going to India probably because there is more political will there to allow this thing to continue.
by shaqbert on 5/30/16, 2:50 PM
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.
by kbutler on 5/30/16, 5:15 PM
That's approximately as much CO2 as a person breathes out in a day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Human_physiolog... says about 1 kg, which works out to about 560L CO2 http://www.umsl.edu/~biofuels/Energy%20Meter%20labs/How%20mu...)
So yes, it provides a little bit of power, and no, it isn't likely to scale up to planet-wide CO2 reductions - one per person on the planet just to cover the CO2 we breathe?
by dTal on 5/29/16, 4:03 PM
"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!
by xfactor973 on 5/30/16, 3:55 PM
by thereisnospork on 5/31/16, 5:45 AM
In any case there are a few important questions re feasibility. Do these bacteria work at atmospheric partial pressures of CO2? Do they perform at the advertised rate at the ~0.0015g/L of hydrogen you'd be lucky to get in solution from his leaf?
Nocera is a blow hard, so pending the full paper I expect the answers aren't encouraging.
by JustUhThought on 5/30/16, 3:18 PM
by abhi3 on 5/30/16, 3:40 PM
Hmmmm....so bacteria breathes in CO2 to make fuel....so we can burn the fuel and release the CO2 back in the atmosphere?
Not to take away anything from this impressive scientific achievement but this application is just depressing.
by tener on 5/30/16, 8:27 PM
Problem is, while the bacteria can reproduce on their own, the leafs won't. They are made from silicon so probably similar tech to regular solar cells. This can be likely a limiting factor here.
Still interesting news.
by gumby on 5/30/16, 4:56 PM
by DateK on 5/30/16, 4:58 PM
I wonder how they tackle the problem of monoculture.
The issue with biofuel from algae is that once the container is contaminated with fungae, it reqires expensive draining and bleaching.
by andrewvijay on 5/30/16, 6:21 PM
by ommunist on 5/30/16, 7:31 PM
by smt88 on 5/30/16, 3:57 PM
by SCHiM on 5/30/16, 4:17 PM