Mimicking photosynthesis at this level, using durable inorganic materials like copper and perovskite, feels like one of those "quiet breakthroughs" that could end up being a game-changer if scaled up
Researchers built a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel.
The problem is the somewhat low atmospheric CO2 concentration; this is why all the "lets just pollute now and remove the CO2 from the atmosphere with some futuristic tech!" approaches are also kinda doomed, because even if you had some workable process that did not cause excessive costs by itself (like this one possibly), you still need to process millions of cubic meters of air, every year, just to compensate for a single (!!) car.
Sure. But thats still very much a lower bound, and it makes a bunch of idealizing assumptions that are hopelessly overoptimistic (assuming your intake gets the full 400ppm of CO2, and you manage to extract all of it in one go).
Even from those numbers, you already get up to a football stadium of processed air per hour for every small town. For a big city, you need to process that football stadium worth of air every second.
Building infrastructure of that magnitude is a major commitment, and if most nations can not be arsed to replace a small number of fossil power plants per country, I honestly don't see us building large air processing plants in every single town in a timely manner (that are extremely likely to be less profitable than replacing the power plants).
Something I'm curious to know: How does the efficiency of this new process compare to using regular solar panels to generate electricity and then using that electrical energy to synthesize the same chemicals?
Imagine you have 100 acres growing corn for biofuels, would it be nice to replace these by 99 acres of wilderness and 1 acre of photovoltaics producing the same amount of biofuels?
If your photovoltaics are 100x more efficient to produce your chemicals, agriculture is the dirty way of doing it.
> Looking at land-use efficiency, corn-derived ethanol used to power internal combustion engines requires about 85x (range: 63-197x) as much land to power the same number of transportation miles as solar PV powering electric vehicles.
Corn isn't particularly great for producing ethanol. I'm guessing that a synthetic process won't be able to get close to 100x less land usage, but any improvement would be welcome.
The problem I see is that there's not enough money in in to develop a new process. Cellulosic ethanol outperforms corn on nearly every measure, but there's not enough money in it to pay for the development needed to scale it up to industrial levels.
We could more or less do that now. In fact we should probably just stop growing corn for biofuel, it's not obvious that it's even energy-positive, let alone a good use of farmland.
Make sure to include the time and inputs to make the grass, and especially trees; those don't just appear out of nothing. And we already know how it works, it's called logging.
Whose time and what inputs are required to make grass and trees? If you simply leave a place alone, it will turn into either a forest, a grassland, or desert (the latter when human activity has thoroughly destroyed it).
None of the inputs required for plants to grow require toxic pollution or destructive extraction.
Of course humans can bring in toxic or destructive inputs to try to favor certain plants over others, or humans can do other non destructive things to favor certain plants over others. Or humans can step aside and let the plants do their thing which will create abundance too. (I like the middle of these three.)
Also, trees provide far more value than timber alone.
Would you give up fertilizer and pest control and stop feeding the 8 billion ?
Please dont be a holdomorehippy.. Those back-to-nature loving massmurderers without a cause creep me out beyond repair.. those that openly hate some humans at least give the monstrous game away.
Eventually, you won't have a choice when fertiliser produced from oil runs out, becomes cost prohibitive, or is made illegal due to greenhouse gas problems; likewise, "pest control" has already resulted in a 40% decline in insect populations; it won't be good if it gets to 100%.
It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash.
The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.
Grass and trees are pretty bad at converting sun into glucose. Main enzyme in photosynthesis Rubisco is both slow (few molecules per min vs several hundred per second) and lowly selective (confusing O2 for CO2 regularly).
Which makes sense, for most of Earth's geological history CO2 was more abudant. So chance of mistaking O2 and CO2 was nil.
Direct solar-to-chemical systems like this can be more efficient in theory because they cut out the middleman (electricity storage and conversion), but in practice, they're often less mature and have lower overall efficiency right now compared to established solar-electric-chemical setups
Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.
Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.
They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].
Modern solar panels are about 20-25% efficient. Putting it in a battery and using it to drive a car is about 80-90% efficient. Both the battery and motor lose some energy. If you multiply that, you get to about 16-22% efficient (starting with sunlight). And solar panels and batteries are still improving. Perovskite and other multi layer panel technologies provide a path to 35-40% panel efficiency.
Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It's basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric.
BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$/kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons/mile costs 75K$ at 3$/gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn't free but it won't cost you 75K. And honestly, you're going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there's maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren't spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You'd lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car.
Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.
After following the literature down several different rabbit holes, I found this argument in some of the supplementary figures on that tree that seems to address your question:
> "Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis.
"In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27"
"On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture."
"Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO)."
Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you'd want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that's easy to regenerate, that's very important.
Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers:
Efficiency is likely much lower than solar panels, however, solar panels are expensive and complicated (chemically) to manufacture. Teaching plans to make stuff for us is a better long term solution as we can just grow the plants.
What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is.
Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.
Solar panels have a limited lifespan, decrease in efficiency over time, and also get ruined when things like hail happens. This doesn't mean PVs are a bad idea, but it's not accurate to say they have little to no maintenance.
20 year solar panels just loose 5-10% capacity and degradation slows over time the reason most people replace them today is 20 year old panels were 200w where as today panels are 5-600w.
'Replace every 15-20 years' is not maintenance. Neither is replacement in the case of catastrophic weather events that'll have you replacing all your windows as well. The only 'maintenance' solar panels benefit from (which is still entirely optional) is occasional cleaning.
Sure but how do these artificial leaves fare when analyzed with the same criteria? Presumably worse, given that solar panels are (roughly speaking) nothing more than a few sheets of material laminated between glass panels.
Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.
If you ignore the nice "Artistic depiction of an artificial tree" it looks like this will also be "few sheets of material laminated between glass panels", but I'm worry it will also need plumbing for the water and output gas.
It is quite fascinating to think that leaves are not just a static end product but make further leaves that can again spin off more leaves via many trees in parallel.
Like the algorithm that began billions of years is nowhere done and is expanding. What we build on the other hand crumbles every few years.
Maybe we should make a javascript UI framework generator. Let an LLM build your next hype UI framework in a matter of seconds.
Could be fun with a highscore that is measured by most amount of dependencies and lines of code, the more the better. The prompt is limited in length. Task for the user is to generate the most amount of code with a single prompt.
Many politicians are more interested in protecting the coal, oil, and gas industries. Renewable energy and methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere are the last things they want.
I think the reality is there is no saving anything. Only surviving as long as we can. Why dump billions into an impossible goal of saving when we could invest in survival? I hope I’m wrong but anyone that knows anything about investments knows that there’s a point where you need to cut your losses
The system of economics that we use is quite new on the historical scale, using it in your argument to say that saving earth based life (which we are apart of) is not financially viable is the most absurd thing in modern society. Without the ecosphere, the economic system ceases to exist... So by the very definition, it is the utmost important and therefore not only viable but absolutely necessary.
It isn't clear what criteria is being used here for "saving" something. People often use "save the planet" to mean stopping most or all ecological changes. That very well might not be viable in which case survival ie adaptation is the other option.
Natural habitats has been destroyed by agriculture.
In the US 10-20% of agricultural land is used to produce chemicals like starch, sugar or biofuels, if we could use less land to produce these it would be great.
Photovoltaics could be up 100x more efficient in producing these chemicals.
This technology could free agricultural land back to natural habitats.
I'm pretty glad that when we've chopped down all our forests, we'll have mechanical leaves as a backup plan. Having the means to generate enough electricity to take oxygen out of the atmosphere could be useful.
> a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel
The device makes ethane and ethylene, oversimplify it's just natural gas. You must put it inside a huge petrochemical refinery to join some of them to make plastic or fuel.
Mimicking photosynthesis at this level, using durable inorganic materials like copper and perovskite, feels like one of those "quiet breakthroughs" that could end up being a game-changer if scaled up
In what way? Energy production? I believe there are quite some breakthrougs required for this to compete with cheap solar panels.
From the article:
Researchers built a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel.
Converting CO2 on its own seems like a useful thing, don’t you think?
Not necessarily.
The problem is the somewhat low atmospheric CO2 concentration; this is why all the "lets just pollute now and remove the CO2 from the atmosphere with some futuristic tech!" approaches are also kinda doomed, because even if you had some workable process that did not cause excessive costs by itself (like this one possibly), you still need to process millions of cubic meters of air, every year, just to compensate for a single (!!) car.
That sounds like a lot, but a million cubic meters is only a cube 100 meters on each side. So it's on the order of the air in a football stadium.
A 1200 CFM home air conditioning system moves roughly 20 million cubic meters per year.
Sure. But thats still very much a lower bound, and it makes a bunch of idealizing assumptions that are hopelessly overoptimistic (assuming your intake gets the full 400ppm of CO2, and you manage to extract all of it in one go).
Even from those numbers, you already get up to a football stadium of processed air per hour for every small town. For a big city, you need to process that football stadium worth of air every second.
Building infrastructure of that magnitude is a major commitment, and if most nations can not be arsed to replace a small number of fossil power plants per country, I honestly don't see us building large air processing plants in every single town in a timely manner (that are extremely likely to be less profitable than replacing the power plants).
Perovskite is not durable though, and that's the main reason it is still not used in solar cells.
Something I'm curious to know: How does the efficiency of this new process compare to using regular solar panels to generate electricity and then using that electrical energy to synthesize the same chemicals?
I'm also wondering how it compares to the efficiency of things like "grass" and "trees", which also convert sunlight into very useful things.
Imagine you have 100 acres growing corn for biofuels, would it be nice to replace these by 99 acres of wilderness and 1 acre of photovoltaics producing the same amount of biofuels?
If your photovoltaics are 100x more efficient to produce your chemicals, agriculture is the dirty way of doing it.
Does it mention it’s 100x more efficient anywhere? Or is it just an example you’re providing, in which case, why not 1000x?
They might be remembering the stat that:
> Looking at land-use efficiency, corn-derived ethanol used to power internal combustion engines requires about 85x (range: 63-197x) as much land to power the same number of transportation miles as solar PV powering electric vehicles.
> why not 1000x?
now we're talking - can I invest in your company?
Corn isn't particularly great for producing ethanol. I'm guessing that a synthetic process won't be able to get close to 100x less land usage, but any improvement would be welcome.
The problem I see is that there's not enough money in in to develop a new process. Cellulosic ethanol outperforms corn on nearly every measure, but there's not enough money in it to pay for the development needed to scale it up to industrial levels.
We could more or less do that now. In fact we should probably just stop growing corn for biofuel, it's not obvious that it's even energy-positive, let alone a good use of farmland.
Photosynthesis in nature is 1% efficient so it doesn’t need to be greatly better to beat it
I'm just picturing whole new swathes of rainforest being clearcut and bulldozed to make way for "artificial leaf farms."
Make sure to include the time and inputs to make the grass, and especially trees; those don't just appear out of nothing. And we already know how it works, it's called logging.
Whose time and what inputs are required to make grass and trees? If you simply leave a place alone, it will turn into either a forest, a grassland, or desert (the latter when human activity has thoroughly destroyed it).
None of the inputs required for plants to grow require toxic pollution or destructive extraction.
Of course humans can bring in toxic or destructive inputs to try to favor certain plants over others, or humans can do other non destructive things to favor certain plants over others. Or humans can step aside and let the plants do their thing which will create abundance too. (I like the middle of these three.)
Also, trees provide far more value than timber alone.
Would you give up fertilizer and pest control and stop feeding the 8 billion ?
Please dont be a holdomorehippy.. Those back-to-nature loving massmurderers without a cause creep me out beyond repair.. those that openly hate some humans at least give the monstrous game away.
Eventually, you won't have a choice when fertiliser produced from oil runs out, becomes cost prohibitive, or is made illegal due to greenhouse gas problems; likewise, "pest control" has already resulted in a 40% decline in insect populations; it won't be good if it gets to 100%.
It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash.
The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.
Grass and trees are pretty bad at converting sun into glucose. Main enzyme in photosynthesis Rubisco is both slow (few molecules per min vs several hundred per second) and lowly selective (confusing O2 for CO2 regularly).
Which makes sense, for most of Earth's geological history CO2 was more abudant. So chance of mistaking O2 and CO2 was nil.
https://youtu.be/vYVSH2RpHcQ?feature=shared
[flagged]
Warning: you may have become cynical.
I didn't read that comment as snarky at all - efficiency comparisons between emerging tech and SOTA (grass, trees) are extremely relevant!
(Warning to welf: you may be naive)
Direct solar-to-chemical systems like this can be more efficient in theory because they cut out the middleman (electricity storage and conversion), but in practice, they're often less mature and have lower overall efficiency right now compared to established solar-electric-chemical setups
Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.
Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.
They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].
[0]: https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
Modern solar panels are about 20-25% efficient. Putting it in a battery and using it to drive a car is about 80-90% efficient. Both the battery and motor lose some energy. If you multiply that, you get to about 16-22% efficient (starting with sunlight). And solar panels and batteries are still improving. Perovskite and other multi layer panel technologies provide a path to 35-40% panel efficiency.
Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It's basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric.
BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$/kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons/mile costs 75K$ at 3$/gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn't free but it won't cost you 75K. And honestly, you're going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there's maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren't spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You'd lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car.
Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.
After following the literature down several different rabbit holes, I found this argument in some of the supplementary figures on that tree that seems to address your question:
> "Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis.
"In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27"
"On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture."
"Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO)."
Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you'd want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that's easy to regenerate, that's very important.
Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...
Efficiency is likely much lower than solar panels, however, solar panels are expensive and complicated (chemically) to manufacture. Teaching plans to make stuff for us is a better long term solution as we can just grow the plants.
What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is.
Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.
I roll my eyes at these "artificial leaf" claims for just the reason you've identified.
Solar panels have a limited lifespan, decrease in efficiency over time, and also get ruined when things like hail happens. This doesn't mean PVs are a bad idea, but it's not accurate to say they have little to no maintenance.
20 year solar panels just loose 5-10% capacity and degradation slows over time the reason most people replace them today is 20 year old panels were 200w where as today panels are 5-600w.
Sadly our solar panels don't self heal or come with 100(0) years warranty.
'Replace every 15-20 years' is not maintenance. Neither is replacement in the case of catastrophic weather events that'll have you replacing all your windows as well. The only 'maintenance' solar panels benefit from (which is still entirely optional) is occasional cleaning.
To be fair your windows are less likely to take the full brunt of an extra large hailstone since they're usually mounted vertically.
Aside from the hail, none of those are maintenance requirements. I've done 0 maintenance on my panels over their lifespan.
Sure but how do these artificial leaves fare when analyzed with the same criteria? Presumably worse, given that solar panels are (roughly speaking) nothing more than a few sheets of material laminated between glass panels.
Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.
If you ignore the nice "Artistic depiction of an artificial tree" it looks like this will also be "few sheets of material laminated between glass panels", but I'm worry it will also need plumbing for the water and output gas.
It is quite fascinating to think that leaves are not just a static end product but make further leaves that can again spin off more leaves via many trees in parallel.
Like the algorithm that began billions of years is nowhere done and is expanding. What we build on the other hand crumbles every few years.
Stuff like this(and fusion) is where we should be putting our research energies.
You don't want another new JavaScript framework instead?
Speaking of which, it feels like we are overdue for the next big one. Is it actually slowing down?
Everybody just went head first into AI?
Maybe we should make a javascript UI framework generator. Let an LLM build your next hype UI framework in a matter of seconds.
Could be fun with a highscore that is measured by most amount of dependencies and lines of code, the more the better. The prompt is limited in length. Task for the user is to generate the most amount of code with a single prompt.
Clearly that's what they meant when they said fusion: https://fusionjs.com/
> Is it actually slowing down?
All I want for Christmas…
... is artificial leafs that create liquid fuel for fusion reactors.
It's great that we can finally turn over a new leaf.
I'll see myself out.
Should we really be making more plastic and carbon fuels?
So can I make a realistic plant mech mobile suit now?
In the next couple years we'll be modifying and creating biological structures that perform these functions.
Building it by mechanically manipulating inert materials feels so 1950s.
Biology is stunningly efficient, but it's hard to optimize further. To get really high yields you usually need industrial processes.
Solar panels are ten times more efficient than photosynthesis.
Today it's 10x more efficient, but it could theoretical get 100x more efficient, worth working on it.
Can it? I thought panels were well over 10% efficiency these days. Plus I'm pretty sure there's a hard limit somewhere below 100%.
isn't the self replicating property of life a huge benefit though?
Wow the level of typical HN "if it isn't practical then it's bullshit and not worth doing" sentiment is unusually high today.
I'm in my early thirties and I feel like i've heard about an "artificial leaf" every five years for the last fifteen.
We have leaves. Can scientists invent something to help us convince politicians to actually give a shit about saving the planet we depend on.
Many politicians are more interested in protecting the coal, oil, and gas industries. Renewable energy and methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere are the last things they want.
Removal of carbon from the atmosphere is exactly what they want, because it gives them justification to sell more oil and gas.
[dead]
>I'm in my early thirties and I feel like i've heard about an "artificial leaf" every five years for the last fifteen.
You have a good memory. Most people don't, so the ruse of living in a world with amazing breakthroughs works really well with most people.
The pragmatic answer is that it is probably a better spend of time to innovate tech that circumvents politics than to spend time winning politics.
Yeah, because it worked flawlessly the last time we tried (crypto)
A lot of the tech research and investment is done by governments, though.
I think the reality is there is no saving anything. Only surviving as long as we can. Why dump billions into an impossible goal of saving when we could invest in survival? I hope I’m wrong but anyone that knows anything about investments knows that there’s a point where you need to cut your losses
The system of economics that we use is quite new on the historical scale, using it in your argument to say that saving earth based life (which we are apart of) is not financially viable is the most absurd thing in modern society. Without the ecosphere, the economic system ceases to exist... So by the very definition, it is the utmost important and therefore not only viable but absolutely necessary.
It isn't clear what criteria is being used here for "saving" something. People often use "save the planet" to mean stopping most or all ecological changes. That very well might not be viable in which case survival ie adaptation is the other option.
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How many natural habitats will need to be destroyed in order to make artificial leaves useful in any meaningful way?
Natural habitats has been destroyed by agriculture.
In the US 10-20% of agricultural land is used to produce chemicals like starch, sugar or biofuels, if we could use less land to produce these it would be great.
Photovoltaics could be up 100x more efficient in producing these chemicals.
This technology could free agricultural land back to natural habitats.
I'm pretty glad that when we've chopped down all our forests, we'll have mechanical leaves as a backup plan. Having the means to generate enough electricity to take oxygen out of the atmosphere could be useful.
What is wrong with normal leafs?
One has a hard time making a ton of money with them.
> a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel
Star Trek Replicator?
The device makes ethane and ethylene, oversimplify it's just natural gas. You must put it inside a huge petrochemical refinery to join some of them to make plastic or fuel.