[Uncle Skeleton]

ScienceDaily: Device Uses Solar Energy To Convert Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

I've long thought that the trick to controlling greenhouse gases should be to actively convert them into something else; solid carbon, oxygen, whatever. These guys are going it one better. They convert CO2 to both O2 (anti-greenhouse gas) and CO (industrial fuel). It's still in prototype, and it draws more energy than it produces, but they hope that will change with different semiconductors (it will use solar energy; it's not a perpetual motion machine).

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton 

ScienceDaily: Device Uses Solar Energy To Convert Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

I've long thought that the trick to controlling greenhouse gases should be to actively convert them into something else; solid carbon, oxygen, whatever. These guys are going it one better. They convert CO2 to both O2 (anti-greenhouse gas) and CO (industrial fuel). It's still in prototype, and it draws more energy than it produces, but they hope that will change with different semiconductors (it will use solar energy; it's not a perpetual motion machine).

So, like plants?

[Uncle Skeleton]

Much like this prototype, plants actually take more existing usable energy input than the amount of energy output they give. Also they need land, which is expensive, and fertilizers, which are expensive and use fossil fuels. The difference is, I haven't heard of anyone realisitically attempting to optimize plants for the purpose of fixing CO2, but these guys are realistically attempting to optimize this prototype. Also plants can't be used for energy for years after they are planted.

Of course, I've also long wondered why no one was working on engineering existing plants to be more effective at CO2 metabolism, or better yet engineer yeast or bacteria to use the same mechanisms on a larger scale and free from soil. So maybe next week's ScienceDaily will have that one covered too...

[peeb]

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton 

I haven't heard of anyone realisitically attempting to optimize plants for the purpose of fixing CO2,

Sure they do - forrestry tables exist for this sepecifically for carbon markets

[Uncle Skeleton]

Ok I don't know what you mean by forrestry tables, but I was talking about enhancing the plants themselves, like changing their biochemistry or genetics to favor metabolism of CO2 over things like reproduction, when the natural balance is the other way.

[peeb]

Sure - it's not quite what you mean, but there are tables that will tell you, for any given lattitude, tree type, density etc, how much carbon is fixed in each year of growth - this is used to calculate carbon offsets from tree planting - it's more about optimising land use than plants.

[Uncle Skeleton]

Ah, ok that's a start, but you're still just making the best of a crappy product. You want something whose primary function is absorbing carbon, and you're using something that has evolved (if you subscribe to that idea) for a completely different primary function, survival. It seems to me that a certain amount of intelligent designing (uh, no pun intended) ought to be able to increase the productivity in this new metric by at least an order of magnitude. Why is nobody trying this?

The product in the above link is trying this, just with semiconductors instead of with chloroplasts.