SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Not content with using hybrid artificial photosynthesis to turn CO2 emissions into plastics and biofuel, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) now claim to have produced an enhanced system that uses water and solar energy to generate hydrogen, which is in turn used to produce methane, the main element of natural gas, from carbon dioxide. Generating such gases from a renewable resource may one day help bolster, or even replace, fossil fuel resources extracted from dwindling sub-surface deposits.
Simply put, the process of photosynthesis turns light energy into chemical energy. In plants and certain types of algae, energy from incoming sunlight is used as the power source to synthesize simple carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. In the original Berkeley Lab hybrid system, a membrane arrangement of nanowires created from silicon and titanium oxide harvested solar energy and transported electrons to microbes where they used that energy to transform carbon dioxide into a range of chemical compounds.
Produces methane...Sorry, cows, you have been rendered superfluous.
Hybrid bioinorganic approach to solar-to-chemical conversion [abstract]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @04:00AM
But if the carbon is extracted from the atmosphere and then returned, it's carbon neutral and not much of a problem. While it doesn't reduce the atmospheric CO2, it doesn't increase it either.
However, any leaks in the process with add methane to the atmosphere and that is worse than CO2 (there will be leaks). If carbon capture and removal can be used at a sufficiently high level, then that could compensate for added methane.