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posted by takyon on Thursday August 27 2015, @12:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the unnatural-gas dept.

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]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:09AM (#228466)
    The only problem with pure hydrogen is that it's damnably difficult to store. It's the lightest element in the periodic table and as such will eventually diffuse through a lot of materials that you try to put it in, and it's pretty hard to store with enough density. If you're getting methane out of atmospheric carbon dioxide and then burning it again, then the process is essentially carbon-neutral. Take it out of the atmosphere and put it back in again, wash, rinse, repeat. You're not adding to the CO2 already there for sure, not unless you have another actual source of it, like, oh, the methane that's been trapped in the ground for millions of years until we took it out and started using it as fuel. If it's possible to easily convert solar energy or some other renewable energy source into something like methane as the article suggests is possible, that would be a big thing indeed. It provides a way to store this energy, as it seems that most forms of renewable energy are largely intermittent. There are days when the sun is clouded and the wind doesn't blow, and there are days of scorching sunshine and strong winds. If you could easily and efficiently store the excess energy you get on days when you can get a lot of it for use on the days when you hardly get any at all, that would go a long way to making renewable energy more viable. Batteries in general have comparatively pathetic energy densities compared to masses of hydrocarbons.