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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: 2) by Rich on Thursday August 27 2015, @09:24PM
Add "in comparison" at the end of your sentence, and I'll agree with you.
Of course. But if it's in comparison to fossil oil, it does not need to be dirt-cheap-in-comparison, it just needs to be marginally cheaper. But to be marginally cheaper in comparison, it must be so "dirt" cheap that the sheiks can't sustain prices below the renewable to push them out of the market. Bit of a feedback logic. :)
On the other hand, the threat of renewable hydrocarbons sets an upper limit to the sustainable oil price, which as I elaborated in the OP would be at 8 cents per kWh in my ballpark guesstimate. One conclusion is that the fossils can't become much more expensive than they are now, which isn't good news for the environment, because that keeps the incentive for energy savings down. But, as the reply to your post says, it will suppress investments in hard-to-tap fossil fuel retrieval, which would only be profitable at, say, 100$ per barrel. That, and that's the better news for the environment, would mean when the easy-taps dry up, the renewables take over.
To be considered is that if the PV spread continues in a fashion that they're past break-even even with non-full sunshine, there would be an intermittent oversupply that someone might soak up for free. And when all the E-Cars are fully charged, one might get the idea to start with synthesizing fuels. But now we're drifting off in the realm where uni profs on global economy can spend their lifetimes calculating ;)