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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, @09:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @09:25PM (#228730)

    fertilizer

    The use of a garbage disposal is a sin.
    The amount of vegetable peelings and not-quite-perfect stuff that gets shoved down those is shameful.
    That biomass could be put into a compost heap and reused to fertilize the next year's growth.
    You mix that stuff with equal parts "waste" paper.
    The amount of paper products we just chuck out is shameful too.

    ...and the fact that many people have land space and use that to grow grass and other inedible things just boggles my mind.

    pesticides
    monoculture

    Our species has know about crop rotation for thousands of years yet we've largely let that knowledge slip away.
    This also applies to "fertilizer".

    "The Three Sisters" [wikipedia.org] is another bit of wisdom that has been ignored for ages.
    This also applies to "fertilizer".

    pavement

    Ever see how much blacktop is torn up and hauled away when they lay down a new asphalt surface.
    That "waste" is just thrown into a pit somewhere.
    Why isn't is being reused for more road|parking lot surface?

    roofing materials

    I know of a city in L.A. County that forbids regular old petrochemical shingles. [google.com]
    More. [cerritos.us]
    The alternatives last much longer as well.

    -- gewg_