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The most important discovery/invention of modern time

barbos

barbos

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Artificial photosynthesis systems are proposed as an efficient alternative route to capture CO2 to produce additional food for growing global demand. Here a two-step CO2 electrolyser system was developed to produce a highly concentrated acetate stream with a 57% carbon selectivity (CO2 to acetate), allowing its direct use for the heterotrophic cultivation of yeast, mushroom-producing fungus and a photosynthetic green alga, in the dark without inputs from biological photosynthesis. An evaluation of nine crop plants found that carbon from exogenously supplied acetate incorporates into biomass through major metabolic pathways. Coupling this approach to existing photovoltaic systems could increase solar-to-food energy conversion efficiency by about fourfold over biological photosynthesis, reducing the solar footprint required. This technology allows for a reimagination of how food can be produced in controlled environments.
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Food without direct light at 4x efficiency of ordinary agriculture. This can revolutionize everything.
 
barbos said:
Artificial photosynthesis systems are proposed as an efficient alternative route to capture CO2 to produce additional food for growing global demand. Here a two-step CO2 electrolyser system was developed to produce a highly concentrated acetate stream with a 57% carbon selectivity (CO2 to acetate), allowing its direct use for the heterotrophic cultivation of yeast, mushroom-producing fungus and a photosynthetic green alga, in the dark without inputs from biological photosynthesis. An evaluation of nine crop plants found that carbon from exogenously supplied acetate incorporates into biomass through major metabolic pathways. Coupling this approach to existing photovoltaic systems could increase solar-to-food energy conversion efficiency by about fourfold over biological photosynthesis, reducing the solar footprint required. This technology allows for a reimagination of how food can be produced in controlled environments.
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Food without direct light at 4x efficiency of ordinary agriculture. This can revolutionize everything.
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Link:
 
Oh, I forgot the link.
Anyway, imagine growing bananas or cacao beans in Finland during winter, using nothing but electricity (and recycled fertilizers of course). Banana republics will be pissed, along with global shipping mafia.
All these german solar panels and wind farms can now be put to good use.
StartTrek level technology.
 
I keep pointing this out but we can't be growing food from that shit. We need to "waste" the product by putting it in a hole where it can't dick up our atmosphere any more.

We need to start focusing on less "efficiency" and more "cleaning up our fucking mess"

Putting it back into the biosphere is exactly the problem and until people realize that we have a bunch of "useless" work that cannot have any other purpose but "wasted effort", we will still be staring down the barrel of a gun.

It doesn't matter if we get really good at plucking this bullet from the air if we put it right back in the gun that shot it at us
 
Well, this is not really about global warming, even though this can be used to capture and store CO2 in some form.
This is about growing any shit anywhere without taking much land, let alone arable land. Any country can grow anything they have to currently import.
 
barbos said:
Well, this is not really about global warming, even though this can be used to capture and store CO2 in some form.
This is about growing any shit anywhere without taking much land, let alone arable land. Any country can grow anything they have to currently import.
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Well, we have two paths to take with this technology: using it to selfish ends or using it to systemically altruistic ones.

We can even take a little bit of each path: strategic food precursor supplies.

But we need to be capturing WAY more than we use.
 

It makes acetate (acetic acid: vinegar acid) by electrolysis:

2CO2 + 2H2O + ⚡️-> CH3COOH + 2O2

The acetate is then fed to some organism that can use it as its sole organic carbon source. That organism is then made into food. Something like Quorn: fungus mycelium (mat of strands).

Some saprophytes, fungi and ecologically similar bacteria, can use a variety of compounds as their sole organic carbon source. I searched for "sole organic carbon source" in scholar.google.com and I found a lot of hits. Also "sole carbon source" and "sole carbon and energy source".

Crop plants are not very energy-efficient in capturing solar energy to make their flesh, and this system can easily beat it.
By powering electrolysis with photovoltaics, the conversion of sunlight and CO2 to food in our system (photovoltaics to electrolysis to acetate to yeast) is almost 18 times more solar-to-biomass energy-conversion-efficient than typical food production, which relies on biological photosynthesis (photosynthesis to glucose to yeast) (Extended Data Fig. 8). For algae production, our process (photovoltaics to electrolysis to acetate to algae) is almost four times more solar-to-biomass energy-conversion-efficient than biological photosynthesis of crop plants (photosynthesis to crop plants) and is equivalent to or higher than the instantaneous energy efficiency of outdoor algae production
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I note a further nice thing aboutthis direct synthesis of acetic acid by electrolysis. It bypasses the Fischer-Tropsch process, what one needs if one makes hydrogen by electrolysis.

Water electrolysis + Fischer-Tropsch:
2H2O + ⚡️ -> 2H2 + O2
2CO2 + 4H2 + 🔥 -> CH3COOH + 2H2O
One can make a lot of hydrocarbons and oxyhydrocarbons in that way.

Direct-synthesis electrolysis:
2CO2 + 2H2O + ⚡️ -> CH3COOH + 2O2


One can do something similar with ammonia, bypassing the Haber-Bosch process:
Water electrolysis + Haber-Bosch:
2H2O + ⚡️ -> 2H2 + O2
N2 + 3H2 + 🔥 -> 2NH3

Direct-synthesis electrolysis:
3H2O + N2 + ⚡️ -> 2NH3 + (3/2)O2


So we can make nitrogen fertilizers and synfuels and petrochemicals without fossil fuels.
 
lpetrich said:
I note a further nice thing aboutthis direct synthesis of acetic acid by electrolysis. It bypasses the Fischer-Tropsch process, what one needs if one makes hydrogen by electrolysis.

Water electrolysis + Fischer-Tropsch:
2H2O + ⚡️ -> 2H2 + O2
2CO2 + 4H2 + 🔥 -> CH3COOH + 2H2O
One can make a lot of hydrocarbons and oxyhydrocarbons in that way.

Direct-synthesis electrolysis:
2CO2 + 2H2O + ⚡️ -> CH3COOH + 2O2


One can do something similar with ammonia, bypassing the Haber-Bosch process:
Water electrolysis + Haber-Bosch:
2H2O + ⚡️ -> 2H2 + O2
N2 + 3H2 + 🔥 -> 2NH3

Direct-synthesis electrolysis:
3H2O + N2 + ⚡️ -> 2NH3 + (3/2)O2


So we can make nitrogen fertilizers and synfuels and petrochemicals without fossil fuels.
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And as important to me, we can start to regenerate stores of liquid hydrocarbons.

This may be what we need to beat the calthrate gun.
 
lpetrich said:
I note a further nice thing aboutthis direct synthesis of acetic acid by electrolysis. It bypasses the Fischer-Tropsch process, what one needs if one makes hydrogen by electrolysis.
Click to expand...
It does not really matter, what matters is overall efficiency - how much land it takes to grow the same amount of food. If it is 4-18 times less than ordinary agriculture then it means we can turn most if not all currently cultivated land into nature reserves.
 
barbos said:
lpetrich said:
I note a further nice thing aboutthis direct synthesis of acetic acid by electrolysis. It bypasses the Fischer-Tropsch process, what one needs if one makes hydrogen by electrolysis.
Click to expand...
It does not really matter, what matters is overall efficiency - how much land it takes to grow the same amount of food. If it is 4-18 times less than ordinary agriculture then it means we can turn most if not all currently cultivated land into nature reserves.
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That's the thing though, it isn't just about overall energy efficiency, but about accessibility of the technology.

In many respects, ceasing industrial agriculture based on drilled petrochemicals and completely bypassing rare-metal catalysis and heat steps that require an industrial footprint make the process more "shut up and take my money".

It's not always about direct amount of work so much as about secondary consequences, these days.

I'd rather work twice the hours and yet produce half the stuff if it meant I could do that forever as opposed to "for the next few years".

I agree moving the majority of farmland to nature, but a lot of it needs to become solar farms doing this process so as to... Stick it in the ground.
 
Well, efficient electrolysis does require platinum or something like that.
That besides materials for solar panels.
But it's not perishable. This thing is obviously super-mega-sustainable, so there is no question about that. The question is what can be currently grown and how fast it can be scaled?
 
barbos said:
Well, efficient electrolysis does require platinum or something like that.
That besides materials for solar panels.
But it's not perishable. This thing is obviously super-mega-sustainable, so there is no question about that. The question is what can be currently grown and how fast it can be scaled?
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Platinum in catalysis is absolutely a limited reagent. It is neither indestructible (4-4.5 mohs) nor generally laid thick upon the catalyst structure.

Over time it erodes into the feed, and is eventually gone... Or worse gets gunked up by contaminants and often is not the sort of thing that is immediately cleanable as I understand it?

There are enough cars around you could potentially just use their exhaust catalyst, assuming you could clean it properly? But the issue is that Fischer-Tropsch uses... Much larger catalysts industrially, yah?

Any industrial scale use of platinum is going to be expensive and complicated. Maybe a step can be added to recover the catalyst that wears into the feed, but that's yet another piece of heavy industry.

On the large scale, liquiform hydrocarbons are really important to the goal of not having our planet go to shit, though, so getting away from Fischer-Tropsch is huge.
 
These are less important details.
Nickel can be used for electrodes at slightly reduced efficiency. And I doubt that electrode material is actually lost even if it gets degraded. It's not like catalytic converters in cars where it gets out.
 
barbos said:
These are less important details.
Nickel can be used for electrodes at slightly reduced efficiency. And I doubt that electrode material is actually lost even if it gets degraded. It's not like catalytic converters in cars where it gets out.
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The Fischer-Tropsch process is for accomplishing the nitrogen fixing stage, if I understand properly. That's not on the electrode so much as a high-surface-area filter or even "expendable" catalyst.

For instance using Palladium (rather than platinum, but mind, Palladium is still extremely rare!) To accomplish the Wacker process in MDMA production, the palladium catalyst is just thin metal ribbon tossed into the vat, which can end up dissolving in the rest of it, and while it can be recovered at some cost, often enough it isn't.

Not that I've ever actually done it.

I don't think you understand how important that nitrogen fixing stage is, and how amazing that the catalyst is bypassed.

*I may misunderstand Fischer-Tropsch. I just looked it up today, but I understand enough to know that while catalysis is really useful for doing hard things easily, it's still a complicated lot of trouble and much better without.
 
barbos said:
Everything can be recovered.
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Yeah, but entropy makes recovering it a massive chemical undertaking, yet another step in infrastructure.

This invention is really good because it removes that whole loop of the system.
 
The main benefit to centralized, concentrated food production is to provide despots like Putler an easy way to starve or feed whoever they want - a key to effective imperialism.
 
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