Scientific American reports on another example of the sort of technology I’ve promoted in the past as a strategy for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere:
Recently, one group has demonstrated that it is possible to combine water splitting and CO2 conversion into fuels in one system with high efficiency. In a June 2016 issue of Science, Daniel G. Nocera and Pamela A. Silver, both at Harvard University, and their colleagues reported on an approach to making liquid fuel (specifically fusel alcohols) that far exceeds a natural leaf’s conversion of carbon dioxide to carbohydrates. A plant uses just 1 percent of the energy it receives from the sun to make glucose, whereas the artificial system achieved roughly 10 percent efficiency in converting carbon dioxide to fuel, the equivalent of pulling 180 grams of carbon dioxide from the air per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.
The investigators paired inorganic, solar water-splitting technology (designed to use only biocompatible materials and to avoid creating toxic compounds) with microbes specially engineered to produce fuel, all in a single container. Remarkably, these metabolically engineered bacteria generated a wide variety of fuels and other chemical products even at low CO2 concentrations. The approach is ready for scaling up to the extent that the catalysts already contain cheap, readily obtainable metals. But investigators still need to greatly increase fuel production. Nocera says the team is working on prototyping the technology and is in partnership discussions with several companies.
I wish these project were closer to practical deployment. The key to these technologies is more often making them practical rather than making them work.
This is so utterly pointless as to be insane. The manufacture of these oils requires much more energy than would be gained by their subsequent oxidation (with carbon dioxide release, exactly as much as was fixed). What we have here is a bunch of rent seekers who are cleverly (and dishonestly) exploiting the current AGW hysteria to capture government subsidies. The amount of outright fraud occurring in our universities is quite astonishing.
Research for new and advanced processes has to start somewhere. High-calibered universities have the young, curious and smart people with the energy to do that sort of thing.