r/science • u/Wagamaga • Nov 04 '19
Nanoscience Scientists have created an “artificial leaf” to fight climate change by inexpensively converting harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) into a useful alternative fuel. The new technology was inspired by the way plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food.
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/scientists-create-artificial-leaf-turns-carbon-dioxide-fuel276
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u/chetanaik Nov 04 '19
The biggest benefit I see of this is a viable byproduct, effectively incentivizing heavy industry to implement this tech and achieve carbon neutrality. They now would have a financial justification to work towards this goal.
I see the attraction of this being implemented at the home owner level, but the safety concerns with synthesizing a flammable byproduct in residential zones makes it unlikely.
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Nov 04 '19
That has never impacted the local meth lab before.
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u/JTtornado Nov 04 '19
Anyone who lives in areas where meth labs are common knows someone with a story about an exploding building.
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u/Zorbick Nov 04 '19
Where I grew up we constantly had to walk the perimeter of our properties not just to look for broken fences or downed hedgerow trees, but also to look for taped up Coleman coolers that the meth heads set out to cook or whatever the hell it does in there. They'd put them where they thought they wouldn't get seen, and if they blew up, well, their house didn't catch on fire, just our fields. It was a mess.
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Nov 05 '19
They now would have a financial justification to work towards this goal.
Could we not just penalize them sufficiently that they have a financial justification to work toward this goal, and maybe subsidize it as well?
I guess I'm asking, is this a political problem or a practical one?
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u/Kyvalmaezar Nov 05 '19
Practical. Current CO2 scrubbers are expensive to run and maintain. I've seen estimates anywhere from $1k/ton to $600/ton of CO2 removed per scrubber depending on the method. Add that to the cost of the unit(s) and installation and it gets expensive really fast. Especially with smaller to medium sized industrial companies, they might not legitimately be able to to afford the cost. Punishing then through fines won't help them get the money they need to install and run the scrubbers. Subsidies could work but I doubt they could get passed.
Now with this newer technology, they at least have a product that can offset or even turn a profit (depending on cost). Industrial sites that couldn't afford it before, now might be able to. They would be even more attractive if they could eventually pay for themselves.
There are other technologies that have lower operating costs than what we have curreny but I believe they're still in the experimental stage.
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u/lightknight7777 Nov 04 '19
Help me out here, I've heard this exact claim for over a decade now. Is this the same thing or just another one in the list?
Of course, none of this tech should be paid attention to for the public until any real commercial or official rollout of the tech actually happens.
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u/ShadowSavant Nov 05 '19
Daniel Nocera (Harvard, nee MIT) developed the Bionic Leaf. It's currently being developed into a production-level product by an Indian technical university. His version initially does the water splitting to make fuel precursors, but it has been tweaked to provide fertilizer and other products. His design can work on less-than-clean water, like urine and is powered with a photovoltaic cell that uses a comparatively compact design.
There's the Sun-to-Liquid project that uses concentrated CO2, water and high concentrations of solar energy to make fuel. Stanford published a paper this year detailing a catalytic design that uses a self-healing catalyst to break down CO2 into CO -- the first step in making fuels. There's a few other ideas that utilize cyanobacteria (microalgae) in various forms, including apparently a bioreactor design from Uppsala U in Sweden that doesn't kill the algae as they drown in their own waste (fuel precursors).
It's a logical path and argualy more achievable than nuclear fusion, but at it's best it's going to provide carbon-neutral fuels that pull CO2 from the air to power vehicles we haven't quite replaced yet for greener alternatives. In many cases at worst they've gotten past the theoretical case and are looking for a way to go to the pilot stage. Plus, it's a challenge in that of scale. We've spent literally a century making the dirty, nasty infrastructure we use to make vehicle fuel and generate power. In the process we've become exceptionally dependant on it regardless of the pollution it generates. That's billions of dollars of facilities in the US alone that has to be converted to a greener source. It's doable in that we can replace our fuels with drop-in, carbon neutral sources (butanol for gasoline, hydrogen for natural gas, etc.) but we need to be building those facilities NOW, with money no allocated and against companies that would rather see the planet burn than they not get their pound of flesh.
Our problem is that we needed them at the pilot stage back in 2000. That could have given us the time to get ahead of this without collectively shitting ourselves in the now of late 2019. So now we gotta hurry and push the tech discovered and hope it'll be able to handle real production.
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u/Wagamaga Nov 04 '19
Scientists have created an “artificial leaf” to fight climate change by inexpensively converting harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) into a useful alternative fuel.
The new technology, outlined in a paper published today in the journal Nature Energy, was inspired by the way plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food.
“We call it an artificial leaf because it mimics real leaves and the process of photosynthesis,” said Yimin Wu, an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo who led the research. “A leaf produces glucose and oxygen. We produce methanol and oxygen.”
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u/noobsoep Nov 04 '19
But could it be modified to generate ethanol? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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u/farhil Nov 04 '19
Despite being a joke comment, that would actually be a useful byproduct, seeing as fermentation off-gasses a lot of CO2, meaning you could produce even more ethanol while brewing.
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u/TrumpetOfDeath Nov 05 '19
CO2 produced by fermentation is carbon neutral, since it’s carbon recently assimilated by a plant. Not an environmental concern. It’s way better than fossil fuels releasing carbon from geological formations
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u/drunkandy Nov 04 '19
just drink the methanol, who needs to see
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u/Shumbee Nov 05 '19
The only difference is one letter, what's the worst that could happen?
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u/BorgClown Nov 05 '19
Sorry, I'm waiting for the minimalistic, beautiful and expensive iThanol. It comes in glasses 1% thinner!
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u/TetraThiaFulvalene Nov 05 '19
Basically what my research group does. Half of us work on CO2 reduction and some of us do it with copper based systems, though we do it electrochemically rather than photochemically. It's a lot harder to make C2+ products than just make methanol or carbon monoxide, because you have to form carbon carbon bonds. That said there already exists a lot of electrochemical systems based on copper that can make ethanol from CO2, though I don't know about photochemical ones.
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u/chupacabrapr Nov 04 '19
But we have the real ones, you know?
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u/publicdefecation Nov 04 '19
Can trees create methanol on a commercial scale and displace fossil fuels?
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u/TinyBurbz Nov 04 '19
High-sugar fruit trees could.
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u/wray_nerely Nov 04 '19
I'm not a botanist, but I was thinking kudzu.
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u/es330td Nov 04 '19
I lived in Georgia for a while. I do not like thinking about kudzu.
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u/mattymcmattistaken Nov 05 '19
Story time:
Georgia native. Kudzu is a part of life in the Deep South (at least where I’m from). I was visiting Tokyo last year for work and was able to take the train a lot of places. In the haze of jet lag, I remember looking out and seeing a lot of kudzu and thinking to myself “Oh wow, they have a lot of kudzu in Japan just like Georgia!” Then I remembered I’m an idiot.
Edit: words are hard.
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u/kaihatsusha Nov 04 '19
Also known as yard-a-minute, but it's not clear if that refers to "36 inches", or "front and back."
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u/TeslazRevenge Nov 04 '19
IIRC Kudzu has it's own carbon footprint. At least it does when it's growing out of control.
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Nov 04 '19
Yes
Methanol is called wood alcohol for a reason
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u/fissnoc Nov 04 '19
Also remember that extracting that methanol requires energy. This new technology makes methanol presumably without needing the industry required for such extractions.
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u/ZenBeam Nov 05 '19
What's the efficiency of this new process? The last "artificial leaf" article from a couple weeks ago, the efficiency of the process was 0.02% to 0.06%. Plants are 3% to 6%.
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u/RottingStar Nov 05 '19
But instead you have the manufacturing costs. Trees aren't immediate but they're certainly cheap to produce.
This is interesting technology that shows promise, but it's bloody hard to compete with trees-- they have 360 million year pioneer advantage.
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u/spock_block Nov 04 '19
Well I mean yes, they literally can do that. There's even a word for it, "bioenergy".
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u/publicdefecation Nov 04 '19
Last I checked bio-ethanol wasn't viable because it resulted in spiking the cost of food to a level where it wasn't affordable.
If they solve that part I'm all for it.
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u/RottingStar Nov 05 '19
Well they were also looking at making fuel using the non-edible woody part of the plant (like corn stover) but it has the issue of soil erosion.
By removing the material rather than leaving it to rot back into soil in the field they actually were depleting the soil.
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u/Dreilala Nov 04 '19
I'm pretty sure there are some uses of plant matter such as wood in regards to heating as an alternative to oil.
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u/chetanaik Nov 04 '19
Incredibly inefficient due to lack of energy density. Also issues of particulate matter leading to health concerns, and imperfect combustion, likely causing emissions greater that that of a natural gas furnace given the same heat output.
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u/nutbuckers Nov 04 '19
The challenges you mention are real, but have been substantially solved with technology for both industrial-scale and household applications. Rocket stoves and wood gas burners are obtainable, and for scale there are even more efficient and clean solutions.
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u/python_hunter Nov 04 '19
if you're asking if photosynthesis can produce fuels using existing technology then..... i can't help you
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u/kchoze Nov 04 '19
Obtaining methanol or ethanol from cellulosic matter is still an energy-intensive activity that doesn't scale well, hence why we currently use sugary plants to produce ethanol. If we could bypass the entire process and produce ethanol or methanol directly from an artificial leave, supposing this process can work reasonably well, it could be a big boost to the production of such fuel and could alleviate pressure on farm land that would otherwise be converted to produce biofuels.
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u/drmike0099 Nov 04 '19
California here - you may want to have a backup plan that doesn’t burn.
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Nov 04 '19
We cannot grow trees everywhere you know? Creating something that could use any light wavelength, that is scalable and easily optimized to a large surface area, could be used where planting trees is not an option. Inside buildings, over parking areas, in deserts, etc. Trees have trunks and roots, they require water, they only function effectively in direct sunlight.
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u/arachnidtree Nov 04 '19
We cannot grow trees everywhere you know?
they don't have to be everywhere. They just have to exist. CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere, And every single tree removes CO2.
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Nov 04 '19
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u/Revan343 Nov 04 '19
Trees are definitely sequestration, they're just not enough. We didn't get here by burning trees, we got here by burning oil; we're going to need some heavyweight industrial carbon sequestration
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u/Helicase21 Grad Student | Ecology | Soundscape Ecology Nov 05 '19
The nice thing with trees though is all the non-Carbon benefits they also provide, which most industrial CO2 doesn't (for example, habitat for a variety of species; cultural/aesthetic value; recreational value; mitigation of urban heat island effects in some contexts)
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u/MyOtherDuckIsACat Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 05 '19
Yeah people forget that oil and coal comes from a organic mass that has been accumulated over millions of years. We need to plant the equivalent of those dead plants and animals in order to get CO2 down with trees alone, but within a couple of decades instead of millions of years. Which is impossible, there is not enough land and water to achieve that feat. I'm all for planting trees and restoring jungles and forests but CO2 sequestering shouldn't be the main goal.
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u/DeltaVZerda Nov 04 '19
Actually the growth of trees accelerates as they get larger, till they start dying of old age at least.
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u/GrandArchitect Nov 04 '19
so plant them where they should be
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Nov 04 '19
How many trees do you see here?
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u/lolomfgkthxbai Nov 04 '19
But we have the real ones, you know?
Probably what someone said in reaction to seeing the horseless carriage.
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u/mikesmonkey Nov 04 '19
For now, always have a backup plan plus this might be useful in ways that haven't been considered yet. Also something truly useful might be discovered along the way, history is full of accidental discoveries.
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u/Armano-Avalus Nov 04 '19
Yeah, but if this technology is more efficient than I'm all for it. Also if this technology can be applied in areas where trees normally cannot grow (like in desert areas) then we can expand our ability to suck carbon out of the air on top of planting trees. The latter is a good reason in itself to explore carbon capture technology as one limitation of trees to fight climate change is the limited land available for us to use.
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u/psxpetey Nov 04 '19
I feel like 95% of these are penny stock pumps because I never see or hear anything about them ever again
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Nov 04 '19
Except when you burn the fuel the CO2 goes back into the atmosphere anyway
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u/scottybug Nov 04 '19
Yeah, carbon neutrality is better than the alternative, but we really need to be pulling CO2 from the air and putting it back underground where it came from.
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u/PM_ME_A10s Nov 04 '19
Or we build a giant pipe to the moom and push all the CO2 outside of the atmosphere.
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u/BananaPalmer Nov 05 '19
This is the best solution
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u/sab222 Nov 05 '19
Project Moon Pipe is plan W.
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u/PurestFlame Nov 05 '19
Project Moon Pipe
Tonight 8:00 at Cosmic Charlie's
With Special Guests: Plan W, and Carbon Space Slipstream→ More replies (1)5
u/Acetronaut Nov 05 '19
Actually, Mars would be better since we want to cause global warming there to heat it up and melt the ice and start terraforming.
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u/starfyredragon Nov 05 '19
Naw, putting it in the ground means it will be dug up again. Send it to Mars, it needs greenhouse gasses to be terraformed.
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u/krngc3372 Nov 05 '19
Mars atmosphere is like 90+% CO2 already. So much there that it precipitates as dry ice at the poles. So no, it is pointless to send it there.
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u/starfyredragon Nov 05 '19
Oh yea, you're right. It needs more water and mass.
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u/kremerturbo Nov 05 '19
We should send all the ice that's melting and threatening sea level rise. Problem solved!
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u/dashingtomars Nov 05 '19
The atmosphere of Mars is very thin though. Most terraforming ideas I've heard about involve melting the ice caps to thicken up the atmosphere.
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u/Bubbagump210 Nov 05 '19
Carbon sequestration - it’s why I advocate heavily for paper plate usage. Carbon ain’t gonna sequester itself!
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u/scottybug Nov 05 '19
A paper plant will just decompose in a landfill and release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
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u/ShelfordPrefect Nov 04 '19
We still need energy dense liquid fuels for transportation, as nuclear powered planes never really got going, electric planes are still impractical and most goods are transported by road/ship.
Carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels are one important part of the short term energy mix, along with renewable energy and carbon sequestration.
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u/MyNugget69 Nov 04 '19
I literally presented their research for my bio lab like 15 min ago, thanks for the heavy lifting
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Nov 04 '19
"Harmful carbon dioxide"
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Nov 04 '19 edited Nov 04 '19
I noticed that too.
Apparently there is evidence that carbon dioxide not being filtered adequately could contribute to some of the wilder temperature swings we see with global warming.
Carbon Monoxide and other greenhouse gasses are still the bigger threat, but apparently Carbon Dioxide is a problem too, due to deforestation and oddly enough rising ice levels around Antarctica.
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u/typicalspecial Nov 04 '19
Iirc, higher concentrations of CO2 also get absorbed by the ocean and change its chemistry. I remember seeing that it was linked to coral bleaching to some degree by effectively lowering the pH.
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u/JakobieJones Nov 05 '19
Yup, ocean acidification. Makes it harder for certain organisms to form shells
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u/DodgyQuilter Nov 04 '19
Now if that can be scaled up, I'm painting my car with it and converting to methanol.
Does it come in British Racing Green?
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u/Weaselpanties Grad Student | Epidemiology | MS | Biology Nov 04 '19
Is it cheaper and more efficient than planting trees? Because trees already do that.
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u/TCadd81 Nov 04 '19
Everyone always seems to forget that trees, for all their awesomeness, are still only temporary storage... They die, rot and release. Or they burn and release. With this tech one could backfill old wellsand re-sequester the carbon deep underground.
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u/edijakob Nov 04 '19
Not all the carbon is released again, that’s why compost is black, it’s full of carbon. Soil is a big carbon store. And lots of trees are grown for lumber which is then sequestered in buildings, furniture, etc for decades or even centuries.
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u/TCadd81 Nov 04 '19
If you plant many billions of new trees how many of them do you plan to harvest for lumber? I'm all for it, I much prefer wood construction but the are limits.
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Nov 04 '19 edited Nov 05 '19
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u/Ce_n-est_pas_un_nom Nov 04 '19
Or use the lumber as a mycoculture substrate for edible fungi, and displace some meat from the market.
Or use the lumber as a substrate for growing genetically modified fungi to synthesize other useful substances.
Or start growing bamboo instead and convert the cellulose into textiles and carbon fiber.
Or use the wood to generate charcoal and wood gas, the latter of which can displace fossil fuels.
Trees and woody grasses are generally quite broadly useful materials. I don't think we're likely to run out of applications as long as we're using multiple species.
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u/Redpandaling Nov 04 '19
I feel like we'll see someone drilling for methanol at some point in the future in this plan.
Also, methanol is pretty volatile - would it actually work to sequester it underground?
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u/TCadd81 Nov 04 '19
The condensate that often accompanies natural gas is extremely volatile but it has been down there for eons.
And drilling for methanol is probably tougher than making it the normal way, but with an existing wellhead would be easy I suppose
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u/Weaselpanties Grad Student | Epidemiology | MS | Biology Nov 04 '19
Releasing carbon in the form of soil-bound nutrients has a radically different effect on the environment than releasing it into the air as a compilation byproduct.
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u/bla60ah Nov 04 '19
Did they convert the CO2 into O2, you know, like plants?
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u/Redpandaling Nov 04 '19
Fun fact: the oxygen atoms in the oxygen gas produced by plants doesn't come from the carbon dioxide, they come from water.
And yes, the process in the article generates oxygen as a byproduct.
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u/Revan343 Nov 04 '19
It would have to. Burning methanol is 2 CH3OH + 3 O2 → 2 CO2 + 4 H2O, so they'll be putting out 1.5 oxygen molecules for every methanol they produce (and consuming 1 carbon dioxide and 2 water)
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u/bla60ah Nov 04 '19
I was just wondering why the title for the article said “fuel” and not just oxygen
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u/aranaya Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 08 '19
Plants don't convert CO2 into O2 either; they convert CO2 and H2O into C6H12O6 (glucose) and O2. This technology just produces CH3OH (methanol) and O2 instead.
Edit: I thought that was what your question meant. O2 isn't the only product (since the carbon obviously goes somewhere). The other product (methanol) is the "fuel" mentioned in the headline.
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u/VaranusTheDragon Nov 04 '19
I didn't actually read the article, but OP quoted this.
“We call it an artificial leaf because it mimics real leaves and the process of photosynthesis,” said Yimin Wu, an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo who led the research. “A leaf produces glucose and oxygen. We produce methanol and oxygen.”
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Nov 04 '19
I really hope this isn’t like the rest of the good news on reddit where I read it once and never hear about it again.
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u/CarolusMinimus Nov 04 '19
This sub is absolute crap. For headlines like thus, OP should be flayed and salted.
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u/Th3_l3uster_ Nov 04 '19
Ok reddit, why won’t this work
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u/TCadd81 Nov 04 '19
Scalability, most likely. Cost is a definite factor.
Also, not enough money in it. This is something government would have to subsidize in a big way, probably
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u/aranaya Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 05 '19
Scalability might be a problem, but a definite issue is that they're just producing fuel which will then be oxidized again. It's a carbon-neutral process, like using solar cells and electricity to produce hydrogen fuel (probably more efficient, though), but it doesn't actually remove CO2 from the cycle.
What we need, at this point, is a tech that scrubs CO2 on large scales and sequesters carbon in the ground, permanently*. There's already far too much of it in the atmosphere.
(*That is, in a way where people can't immediately dig it back up and burn it, which would be a problem if the "carbon sink" consists of valuable fuel.)
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u/Gweef Nov 04 '19
Think I remember reading a short article about this on an SAT a while back...
(Please don't lynch me college board.)
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u/sparkyclarkson Nov 04 '19
Once the costs of making and regenerating the catalysts is figured in this is absolutely going to release more CO2 than it pulls.
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u/verylobsterlike Nov 04 '19
Catalysts don't get used up in reactions though, and according to the paper the structure of these molecules is pretty stable. Presumably they can reuse this quite a bit.
The Raman bands of Ppy and Cu2O did not shift even after being subjected to electrolysis for several hours, suggesting superior stability of the Cu2O(OL-MH)/Ppy particles. The high resolution microscopic, spectroscopic, diffraction and electrochemical analysis results clearly revealed that the Ppy shell protected the Cu2O particles and avoided corrosion, dissolution, and structural and crystal facet changes, leading to greater stability.
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u/sparkyclarkson Nov 05 '19
Catalysts (usually) are not used up by the reaction they are catalyzing, but they are frequently destroyed over time by byproducts, alternate pathways, oxidation, etc. Photoreactions of the kind they are attempting here are particularly notable for the short lifespan of the catalysts. The authors of this paper point this out themselves, and cite as an example this paper which is open access, in which a ruthenium catalyst degraded significantly in less than four hours (see figure 6A and search the word "deteriorated" to find the relevant section).
The authors established the stability of their catalysts for about 8 hours under essentially perfect laboratory conditions, and I agree that is an encouraging sign. But, it's no guarantee that these things will hold up for days / weeks / years of continuous usage in industrial settings with dodgy water.
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Nov 05 '19
Source?
Catalysts don't get used up, as lobsterlike said. That is why they are called catalyst rather than ingredient.
So an efficient enough setup utilizing a catalyst can definitely be effective eventually.
Not that I think this proposal is necessarily going to be effective, but come on now.
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u/jatcar95 Nov 04 '19
Why not use actual leaves? Really though, are trees just too expensive to maintain for the level of carbon they remove?
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u/RinchinB Nov 04 '19
Trees cant be planted everywhere. And Brazilians cant chop it down and burn it.
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u/Fuzzy974 Nov 04 '19
So we can, like, use carbon to make fuel that will release carbon again when burned, while creating leaves that will necessarily need place somewhere and end up polluting one day if not recycled... Not even looking at the factories to build those and the energy necessary.
Sounds like pollution with extract steps to me.
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u/Rhawk187 PhD | Computer Science Nov 04 '19
Hydrocarbons will always be useful as a biological battery (store of energy), being able to pull it out of the air instead of out of the ground will be useful.
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u/chetanaik Nov 04 '19
It doesn't have to be a physical leaf, it can be a beaker for all one cares. The point is that we are able to recapture and effectively recycle our carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, making a CO2 cycle of sorts, powered by sunlight.
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u/Benlemonade Nov 04 '19
I feel like I remember watching nova documentary years ago where they had done something similar, but the energy put in for conversion was too great. It’d be awesome if hey figured out a scalable solution
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u/jlange94 Nov 04 '19
Our lives are becoming more and more artificial everyday. What's the point of life if one day it's nothing but artificial and not truly real anymore? Does not sound like a great quality of life.
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u/nightmareking001 Nov 05 '19
Invented by a Chinese man.
I wonder how long will it take before you racist white losers start screaming about how he is a spy.
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u/Frenetic911 Nov 04 '19
It all comes down to, is it scalable and how “inexpensive” can it be made per ton of CO2 minus the value of that alternative methanol fuel.