Researchers Devise Photosynthesis-Based Energy Source With Negative Carbon Emissions (concordia.ca) 47
Researchers have devised a way to extract energy from the photosynthesis process of algae, according to an announcement from Concordia University.
Suspended in a specialized solution, the algae forms part of a "micro photosynthetic power cell" that can actually generate enough energy to power low-power devices like Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. "Photosynthesis produces oxygen and electrons. Our model traps the electrons, which allows us to generate electricity," [says Kirankumar Kuruvinashetti, PhD 20, now a Mitacs postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary.] "So more than being a zero-emission technology, it's a negative carbon emission technology: it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and gives you a current. Its only byproduct is water."
[...] Muthukumaran Packirisamy, professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering and the paper's corresponding author, admits the system is not yet able to compete in power generation with others like photovoltaic cells. The maximum possible terminal voltage of a single micro photosynthetic power cell is only 1.0V. But he believes that, with enough research and development, including artificial intelligence-assisted integration technologies, this technology has the potential to be a viable, affordable and clean power source in the future.
It also offers significant manufacturing advantages over other systems, he says. "Our system does not use any of the hazardous gases or microfibres needed for the silicon fabrication technology that photovoltaic cells rely on. Furthermore, disposing of silicon computer chips is not easy. We use biocompatible polymers, so the whole system is easily decomposable and very cheap to manufacture."
In the paper the researchers also described it as a âoemicrobial fuel cellâ...
Suspended in a specialized solution, the algae forms part of a "micro photosynthetic power cell" that can actually generate enough energy to power low-power devices like Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. "Photosynthesis produces oxygen and electrons. Our model traps the electrons, which allows us to generate electricity," [says Kirankumar Kuruvinashetti, PhD 20, now a Mitacs postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary.] "So more than being a zero-emission technology, it's a negative carbon emission technology: it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and gives you a current. Its only byproduct is water."
[...] Muthukumaran Packirisamy, professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering and the paper's corresponding author, admits the system is not yet able to compete in power generation with others like photovoltaic cells. The maximum possible terminal voltage of a single micro photosynthetic power cell is only 1.0V. But he believes that, with enough research and development, including artificial intelligence-assisted integration technologies, this technology has the potential to be a viable, affordable and clean power source in the future.
It also offers significant manufacturing advantages over other systems, he says. "Our system does not use any of the hazardous gases or microfibres needed for the silicon fabrication technology that photovoltaic cells rely on. Furthermore, disposing of silicon computer chips is not easy. We use biocompatible polymers, so the whole system is easily decomposable and very cheap to manufacture."
In the paper the researchers also described it as a âoemicrobial fuel cellâ...
Yeah no (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe the only non-gaseous emission is water (in the form of water vapor) but that would make their statement misleading.
Another possibility is the carbon is absorbed by the algae, but that will be re-emitted when the cells die, so that's delaying the inevitable at best. This is also why planting more trees doesn't help with carbon sequestration - the dead trees will rot and emit CO2. I believe existing coal deposits were formed by trees that predated the bacteria that converted cellulose back into CO2. There's lots of other benefits to planting a tree (or growing algae) but permanent carbon capture is not one of them.
Re:Yeah no (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of a contained bioreactor, the byproduct would be carbon-rich solids (e.g. more algae) which can easily be buried or otherwise sequestered after the end of the useful life of the bioreactor.
The real questions are: how long can a bioreactor work before you've got to clean the thing out and start over from scratch? How expensive is that process? Can you reuse the biomass without having to dump it?
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It depends how and where you bury it. Maybe we just dump it in abandoned salt mines or make a slurry and pump it into old oil deposits that have been drained.
Nature sequestered it once, we can do so again. Of course, that will take energy and there's no profit it sequestration...
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you are never ever "removing carbon", all you can do is move it around.
this thing captures carbon from the air, produces energy in the process, and stores it in biomass that you can then dispose of. it's just algae doing algae stuff.
the interesting bit here is that we can tap into photosintesis (which is naturally occurring large scale) and harvest electricity. if that's economically viable large scale is a different matter.
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
No, you then mix it up with a bunch of calcium underground and nature locks it away. It doesnâ(TM)t come back unless you burn it
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In the case of a contained bioreactor, the byproduct would be carbon-rich solids (e.g. more algae) which can easily be buried or otherwise sequestered after the end of the useful life of the bioreactor.
The real questions are: how long can a bioreactor work before you've got to clean the thing out and start over from scratch? How expensive is that process? Can you reuse the biomass without having to dump it?
What happens if it gets away from us? Do we want a presumptive carbon negative Algae spread all over the earth? Whatever could go wrong?
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I'm going to assume the best: you're going for funny with this.
There's a lot of people that won't see that, and opt to flame you instead.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to assume the best: you're going for funny with this.
There's a lot of people that won't see that, and opt to flame you instead.
The flamers might consider reading about the Great Oxidation crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] I'm a real Cassandra, so no one likes what I have to say sometimes.
Bears a bit of similarity to what these folk are trying to do. Just a difference between creating Oxygen or removing CO2. Cassandra me, no doubt - after all, I get people pissed when I say we don't want a thousand years of Acid Rain, in one of their wonderful fixes of injecting sulfuric acid forming Sulfates into the air. So people migh
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Seems your assumption was too generous.
Re: Yeah no (Score:1)
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Rubbish. If nature couldn't sink the CO2 then Earth would've been a permanent hot house long before humans existed. Ice-ages couldn't have happened.
Take the oxygen away and the bacteria shuts down. There wasn't any shortage of deep peat bogs and swamps before we drained them all.
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If nature couldn't sink the CO2 then Earth would've been a permanent hot house long before humans existed. Ice-ages couldn't have happened.
Nature made coal and oil before fungus evolved to consume lignin. Plants can still sequester carbon, but they can't sequester it as quickly as they used to and that's why there isn't going to be another round of fossil fuels unless the climate resets so hard that it destroys those fungi. That's definitely not going to happen without it also destroying us, so it's a consideration which is irrelevant to us.
Limestone (Score:2)
Nature made coal and oil before fungus evolved to consume lignin.
That's burnable carbon. However, about 15% of the Earth's sedimentary crust is limestone, calcium carbonate, formed using carbon capture by sea creatures or when it crystallizes out of solution. So nature can, and does, have ways to sequester carbon in a much more permanent fashion.
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Rubbish, dried peak bogs are a great source of fuel even before they get buried deep. It just takes a lot of time.
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
We have passed peak peat because we are digging up peat bogs.
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Exactly. Give nature some space back. Let the bogs revert. Let jungles reform.
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Nature made *lots* of coal and oil before various microorganisms figured out how to break down lignin. It's true most of the fossil fuels were made during that period because dead plants sat around until they could be buried away from the reach of microorganisms that could break them down. The process hasn't stopped though, there's still bio-sequestration of any biomass that gets buried quickly enough. We humans are clever enough to make that happen most of the time if we choose to.
Thus the GPs mention of p
Yeah no (Score:5, Interesting)
This is also why planting more trees doesn't help with carbon sequestration - the dead trees will rot and emit CO2.
This, sir, is bullshit. Not your conclusion, which is true; the dead trees will decompose and emit CO2, yes. But they will not release all of their carbon, and therefore planting more trees DOES help with carbon sequestration. When trees decompose aerobically, most of the CO2 is sequestered. It winds up in the soil. It's only when they decompose anaerobically that most of the sequestered carbon is released. This is why rainforests typically do not do much carbon sequestration — the rate of death and decomposition is high enough and the terrain wet enough that most of the decomposition is anaerobic.
By the same token, if we aerate algae as we compost it, most of the carbon will be retained in the compost. Another option is to use the algae to make biofuels, which would then be carbon neutral.
There is a real and salient objection to be made to this technology: What are the cradle to grave carbon emissions? You still have to make the devices, you have to clean and otherwise maintain them, etc. Telling me only about the operating conditions doesn't give me all the information I need to make an informed decision. However, I'm at least still starting off in a better place than people who don't think carbon is sequestered by trees.
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(oh, say nothing of some tree species living for hundreds of years, thus sequestering todays carbon for plenty of time for us to get our act together.)
That's the rub of tree planting. The vast majority of species fix more carbon when they are mature, because all growth occurs in a thin layer beneath the bark called the cambium (which is larger in mature trees) and because such trees also have more leaf area, which means they can collect more sunlight (from the tops of leaves) and more air (from the stomata on their undersides) which means they can do more photosynthesis. This is why planting trees is positive, but still not enough to save us. Not deforest
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
This is why rainforests typically do not do much carbon sequestration â" the rate of death and decomposition is high enough and the terrain wet enough that most of the decomposition is anaerobic.
Sort of. Rain forests don't sequester much carbon because they are nutrient poor. They are nutrient poor because they drain very well (see the Amazon river). Hence the need for the indigenous people to ammend [wikipedia.org] the soil in order to farm it. If you want anerobic conditions, go find a peat bog. The operative term being "bog", i.e. poorly drained.
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As always, it's a bit more complicated than that. Yes - dead trees > > coal. but far more important in terms of tonnage then coals (sedimentary rocks with about 60% or higher w/w of carbon) is the 1~2% w/w of carbon present in most fine-grained sediments ("mudrocks" - which if you've got an electron microscope you can meaningfully separat
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Well, what I want it to do is build soil, since we've lost a lot of it to erosion after fires here in northern California. Keeping the soil is the most important thing for regrowth of forests, but building more is the next best. But I want it to build carbon-rich soil, for multiple reasons. I'm thinking a little more short-term, ha ha.
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When I did Soil Science (back in the 80s, when the country actually had a whole 3 university Departments of Soil Science ; there aren't any now, TTBOMK), the "poster child" of "why S.Sci. is important" was continuing efforts to repair the damag
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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Indeed the summary is either really dumb, or the researchers do not understand their own methods.
This method copies the light reaction of photosynthesis. There is no water as byproduct. Quite the opposite: water is the input from which oxygen (and H+ and electrons) is derived.
In algae, the CO2 is sequestered in the subsequent dark reaction of photosynthesis, which also consumes energy (NADPH, ATP) that is created in the light reaction. The dark reaction is a complex chemical cycle that does not produce any
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Dude. It's a plant.
The carbon is captured by the plant life, to make more plant life.
How the hell did you not get that from it being ALGAE doing the work here?
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
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So you think that 100% of the carbon will somehow be emitted as atmospheric CO2, and there's absolutely no way to prevent that?
Never heard of petrified trees? Or the idea that this is a machine that will have maintenance cycles, and part of that maintenance may be removing carbon build-up periodically and dealing with it in a way that isn't conducive to open-air rot and methane production, such as vacuum sealing, limestone creation, or even cooking at high temperatures in an oxygen depleted environment to
Re: Yeah no (Score:2)
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Great. Cherry picking one thing without speaking to any of the other mechanisms that took 5 seconds to think of means there is no argument against them, and therefore the complaint of "all the carbon it captured is turned back into CO2" is without merit.
AI to the rescue (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry guys, they're going to use AI to solve all their problems.
5 years ago they would have used blockchain, but AI will definitely help now!
Use BlockchaiAI (Score:5, Funny)
Use BlockchaiAI
Use BlockchainAIQuantum (Score:1)
> Use BlockchainAI
Dude, why did you leave out quantum.
Also it takes CARBON out of the atmosphere but it makes pure water. WIthout needing any energy. So it's like a thousand times better than desalinization AND adds to our oceans. Also the water it produces is cold (not a thing) which means it reduces the energy in the water it's added to (wait, so that's how it's powered) an all of this is good.
To summarize: Don't worry about TaySway's jet, all those 18 wheelers, trains, cars, power plants and anyth
Re: (Score:1)
Think you are burying your head in the sand if you think AI is like BlockChain. Treating it like that is going to help you go the way of Circuit City, Borders, Blockbuster and all of the other companies that thought the Internet is just a fad. Forget the ChatGPT and deep fake generators. There are really scary things happening across the board. Look closely at the recent layoffs in HiTech and “knowledge heavy” industries like banking, insurance, etc. In Manufacturing, look closely at the number
So how large is it? (Score:2)
If you go comparing it to photovoltaics, thereby inducing certain expectations in the reader, you ought to also tell us how it compares in the amount of space it needs to provide an equivalent output.
I understand that we don't compare costs for a proof of concept in relation to an established multi billion dollar industry product... but come on...
I rate this as "lab curiosity" (Score:2)
The summary, at least, didn't give ANY efficiency figures. And made some impossible (without extensive caveats) claims. The basic idea is reasonable, and probably real, but I doubt you could (efficiently) extract enough electricity to even monitor the process. Outside of the electricity and "impossible claims", this happened in my grandfather's cattle watering tank. So I wonder what they're really doing (as opposed to what the reporter heard).
Oh, the relief! (Score:2)
tl;dr : Tree 2.0 (Score:2)
plants (Score:2)
So, they invented plants? I believe there is prior art.
Negative Emissions? (Score:2)
1.0V (Score:3)
I think they miss a m or u before the V. Because if they get a whole Volt out of one unit of one microcell, that has a huge potential (pun intended).
Stack 5 of them and you can run an arduino. They did forget to mention anything about current though, I guess the Amperage aint that good.