ZyyzYzzy
RIP USA
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Yes. Fucking chaperonins and other proteins that bind to amino acid chains as tjey are made to make them fold in a specific way that is not easily predicted. Amazing how complex life really is.
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Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?
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Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Yeah im too ignorant to understand why you cant replace light with electricity in the co2 + h2o = sugar +oxygen equation, amd thats ok. Im just a dude who wants to see indoor plant gardens without super bright lights, fast growing indoor fruit and a way to grow food sources from nuclear energy.
It is like the guys who drew pictures of boats flying through the air with a big bunch of feathers attached. Sure it is retarded, but once we discovered lift we made the idea work.
Maybe electric plants will make sense when we understand more. I mean the ethanol from co2 is a step in that direction.
I have to be jonny hopeful about fields i know nothing about to offset being debbie downer when people talk about vehicular autonomy being right around the corner.
Sentagur
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doing things like that with plants might be difficult because it would be breaking the one defining thing plants have and that is photosynthesis.
It might be possible with bacteria or algae , feed them nutrients in a solution, run voltage through it and scoop up overflow from the top every few days for ethanol processing or complex hydrocarbons extraction.
Sentagur
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Couple problems:
- Electricity (potential change) is not selective, it would ruin lots of processes in the cell
- In solutions, current is ferried by ions migrating (diffusing) to the electrode. To make this work, you would need the entire photosynthetic set-up to be able to move (not happening), or some extra step you have to design to make another molecule do the ferrying
Sentagur
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Its the logical next step. If the battery packs get popular they will normalize the price of electricity and there will no longer be a cheap rate at night and expensive rate during the prime time hours.
The batteries also add decentralized power storage so that can absorb our any jumps in usage until more conventional power generators can spin up to compensate for the increases.
The Distributed power generation is the extension of that.
If they combine that with the CO2>Ethanol tech(if that turns out to be feasible) it can improve power storage dramatically because ethanol has better energy density than batteries if i am not mistaken.
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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If this actually becomes functional, this will be great. I remain dubious given the opacity of the glass plates and the complete lack of information about its actual output - seems more a sales pitch idea just like his dumb hypertube or whatever. Even with cost as no object, putting glass on top of solar panels which diffuses the light seems like a great way to make pretty poor performing solar panels. I love the idea of it and I could see something in straight 'solar panel black' but shaped like shingles working.
Can you imagine the amount of wiring in a single roof though?
TheBeagle
JunkiesNetwork Donor
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I just want to remind those of you without a background in chemistry that when you burn ethanol it is converted to CO2. This isn't some magic bullet that is going to somehow sequester CO2 and reverse climate change. At best, if all the worlds consumption of fossil fuels were somehow converted to the EtOH ->CO2 ->EtOH loop that this research suggests it would only hit the pause button on CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The only true way to dial back the ever increasing ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere is to quit combusting organics for energy all together.
The only true way to dial back the ever increasing ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere is to quit combusting organics for energy all together.
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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Yeah, but a pause button would be really helpful on its own. Its like livestock, it's bad, but partially not as bad because its part of a cycle that will draw the green house gases back out of the atmosphere and into the vegetation needed for the livestock. Regardless of us that cycle continues (The actual net negative is that the land might sequester more if it weren't grazing or crop land; and the water usage is bad.)
But overall, correct me if I'm wrong, the big issue is taking carbon that's been sequestered 'outside' of the normal climate or annual (Not sure what to call it) cycle of carbon fueling sugar creation, sugar burning releasing carbon. We're drawing up stuff that has been locked out of the atmosphere for millions of years now, in tar, deep in rock ect. (It's pretty funny that one of the ideas to sequester carbon is to shove it back down in there, lol) So stopping us from having to remove more of that trapped carbon would really help no?
Especially given it would allow us to store solar energy a lot more effectively so cheaper mirror plants could be built in the desert without the logistical cost of running DC lines to connect them to the grid; and they could just make ethanol rather than pumping it up from the ground (If it was cheaper than doing so.) Getting stuck in a loop like that would give us a pretty powerful tool to get our mass transport off sequestered fuels. Then we need to build more houses from wood, I guess (This is hyperbole heh.)
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TheBeagle
JunkiesNetwork Donor
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Ya you're right, I shouldn't be such a Debby downer, it is a step in the right direction. But EtOh ->CO2 is exothermic, no energy input needed. CO2 -> EtOH is an endothermic reduction rxn that requires energy input. Where's that energy going to come from? That's the classic problem with ethanol production.
*edit* I guess that energy input could be solar that then get's converted into stored EtOH as you said. Ok maybe this idea is quite a bit better than I first thought. Nice post.
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Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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Yeah, lacking energy storage medium is probably the number 1 things that makes solar/wind less viable than others. The second you add molten salt or gravity storage; the price of a solar plant skyrockets well beyond anything else. (And they already have issues with large plants even without those because of how much room you need. The one in the deserts in Nevada ran into all kinds of issues because of wild life and zoning, then a malfunction screwed up part of the plant and its way more expensive than projected ect.)
So room and energy storage are the two big impediments to solar/wind. Tesla is hoping to beat that with using the roof room, and wall batteries for decentralized production and storage (So you get an enormous amount of storage and space on already taken land). But being able to put that energy in a medium that could be sold to transport (Or even burned for energy directly), that's very cheap could drastically change the issue. Both by allowing grid based plants to produce during low production periods or to cover spikes or offsetting the cost of them by not wasting the energy...Or it could allow, as said, plants to be built in places where their out of the way so it overcomes the room thing and we can use their energy to feed transport.
And I don't think your being a debbie downer--it's absolutely true. This won't solve our problem. It gives us time to solve our problem, and potentially gives us a way to manage our power problem into the future if it works out which is great. But even if it scales up cheaper than pumping out oil; it's not going to fix the fact that that because of clear cutting in a lot of poorer countries the amount of carbon we can sequester is going down, and even if its cheaper than pumping new discoveries of oil, I doubt it will be cheaper than current reserves on tap. =-/. It's a piece to a future without needing oil from the ground, but its not a magic bullet for what the essence of the problem is--3-4 billion people live at subsistence level, a small fluctuation in the price of energy will kill a lot of them.
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Sentagur
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At the very least if renewables like solar or wind or even if Nuclear power(yeah i know it is not renewable) is used to create Ethanol it will help the society ween off the oil and leave that carbon that was sequestered for millions of years underground where it is currently.
This will as mentioned slow down and eventually hit the pause on global warming until more permanent solutions get established.
When we hit the point where power generation is sufficient we can suck the CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to Oxygen + Carbon nano fiber suits for everyone...
iannis
Musty Nester
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I remember reading a fairly long discussion on reddit one time that one of the best things we could do is start to bury trees in the desert.
Tongue in cheek, obviously, but they'd actually done the math behind it. It was kinda funny. It would definitely put a lot of carbon and the slow road.
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Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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Well, that's kind of how the oil got there in the first place, except it was plant mass/algae in marshes sinking down I believe.
But we have ways we could yank it out of the atmosphere and sequester it; if we dedicated resources to it. Algae and Photosynthetic Bacteria can process CO2 at speeds that put plants to shame, several times greater than even Sugar Cane (Which uses a ton of carbon, I believe, in its Calvin Cycle to make sugar.). That's why they are typically what's used to try and make efficient bio-fuels. You could grow massive batches of Algae, then sink them somewhere deep.
I seem to recall people talking about how fracked shale could contain carbon well, and the system to put it there is already in place. I wonder if you could shoot Algae down into there, heh.
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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Might need to do that to reverse the processes we have already started, but it seems insane to engineer systems to artificially remove carbon that will almost certainly have serious unintended consequences vs. just not outputting a shit ton of carbon in the first place. I.e. nuclear.
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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Yep, it is, but the thing is, even if we swapped over to nuclear, and solar/wind for intermittent day time spikes? We'd still need a lot of oil; there are elements of transportation that won't be able to run on batteries within the foreseeable future. So even if we swapped over electrical generation, we wouldn't really need less oil--in fact, in the U.S. for example, oil is rarely used for electrical generation at all.
71% Transportation
23% Industrial
5% Residential and Commercial
1% Electric Power
The big thing nuclear would end is coal. Which is 22% of our energy usage--so it's a major drop off of emissions. Not sure if it would cut down as much on our natural gas use, since most natural gas plants are there specifically to deal with usage spikes (And Nuclear, from what I understand, is great for base load but it doesn't adapt very well to short term demand increases or decreases.) But that could probably be done by renewable, combined with local storage. But if we could swap just all of our coal electrical generation (91% of coal is used for that) over to nuclear; and then swap all personal transports over to electric (Even just Cars, and motorcycles) we could reduce our oil reliance by around 15%, or so (Not sure if light trucks can swap over to batteries too? But that would drop our oil use by probably 30% or more, all together). But the drop in emissions would be pretty immense, thanks to not needing it for electrical generation alone, just from eliminating coal.
However, from the list below--there are just certain types of transports that right now are going to be oil for quite a while. So being able to pump some of it down, while not needing to pull as much up is probably going to be needed. (Trucks, and everything else down the list below them.)
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