It's the future baby and the Hydrocarbon Barons just got a whiff of it.
Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel
July 28, 2016
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.
The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.
Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.
“The new solar cell is not photovoltaic — it’s photosynthetic,” says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.
“Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight,” he said.
Someone pass the smelling salts, Al Gore just fainted at the prospect of cheap, renewable fuel that uses a greenhouse gas as a source, thus reducing it.
Here is where OPEC lost control of it's bowels,
The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.
Like solar cells, the price will come down as production goes up.
It's still a ways off but the technology has been proven to work, now someone just needs to start mass producing them.
There is more at the link.
Theoretically, you could mount some of these and a small solar electrical panel on an autonomous vehicle out in the middle of nowhere and forget about it while it performs whatever task it was designed for.
Self fueling and unlike just electricity, you can get real work done with burnable fuels.
15 comments:
Almost too good to be true.
I'm sure Al Bore and his greenie-weenies will do their best to claim it causes more harm than good, and will crank up their propaganda machine to ludicrous speed....
That's gonna be something to invest in for sure. Just watch for those two researchers to end up "missing".
One thing I have wondered about... What happens "if" we get to the point that we are using up, or not producing enough carbon dioxide? Will plant life start dying off? Will cooling start?
In 100-1000 years ( if man is still here ) will there be a whole movement to start creating more because "#Global Cooling"?
They will just have to blow the dust off that plan, it's already on the shelf.
Yep
But now what are Malthusian nihilists supposed to use as a club?
Good find. Hope it scales up and gets into production quickly. Wouldn't it be nice to have no reason to meddle in the Middle East?
Suck up to the Chinese instead (84% of world tungsten production).
just wait till it gets banned
Wildflower
Burning the fuel (I'm thinking methane, but maybe they can add more carbons on the chain than that) will create CO2 again. The same way that burning hydrogen creates water again.
This is absolutely fascinating. I presume that with additional solar cells for direct electrical power generation, the device could store the compressed gases in tanks and, presumably, make a robotic cellular phone call or send an automated wireless Internet email to tell you when the tank fills up.
An alternate solar power idea has been around since the 1970s, courtesy of science fiction author (and former NASA engineer) Dr. Jerry Pournelle. You build satellites that have square miles of solar panels connected to them, up above the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them more efficient, since the Earth's atmosphere blocks or absorbed around 95% of the sun's light. The power they generate is beamed down as microwaves, and the ground station has a type of antenna called a "rectenna" that converts the microwave energy back into electrical power. During the 1970s this idea got a little funding from NASA, but official government concern about the "Energy Crisis" dropped off after 1980 or so, and the project went away, along with a lot of other very promising ideas.
There's already no reason - put all the environazi said in a fema camp, and let the oil flow!
There is enough oil in North America to fulfill our needs for 300 years minimum.
...but you won't hear that from the msm
Are you SURE this isn't a spoof? Sounds like the UIC are . . . .. GROWING TREES.
B Woodman
III-PER
Can you imagine if governments would label gasoline a pollutant and regulated it back in the late 1800's? At the advent of oil refineries the sales product was kerosene and gasoline was a nasty biprooduct that had no use...
The horse market may be booming through today!
The biggest problem is that carbon dioxide is only a trace element in the air. The concentration is too small to be productive.
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