CO2 Researchers Are Now Hacking Photosynthesis (chicagotribune.com)

Remember that story about the "artificial leaf" solar cells? Long-time Slashdot reader managerialslime quotes the Chicago Tribune: University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have developed a way to mimic plants' ability to convert carbon dioxide into fuel, a way to decrease the amounts of harmful gas in the atmosphere and produce clean energy. The artificial leaf essentially recycles carbon dioxide. And it's powered entirely by the sun, mimicking the real photosynthesis process.
But meanwhile, in Germany: Biochemists led by Tobias Erb at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology...have developed a new, super-efficient method for living organisms to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Plants, algae, and other organisms turn CO2 into fuel. Erb and his colleagues reengineered this process, making it about 25 percent more energy efficient and potentially up to two or three times faster... Erb hopes that one day the CETCH cycle could be genetically engineered into living organisms, helping them more rapidly reduce atmospheric CO2 while producing useful materials.
The researchers created their new CO2-transforming cycle using 11 carefully chosen enzymes.

Comments

Beginning of the end

[ghoul]

If this technology escapes the lab this would be the ultimate weed. Sucking out all of the CO2 out of the air and killing off crops. This is an Interstellar type disaster scenario. Finally the Global Warming alarmists have gone too far. Till now they were only threatening our economic wellbeing. Now they are going to kill the planet.
Time to finally get rid of the Global Warming alarmists.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is a sad reflection of the times that I can't tell this is exaggeration-as-satire or a real nutjob belief.

Hail Trump!

Re:Beginning of the end

[flyingfsck]

That's OK, since Trump will revive the coal industry, so no worries.

Re:Beginning of the end

[dunkelfalke]

I suggest they call the plant "triffid".

Re:Beginning of the end

[Tulsa_Time]

This is not "Funny", it is a real possibility.

Re:Beginning of the end

[ShanghaiBill]

If this technology escapes the lab this would be the ultimate weed

Since it is something that is manufactured, and had no ability to reproduce on its own, that is unlikely. It is no more likely to "escape" than any other solar panel. Do you also worry that motorcycles might escape from garages and start reproducing in the wild?

Re:Beginning of the end

[Tulsa_Time]

"Erb hopes that one day the CETCH cycle could be genetically engineered into living organisms, helping them more rapidly reduce atmospheric CO2 while producing useful materials." Yes you should worry...

Re:Beginning of the end

[ShanghaiBill]

This has happened before, when plants first evolved the C4 cycle about 35 million years ago. It wasn't until about 6 million years ago that C4 became ecologically significant, when grasslands became widespread. The resultant fall in atmospheric CO2 caused global cooling and may have been a reason for the ice ages.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Anonymous Coward]

typical of deplorable idiots who can't read or think. There was no mention of Hillary or her losing the electoral college vote.

The point is that willfully ignorant are enjoying a temporary ascendancy, proudly displaying their ignorance (like you). That has nothing to do with Hillary, who I dont like either.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Applehu Akbar]

"If this technology escapes the lab this would be the ultimate weed. Sucking out all of the CO2 out of the air and killing off crops."

I can see the disaster movie now. Environmentalists desperately setting fire to coal seams and doing donuts with huge SUVs in the parking lot of Whole Foods as the ice age marches on.

Re: Beginning of the end

[ClickOnThis]

Well, I for one welcome the glycophosphate resistant weeds we created from Roundup ready crops overlords.

FTFY

Re:Beginning of the end

[hey!]

And of course voters in LA don't count.

Re:Beginning of the end

[plopez]

but a majority of the voters

Re: Beginning of the end

[plopez]

as long as they are not also 2,4D , triazine (nasty stuff, tends to persist), metam-sodium, Dithopyr and pendimethalin resistant we might still have a chance.

Re:Beginning of the end

[MrCreosote]

Haven't you seen 'Jurassic Park'? Nature always finds a way.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Pseudonym]

I was thinking The Red Weed.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Hadlock]

I don't think anyone can save the coal industry short of something like the billion dollar a year subsidy ULA gets from the government as a form a life support. Solar is already at price parity with coal, and will soon surpass it. And then there's wind...

Re:Beginning of the end

[ghoul]

Nope "Blight" it is

Re:Beginning of the end

[ememisya]

I was wondering what to grow out back, heck an acre of these and I can fuel my car at home eventually. Finally I can talk to myself walking around weird leafy things, and be frugal at the same time, provided it's sunny.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Reziac]

Actually, I had exactly the same thought, and that's coming from a background in biochemistry.

It's not "global warming" that I find frightening; it's the schemes people come up with to "cool the planet" (one or two degrees and hello ice age) or "get rid of CO2" (which is to say, plant food -- this is a recipe for famine by reducing crop yields by at least as much, probably about half-again more since starving plants need more water, and cooling reduces rainfall).

So while you got modded funny... it was actually damned insightful.

Re:Beginning of the end

[ghoul]

The Global Warming Alarmists have made an entire industry out of promoting "solutions" to global warming. I personally don't think Global Warming is a bad thing. Our planet is a lot cooler than it has been at its most fertile times (Antarctica actually had vegetation cover). More CO2 means higher crop yields. A warmer temperature means more rain and more moisture in the air. The Sahara is actually greening over the last 50 years and it correlates well with the rise in temperature.
Most of the rise in temperature has been warmer winters rather than warmer summers. A warmer planet will mean milder winters in Canada and Siberia and longer crop growing seasons. It will also mean stronger monsoons and better irrigation in India. The North west Passage will become navigable saving a lot of time and energy in transporting goods. Rising sea levels is not really an issue for any developed nation (See Netherlands and Venice for the tech available). Low lying Island nations are not that important from an economic output point of view. They can migrate. The net livable land habitable by humans will go up with warming.
We should not be wasting resources on reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. In any case water vapour is a far greater Greenhouse gas but even the alarmists knew it would be too hard a sell to try and convince people that its better to not have rain or for that matter cows (Cow farts contribute more to Global Warming than all Coal power plants). The entire Global Warming movement has been built as a way of getting papers published, getting funds to run NGOs (which provide a very comfortable jetset lifestyle) and give the ideal rich something to talk about while distracting the working classes from real problems.

Re:Beginning of the end

[ghoul]

BTW I told all my friends to vote Trump.
Trump is a race baiter and if the racism gets too bad one can always leave the US.
Clinton was going to start a war with Russia. When the nukes started falling one would not get enough warning to leave the US.
Racist vs Warmonger. I will choose the racist everytime.

Re:Beginning of the end

[Baron_Yam]

>I was wondering what to grow out back, heck an acre of these and I can fuel my car at home eventually

Here's the real problem. A given standard of living requires a specific level of energy. The only truly renewable sources of energy we have - as in 'will last as long as the planet could remain habitable' are tidal, geothermal, and solar (which includes wind and hydroelectric, as they are themselves solar powered). Nuclear will run out. Fossil fuels will run out. IF we get practical over-unity fusion going, that can go on the renewable list, too.

Ultimately, you need a certain amount of surface area assigned to energy collection per person, and it's not tiny, especially as you get further inland or further from the equator.

What is the carbon footprint?

[plopez]

The total carbon footprint. What does it cost to create the enzymes? Odds are they are derived from hydrocarbons. This could be another scam like ethanol and the "hydrogen economy".

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[jiriw]

Guess what. Enzymes are usually called enzymes because they make possible a biochemical reaction, or enhance the natural reaction in such a way that they are not used up. Like a catalyst, but catalysts can be inorganic. Enzymes are definitely protein based, and as such, organic molecules.
As other proteins, they can denature or even disintegrate due to external circumstances (too much heat, acidity level) but in the right circumstances they keep existing and can process virtually indefinitely.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[Gilgaron]

To bulk produce biochemicals usually involves genetically modified E.coli or yeast in a fermenter. You could feed them refuse if you like, although likely you'll consume an outside energy source of some sort to keep the reaction vessel at temperature since the enzymes won't fold right at the wrong temperature. That source could be a renewable easily enough.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[ClickOnThis]

What is your carbon footprint? Is that the carbon that you actually contain, or is that the carbon you require to live? Or, is that the carbon you choose to alter because you like a nicer quality of life than what it minimally required to live?

It's the third one, sort of. Your "carbon footprint" is the amount of carbon compounds per unit time that your existence puts into the air. That include everything associated with your existence. Not just the carbon in you and what you exhale, excrete, etc., but also the amount of carbon put into the air: to make the electricity you use; to drive your car; to make the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in; and so on.

The OP's question on the carbon footprint of the enzymes was analogous: what's the entire carbon budget associated with manufacturing, transporting, distributing, and maintaining a solution based on this technology? The ideal case, as TFS mentions, is to incorporate the enzyme into a living organism that can take care of several of the above steps. Whether this technology turns out to be carbon-negative will be answered in due course.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[plopez]

What sort of energy cost is entailed? I assume the temperature and pressure must be correct. I assume some sort of medium is required.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[plopez]

How much energy will be required to keep said organisms alive? Where will it come from? What about waste products i.e. products that are not useful (waste management is the bane of nuclear power)? What do we do with those ? What do we do with organisms that die?

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[plopez]

The "hydrogen economy" would produce huge amounts of CO2 if we use the cheapest most efficient means of producing hydrogen, namely hydrocarbon fractionation. I had read of energy balances for ethanol that show it requires more energy to produce than it actually produces. Not to mention the stupidity of using food for fuel. Ethanol drove up the price of corn enough that there were food riots in latin America.

Having seen this blow up in our faces before I want to raise a warning flag early so we can nip a bad idea in the bud.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[HiThere]

Just as catalysts usually get poisoned and need to be regenerated, so enzymes usually suffer degradation in use. In living organisms they're usually they're digested and rebuilt rather than just reconditioned.

So the cost of the enzymes is likely to be a real factor. It's also likely to be a small one...but you can't be really sure without knowing how they are acquired/synthesized/reconditioned.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[HiThere]

You can be pretty sure that the process will use lots of energy (relative to, say, grass). So it's unlikely to be competitive even if there are decent sources of energy available (say you steal chloroplasts from some algae, the way some [were they bacteria] do). I'm quite willing to accept that they've found a more efficient carbohydrate synthesis mechanism, but that's a long way from something that's capable of competition with microbes that have been evolving for 4 billion years (plus or minus a bit). That said, if they were to genegineer it into an existing microbe it might be successful in some environments. And that could be a problem. So when they get ready to do that in 15-40 years be sure they've filled out all their environmental impact reports properly. Including recovery strategies in case of a mistake.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[RockDoctor]

All enzymes are catalysts. Some catalysts are organic. Enzymes are just one class of catalyst which are also organic materials and mostly work best at life-compatible temperatures.

One of the defining characteristics of catalysts (including enzymes) is that they increase the rate of a reaction but are not consumed by it. The killer for most natural and synthetic catalysts is side-reactions which do consume the catalyst.

Re:What is the carbon footprint?

[RockDoctor]

The energy yield of a reaction is determined by the initial and final components. Both sets of components have an internal energy (mostly stored in the bonds that hold the atoms together in each molecule) and when you total that up for the reactants and the products, you find that energy is released to the products. (I'll gloss over the fact that all reactions are equilibria, and will go in both directions. Also the fact that the expansion of gasses and dissolution of solids in liquids also entail energy costs which you have to include in the calculation). However in the process of a reaction there is an activated energy state - for example where both molecules have deformed but not yet broken any bonds - and the energetic cost of getting into that state is the limit on the reaction rate. Catalysts (of which enzymes are a sub-group) reduce the energy of that intermediate state, which typically increases the rate of the reaction, sometimes by many orders of magnitude.

Were you off school that month? Or do you live in a country which doesn't value STEM training? It is a pretty basic part of chemistry.

"Super-Efficient"?

[BlueStrat]

....have developed a new, super-efficient method for living organisms to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Yeah, let's genetically engineer plants and microbes to be unnaturally efficient in removing atmospheric CO2. It's not like the biosphere has spent millions of years achieving a balance or that the balance is important.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

This could be a plot for a sci-fi novel or movie. One of those that predict a not-happy outcome for humans due to their own shortsightedness and hubris.

Strat

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[jiriw]

Well, 'we' are already working on a not-happy outcome for 'us' due to 'our' own shortsightedness and hubris. Be glad there are still people willing to look into (even if they are radical) solutions to reverse this shit, instead of moaning about some imaginary economic doom scenario if they were ordered to actually move their asses for once.
There are already a lot of things making perfect sense (also economically) to do to reduce more damage. But often they aren't done because of established order and general inactivity and who-gives-a-shitness. Well, I do.

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[pushing-robot]

You go too far! No control Nature!

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[dbIII]

I thought you'd be happy with a disaster so that you can shoot your neighbour and take his stuff - that's your reading of what the second amendment is for from what you've written to date.

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[BlueStrat]

I think our fingers have been good and well fucking up that balance for a few hundred years, with the mass removal and burning of countless tons of coal.

You assume humans are not and and human activity is not 'natural' or 'normal' or that the planet does not already have sufficient feedback measures in place we are not yet aware of to compensate for human activity without harmful/dangerous rates/amounts of climate change. We, ourselves, are a product of nature, after all. How many times in the past has nature created species that upset the global climate? Are we so arrogant as to think that just because we've developed a higher intelligence and self-awareness that we are somehow beyond/above nature and nature's ability to mitigate changes caused by life that is nature's own product?

Human understanding of the global climate system is in it's infancy. CAGW may well be akin to the warnings scientists were voicing in the 1940s that detonating an atomic bomb would start a chain reaction destroying the Earth and killing all life, or at least the planet's ability to support life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for advancing both our knowledge in this area and for finding *pragmatic & economically viable/practical* ways to pollute less and impact the environment less overall. I don't believe it warrants extreme measures bordering on emergency status that will harm people by destroying economies and lowering standards of living while empowering authoritarianism to enforce those measures.

Strat

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[Rick Schumann]

I agree with you, friend, but the problem that confronts us is that apparently several orders of magnitude more people in this country than just who live in Flint, Michigan have high levels of lead in their drinking water, and thus are becoming mentally impaired. Between the religious nutjobs who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old and that the 'end times' are here (therefore it doesn't matter what we do to the Earth anymore), people who think science is bullshit, corporations who are only interested in short-term profits and not what the consequences of their actions in the next 100 years are, and scientifically and technologically ignorant politicians, people who matter who actually see the handwriting on the wall and keep saying we need to do something about this are in the minority power-wise and are scoffed at and ridiculed. As you say: But often they aren't done because of established order and general inactivity and who-gives-a-shitness.

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted this a bunch of times on stories like this, but nobody ever seems to take notice. Let's try again. There exists *today* a viable carbon sequestration scheme which relies on extant technology, improves soil, and could be made into a profitable venture. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: "Super-Efficient"?

[jxander]

Of course nature has a feedback method to automatically correct the damage we do: extinction (or a major culling at least)

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[plopez]

or you could just starve to death. A "win-win"!

Re: "Super-Efficient"?

[BlueStrat]

Of course nature has a feedback method to automatically correct the damage we do: extinction (or a major culling at least)

It couldn't possibly be some other mechanism or combination of mechanisms nobody has thought about or understands yet coming into play. That's unpossible. The science is settled. It has to be extinction. Because alarmism gets attention and funding.

Strat

Re: "Super-Efficient"?

[Nocturna81]

Not that some random comment on Internet will convince you but yes we're the first species to change the environment in this short a timescale. Until we find something really unexpected in the fossil beds we really are the first. Can also be logically deduced by the fact that there was still oil and coal left in the soil when we first started looking for it.

Re: "Super-Efficient"?

[dunkelfalke]

Oh come on. Just say it - that you believe some god will fix it for you.

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[jeffb (2.718)]

You assume humans are not and and human activity is not 'natural' or 'normal' or that the planet does not already have sufficient feedback measures in place we are not yet aware of to compensate for human activity without harmful/dangerous rates/amounts of climate change. We, ourselves, are a product of nature, after all. How many times in the past has nature created species that upset the global climate? Are we so arrogant as to think that just because we've developed a higher intelligence and self-awareness that we are somehow beyond/above nature and nature's ability to mitigate changes caused by life that is nature's own product?

Sure. Just google "Oxygen Holocaust". Great for us, but kinda sucked for the planet-wide biosphere of anaerobes, who now survive only as a few reviled and persecuted minorities. (There may well be people talking about protecting them, but I don't see many people volunteering to host them in the form of botulism and gangrene.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for advancing both our knowledge in this area and for finding *pragmatic & economically viable/practical* ways to pollute less and impact the environment less overall. I don't believe it warrants extreme measures bordering on emergency status that will harm people by destroying economies and lowering standards of living while empowering authoritarianism to enforce those measures.

Strat

You know what destroys economies and lowers standards of living? Human extinction. But it's a totally pragmatic and viable way for the biosphere to reach a new stable state.

Re:"Super-Efficient"?

[RockDoctor]

It's not like the biosphere has spent millions of years achieving a balance or that the balance is important.

Tell me, where is your evidence for there being a balance? I'm a geologist and I get paid (you know - cash, from businesses, for delivering useful product) for identifying the swings and surges in those reactions as the Earth's systems either fail to keep up with external changes to the conditions that determine that alleged "balance", or overshoot their adjustments.

You know how to balance a broom by resting it's handle in the palm of your hand, then jiggling your hand around to try to keep the broom head in the air. Yes? Done that? That's the sort of balance that nature has.

Or maybe that's a poor analogy. Try a double-pendulum : suspend one weight from an anchor, then a second weight from the first weight with either a rod (stiff, light, you remember the mechanics problems) or a cord (light, flexible) ; now agitate the anchor. Try to predict the motion of either mass in the pendulum.

Tectonic forces within the Earth (decreased heat flow as radioactive and construction heat decay) is one agitation to the system ; astronomical forces (the ~5%/ Gyr increase in heat flow from the Sun ; Milankovich orbital cycles) are other agitations to the system. There is no "balance, there never was, and until the heat death of the Solar System, there never will be. There are restoring forces, but there is no reason to think that they will be either large enough to stabilise the system, or small enough to not de-stabilise the system.

The best we can do is to try to reduce the forcings we are putting on Earth systems, or to apply the forcings we do control in directions that shift the current state in a direction that we want. We started to understand this (chemistry and thermodynamic systems) in the 19th century ; we started to understand the maths of deterministic chaotic systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Poincare on orbits ; Mandlebrot in more general mathematics) ; we're still trying to get to grips with the wider implications.

How much fresh water is needed?

[RogueWarrior65]

There is yet another environmentalist faction that's obsessed with fresh water usage. How much water do these synthetic flora need?

Re:How much fresh water is needed?

[flyingfsck]

Grow them in the sea. There is enough water there.

Re:How much fresh water is needed?

[Gilgaron]

They're planning on cloning it into living organisms, so you'd just pick an oceangoing algae and then you're done.

Re:How much fresh water is needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually read the article, you would note that the lead researcher says that if such organisms are created, it will be decades away.

Furthermore, environmentalists like myself who are "obsessed" with fresh water usage are smart enough to know that the world's water problems are caused by inefficient usage (i.e. draining fossil aquifers to supply places like Las Vegas or Phoenix or open-spray irrigating farmland in arid climates), and there are lots of places in the world that have more than enough fresh water to supply the needs of even industrial-scale implementation of something like this.

Damaging C02 is not at ground level

[skullandbones99]

To avoid killing plants due to a lack of C02 at ground level, this technique would have to be done in the upper atmosphere perhaps in aircraft ? Perhaps aircraft could manufacture their fuel as they fly along ?

Re:Damaging C02 is not at ground level

[jiriw]

CO2 is a heavier gas. Yes, it exists at higher levels, due to wind and such. But, give it a rest and it would float down (It's lighter than oxygen and nitrogen). If you reduce CO2 at ground level, natural atmospheric processes will cause it to be reduced at higher level as well. No need for airplanes and such. Wind will be your best friend.

Re:Damaging C02 is not at ground level

[jiriw]

Of course I meant heavier than oxygen and nitrogen. Sorry, I should know that's why there is a preview before submit *sigh*.

Re:Damaging C02 is not at ground level

[dbIII]

It really astonishes me how some people care so little about how stupid they look just so they can push some kind of political point. You are not Glenn Beck, you do not have brain damage from cocaine usage like him so please stop acting as if you do.
Yes, Gore said stuff about carbon dioxide years back so to be a good Party Comrade you think you have to oppose anything with those key words, but this isn't about climate this time, it's about the possibility of chemical industries near you instead of having to import stuff from China.

Greener than you Think

[BenBoy]

A great SF on more-or-less this theme: Greener than you Think. The protagonist's fecklessness rivals Ignatius J. Reilly.

Question

[Solandri]

Instead of bio-engineering an organism which collects sunlight and uses it to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, why don't we just plant more trees?

I understand that you're upset that we're not doing more about CO2 emissions. But you have to understand that we're directly in control of those CO2 emissions. If we wanted to, we could stop all our CO2 emissions tomorrow. The problem isn't the capability, it's the desire. We already have the capability, we just lack the desire.

Releasing a self-replicating bio-engineered organism which extracts CO2 from the atmosphere is an order of magnitude more reckless than wantonly emitting CO2 to generate energy. Because once you release a self-replicating organism, you no longer have any control over it. If it turns out our calculations and predictions are wrong about the effects of reducing our CO2 emissions, we can modify our behavior in response because we control our CO2 emissions. But once you release that organism, that's it. It's out of our control. If our calculations were wrong about what the steady state response of the ecosystem will be to the introduction of that organism, we won't be able to stop it even if we desire to do so.

At least with trees, you have an organism which has been around for millions of years so its steady state effect on the ecosystem is pretty well understood.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Ending deforestation tomorrow and planting trees until every square inch of arable soil is covered won't make a dent in the 100 or so gigatons of extra CO2 in the atmosphere from human activities. We should still do it, but don't expect it to fix the problem. The weight of all *biomass* combined on the planet is only something like 400 gigatons. We've really burned a lot of coal and oil, people need to understand this.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

We are not that in control of our CO2 emissions in any meaningful sense.
If we were to do as you suggested, and stopped doing everything producing excess CO2 at once, most of the civilised world would die.
We can only try to shave some emissions off the total and that may not do the trick, so having options is good.

But meanwhile, in Germany ...

[PPH]

... anti GMO interests attack attempts to alter organisms to increase their CO2 processing efficiency.

Face it, someone is going to find something to bitch about. Until the western economies regress to a pastoral existence (with about 90% of us starving to death on our way there), they just won't be happy.

I like what the US Navy came up with better

[blindseer]

I saw a few YouTube videos where people from the US Navy described a system that took seawater and electricity to create jet fuel. The intention is to use this system on a nuclear powered vessel so that it can produce the fuel for the aircraft it carries. Obviously a modern aircraft carrier carries a lot of aircraft, and is nuclear powered, but there are lots of other ships that could use this technology. Most every ship in the US Navy and US Coast Guard will carry one or two helicopters for the purposes of search and rescue, carrying in supplies, moving crew to and from shore or other ships, etc. These ships could use this technology to fuel those helicopters and/or any small boats used for similar purposes.

This seawater to jet fuel process doesn't have to be driven by nuclear power, I'd guess, but that's the way to go. It could be powered by sun, wind, or water, but nuclear power doesn't care about the weather. Powering it from coal or other fossil fuel is just stupid. This process doesn't have to be on a ship either, if it can be made cheap enough then it could compete with fossil fuels.

I've mentioned this before and I get stupid responses on how this is a bad idea. One reason given that it is a bad idea is because it still involved burning hydrocarbons, and burning anything is somehow bad. Another reason given that this is a bad idea is because the CO2 is taken out of the water, not the air, and therefore still contributes to global warming. First thing is that by taking the CO2 from the water the cycle is closed, any hydrocarbons it produces is from CO2 in the environment, not from deep in the ground. Second, the CO2 in the water got there from the air. Any body of water exposed to the air will reach a CO2 equilibrium with the air, any CO2 pulled from the water will then get pulled from the air.

The US Navy has demonstrated this technology and it works. All it needs is some funding so that it can be developed further and deployed.

Re:I like what the US Navy came up with better

[adrn01]

One of the biggest problems with wind farms is that peak demand (hot days, little wind) correspond with least output, and vice-versa. Putting one of these water to fuel plants with every wind farm located near water would solve that. Note that jet turbine powered generators are used for peak power demand anyway ( http://www.eia.gov/todayinener... ) so half the needed infrastructure for this is already in place.

Little help

[manu0601]

On the climate change front, it is of little help to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to make fuel that will be burnt again.

I wonder if at some time we will be able to use sunlight, CO2 and nitrogen to make aminoacids.

balance de CO2 budget

[snemiro]

Why simply the govt doesn't enforce the capture of CO2 to the companies which profit from selling CO2 emitting products?...maybe the govt IS formed by those companies.....silly me.....

Fires first, due to high O2 levels

[SuperBanana]

We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2. Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.

Re:Fires first, due to high O2 levels

[RockDoctor]

We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2.

No, I don't see that connection. Fires die out because of lack of oxygen not increase in carbon dioxide (which is why underground coal seam fires can smoulder for decades, and in general firefighting the phenomenon of a fire re-igniting from smouldering debris is well known - which is why you spend a lot of effort on damping down a fire after the flames have died out.

Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.

Hmmm, reduced CO2 ; would reduce the pH-lowering effect of the CO2 already in the seawater. So the pH would rise, becoming more alkaline. You wouldn't want that to go too far, but it wouldn't. As the pH rose, the oceans would become more effective at scavenging the remaining CO2 from the atmosphere, which would buffer the change considerably. (Which is what is happening at the moment in the other direction.)

Hope they're not successful

[Qango]

If it worked, maybe we end up with a high oxygen atmosphere that's hostile to food crops.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[surd1618]

One strain of one plant could easily take over a huge swath of land, displacing hundreds of diverse plants and commensal insects, fungi, etc. Then one disease could wipe out the entire patch, erosion would set in... fun times!

Outputs of this reaction

[oakbox]

Unless this reaction process can produce ATP or Glucose as an output, it will be useless to try and 'embed' in plant cells. From the, very sketchy on details, article, it seems that the output is a compound that is relatively inert. To be useful and scale-able, any improvements to the Calvin Cycle need to have glucose and oxygen as outputs and sunlight and CO2 as inputs.