Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.
They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].
[0]: https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
> "Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis.
"In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27"
"On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture."
"Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO)."
Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you'd want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that's easy to regenerate, that's very important.
Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...
Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It's basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric.
BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$/kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons/mile costs 75K$ at 3$/gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn't free but it won't cost you 75K. And honestly, you're going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there's maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren't spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You'd lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car.
Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.
I did a double take here, I believe you mean miles per gallon?
> We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter.
Disagree, you seem to only be considering cars. All of these things are just different forms of energy storage and they are useful if battery technology doesn’t have multiple orders of magnitude of improvement left in it.
There are numerous high impact use cases where you need more density, faster energy transfer, and completely different weight profiles than batteries.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
If your photovoltaics are 100x more efficient to produce your chemicals, agriculture is the dirty way of doing it.
I don't understand, can't we get Biomass from like undesirable items like (not to gross anyone out, but feces?) whereas corn still has some value where you can actually eat it.
> Looking at land-use efficiency, corn-derived ethanol used to power internal combustion engines requires about 85x (range: 63-197x) as much land to power the same number of transportation miles as solar PV powering electric vehicles.
Corn farmers could be doing literally anything else, including a whole variety of things that rebuild soil or capture carbon or generate electricity, and it would be equally effective at powering the Iowa caucus, as long as we pay them to do it. They could even be producing crops organically, producing free-range livestock, or producing different lower-return higher-nutrition types of food, should we ever be interested in changing our diet a little. Deciding to produce the world's largest excess food supply in an industrialized fashion and then literally burning it was maybe a poor use of resources.
now we're talking - can I invest in your company?
The problem I see is that there's not enough money in in to develop a new process. Cellulosic ethanol outperforms corn on nearly every measure, but there's not enough money in it to pay for the development needed to scale it up to industrial levels.
Cover sunny, bleak northern africa in towering photovoltaics panels baby!
I’m as optimistic as the next person about energy tech, but I hope it doesn’t turn out like yet more colonialism.
It's not useless, it's arid.
> which plays a key role in how the climate works
As does ever other square meter on Earth, and its natural abundant resource could be leveraged to even greater overall good.
> Extractive industry ... like yet more colonialism.
I'm not sure how we got here, or what your actual concern is.
Which makes sense, for most of Earth's geological history CO2 was more abudant. So chance of mistaking O2 and CO2 was nil.
Of course humans can bring in toxic or destructive inputs to try to favor certain plants over others, or humans can do other non destructive things to favor certain plants over others. Or humans can step aside and let the plants do their thing which will create abundance too. (I like the middle of these three.)
Also, trees provide far more value than timber alone.
Please dont be a holdomorehippy.. Those back-to-nature loving massmurderers without a cause creep me out beyond repair.. those that openly hate some humans at least give the monstrous game away.
It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash.
The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.
Mining for phosphorous and potassium fertilizers, likewise, but situationally a little different because these aren't very mobile in the groundwater column like nitrogen is, and they don't offgas back into the air like nitrogen compounds do. Quite possibly we'll be mining manure lagoons more, for CH4 and for closing the loop better on P and K.
Ag will continue at industrial scale for cereal grains, because half the population is not going back to the fields.
Within that framework, there's a lot of difference between outcomes in terms of how green we make our farms, what we grow, how we grow it. Herbicide and insecticide practices do not have to be what they are, as we witness massive overuse of things like neonics, glyphosate, and aminopyralid mostly because there's little financial reason to constrain use. We could stand to dramatically reduce the amount of cereal grain we consume, from a diet perspective, but the logistical difficulties of alternatives like more fresh fruits & vegetables will tend to increase carbon emissions. Eating less grain-fed meat and more high-protein legumes is basically a win-win from diet and climate perspectives. Returning to a less industrialized industry where livestock are raised on farms instead of on "feeding operations" seems like a fair tradeoff against something like subsidized corn-ethanol production. Attempting to encourage long-term soil stability with reduced tillage and is another goal that we might tangle with that would reduce yields; We have plenty of yield to spare in the US, so this is an option.
Chickens can also be raised more sustainably. They don’t need to be raised 50,000 at a time, and don’t need to be fed grain. I don’t feed mine other than in winter when there is snow, and they don’t forage past an acre or so area. We produce a surplus of more chicken meat and eggs than my household can eat, and I still have enough time to work full time doing something else. (The same goes for my cows, but they take even less work and basically sustain themselves - I have not bought feed for them in two years.)
Oddly enough, I now sell my eggs for less than grocery stores charge for them. I could easily plant enough cereals and legumes for my household (about a 10,000 sq ft area or ¼ acre), but haven’t done this the last 2 years since I put my effort into vegetable gardens and livestock instead.
Part of the big myth is that we need industrial scale “farming”. We don’t. A lot more humans need to be a lot closer to producing the food they eat, though. If someone owns/maintains a lawn, they should be using it to grow food, instead of buying factory farmed food. (I give apartment dwellers a free pass, but I see large swathes of land that do nothing but grow grass and then have a lawn mower run across them.)
It doesn't have to be 99% industrial scale farming in the current format, is the thing.
You mean, aside from the process of making ammonia using green hydrogen that doesn't use fossil fuel at all? A process that can be sustained indefinitely, using renewable energy?
The single big concern is nitrous oxide emission from bacteria in the soil, but that can be reduced by nitrification inhibitors, some of which can be produced naturally by plant roots (and likely engineered into crop plants.)
Any plan that relies on depopulation isn't going to work and any attempt to force it to work would require crimes against humanity.
I didn't read that comment as snarky at all - efficiency comparisons between emerging tech and SOTA (grass, trees) are extremely relevant!
(Warning to welf: you may be naive)
Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.
Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.