Artificial Photosynthesis

This sounds really good, does anybody else think this tech will ever be able to solve our carbon problems? What could be better than making useful products out of sunlight and CO2?

 

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Keep in mind that even natural photosynthesis is only a few percent efficient. It would have to be a lot more efficient than that to become viable. (Compare that to solar photovoltaics, which hit about 18% for commercial products and 35% for high efficiency cells, like those used for satellites.) Until then plants will probably be a more efficient method of converting sunlight, water and CO2 to useful products (wood, food.)

 

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True, but you have to start somewhere and see if you can make it worthwhile and Panasonic is willing work on it. If we could ever get it to a point where we were able to use all the CO2 we produced, that would make a real difference.

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who cares about our problems, think of utilization of this device in space! though I doubt it reaches anywhere close to the plant photosynthesis efficiency

 

I'm glad you pointed that out. Just another reason to perfect the technology. The article does give the impression that progress is being made and a big company is willing to invest money and resources into it's development. I don't think they would do that unless they think there's a good chance to make it work.

 

Agreed. How about algal biodiesel? It would work now, and a big enough collector could use all the CO2 from (say) a coal fired power plant. It would be huge though.

 

If it produced a useful product, the bigger the better. Also, just because we do have something that will work now, is not reason to give up pursuing other possibilities that could also be very useful.

 

If we were to "perfect" a way to turn our carbon back into oxygen. We would have to be somewhat careful. To much oxygen maybe a imbalance to many species, including us. So how much oxygen is to much? An could we an other things survive in a super rich oxygen environment. (I may have taken what you said out of context, hope I understood correctly). An do we really want to "sh"uck with nature like that! Let's just plant more trees...

 

There's a lot to be said for understanding nature to a point where we can duplicate some of the processes going on. Currently we are messing with our biosphere without much understanding. If we are ever going to fix the harm we have done, we need to know a lot more about what's going on, and we need to be able to see the long view of what's going to happen if we continue doing nothing to change our ways. I personally believe we won't fix the problem in time to save billions of people. However, I will be very glad to be wrong about that.

 

don't worry it would take ginormous amount of oxygen production and energy for it, in order for it to have any sort of adverse or even negligeble effect on living being on our planet. DOnt forget oxygen can be regulated by its capture through rusting.

 

Do you think this could be used say on Mars to make it livable.

 

you got to realize the water on Mars, its frozen at the surface and if it is liquid, only waaaay down below, the rest is water ice particles in atmosphere...it would take energy to melt it. Same goes with carbon dioxide, it would have to be pressurized for the reaction to be sufficient and that with Martian 1/100 of Earth's atmosphere. I am betting they need some kind of catalyst for this device to do artificial photosynthesis, is this catalyst present on Mars?

 

I wouldn't worry about excess oxygen; even if all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were converted into oxygen it would only raise the O2 partial pressure by less than a percent; not even noticable. However we would miss that carbon dioxide; it supplies plants with carbon, and keeps our planet warm. Obviously we need to maintain CO2 at an optimum level, not get rid of it altogether.