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Copying Plants

As plants use carbon dioxide and free electrons derived from water to turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates (please excuse the simplistic nature of the overview of photosynthesis, i realise what i just said barely scratches the surface but run with me on this) Couldnt we do the same with CO2 admitted from power stations?, firs electrons at it under the right conditions and simply make by-product carbohydrates out of it?

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Tags: photosynthesis, Greenhousegases.

 

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Jon-Richfield says:

The short answer is yes. Practically any reduction of the carbon dioxide molecule, whether to formic acid, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, methanol, or even plain carbon, would yield storable, industrially usable materials.

There are two fundamental problems, apart from a large job lot of incidental problems:

Firstly the most fundamental problem is the thermodynamic fact that you cannot reduce carbon dioxide without expending at least as much energy (in practice significantly more energy) as had been yielded by the oxidation of the carbon in the first place. Since the oxidation of carbon is our greatest direct source of industrial and domestic energy, this represents a serious problem. So far we have dealt with it simply by dumping our "ash" into the atmosphere – simple and cheap. Until now.

Secondly, and accordingly, for anything like that to work we must identify a source of energy to drive the process. The only obvious such source (apart from some futuristic speculations and minor specialist applications) is solar energy; which is where we got most of the fuel from in the first place by way of photosynthesis. We still use this route, willy-nilly, in the form of photosynthesis in plants, but the process is chemically enormously tricky and we still have a long way to go before we can cheerfully undertake to undo our creation of carbon dioxide by industrial processes anyway nearly as fast as we create new carbon dioxide.

Just firing electrons is neither nearly efficient enough, nor specific enough to produce desirable effects. It is not yet clear how best to achieve photosynthetic results, either from harvestable or self sustaining plant growth, or from fully synthetic, solar powered industrial processes.

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posted on 2011-02-14 07:05:23 | Report abuse


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tbrucenyc says:

I saw a documentary where they had the CO2 fro a power plant bubbling through plastic tubes growing algae in the sun.

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posted on 2011-02-14 16:30:48 | Report abuse


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@li0nestone says:

We are likely to go down this route in a very short time, probably no more than 20 or 20 years hence.  By the use of solar energy we could convert the CO2 in the atmosphere to either methanol (CH3OH) or dimethyl ether (CH3OCH3) to use as fuels.  It's not done at the moment because it's not economic to do so.

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posted on 2011-02-17 10:26:00 | Report abuse


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