Solar Power

We have had the Solar Panel debate here before But I thought I would post some really encouraging news: Researchers with the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have evaluated the potential efficiencies of this process for several different photoelectric cell configurations, catalysts, and fuel end products. The conclusion is that photonic efficiencies of up to 38% can be achieved for artificial photosynthesis (much higher than photovoltaics). Imagine that your solar panel doesn't produce electricity that you have to use right now (or store in a bulky inefficient battery system) but instead produces high energy density gas which can be burned at a later time. This is the type of Solar energy I can get behind, it does not require batteries or an electric grid and it removes CO2 from the air. A high speed tree...

I've been very interested in harnessing photosynthesis processes for energy production, but I don't know much about this one.

I'd have to assume that this gas then release CO2 when oxidized?  Not much unlike respiration that uses sugars as fuel... so it's really neutral in that respect.

Now the problem in my mind becomes how efficiently can we recover the energy from said gas?  If we are using combustion, that is generally an inefficient process.  And we then generally convert that energy to electricity anyway for transmission purposes... with the way our technology has progressed, it generally makes sense to generate electrical energy because that's what we distribute and run most of our devices off of.  The whole process is rather inefficient for heating and mechanical purposes.  It might be an interesting alternative for the transportation industry if the energy density of the gas makes sense.

Lately all I hear about is DME and ammonia for transport:

http://methanol.org/Energy/Transportation-Fuel/DME-Emerging-Global-Fuel.aspx

http://www.agmrc.org/renewable_energy/renewable_energy/ammonia-as-a-transportation-fuel/

Neither are true solutions to the problem... bioDME being the closest, but probably the least likely to succeed full scale - like bio-ethanol et al.

What is being proposed as a production gas is Hythane which is a Hydrogen/Methane blend - this offers much lower CO2 emissions when burned. I don't know how well it compresses but would imagine that you would not want to liquefy it due to the energy loss in that process but rather tank it under relatively low pressure to use for hot water, cooking and heat, transportation needs are likely not the sweet spot. In doing further reading the cells only work if they have a high concentration of CO2, much more than atmospheric concentrations which means residential utility is not good. So maybe not so good in the short term. This might be a good process to couple with an existing Power Plant to reduce it's CO2 emissions - more research is needed.

This sounds really promising.  My guess is that it this won't be promoted like other so called green tech becuase it still releases The vilafied CO2.  That it uses atmospheric co2 to create energy would seem it would be neutral though.  If homes could produce thier own heating and cooking gas and offer a reasonable pay back it would be a winner.