OK, so lets start with the big one. I think I can reverse global warming. Ideas have to come from somewhere don't they? This is a plan I started working on over 6 years ago and no one has been able to find a reason why this wouldn't work and this includes university departments and one of the largest chemical companies in the world. It is however, theoretical and so I am putting it out there to see if people agree or if people want to help try and prove or disprove the idea.
Essentially I have established a mechanism by which you can power the metabolism of bacteria using a renewable energy source. Essentially you can plug the little blighters into an electrical power source and you can them get them to make a fuel. So why would you want to do that? Surely if you already have electricity you wouldn't need a fuel? This is true, however, the really good part of the plan is that in making that fuel, the bacteria take in carbon dioxide.
This means your renewable energy is used to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere!
The fuel that is created is formic acid which can be split into hydrogen and CO2. But while the hydrogen can be used to drive an electric battery the CO2 remains in solution and so this can be either recycled or disposed of underground as a form of carbon capture.
So what do you think? Or better still does anyone want to help get this done?
It's a great idea - a few things need to be clarified to get the ball rolling:
ReplyDelete1) How much H and CO2 are you talking about creating (peak)?
2) How long woul it take to get to peak production levels from switching it on?
3) what facilities are you thinking are needed?
4) What investment is required.
5) ROI timeframe.
6) Are the mechanisms you need to use on the bacteria proven or do the require R&D.. The latter would delay things somewhat and increase investment requirements.
I love the idea - these are the areas we need people to help with to move this forward.
Thanks for getting the ball rolling and there are some great questions here. If we start with the with the hydrogen production then catalysts have been developed that effectively split formic acid at 90deg. However, there should be very little if any warming up time because you could pre-split some of the solution before the car was fuelled.
DeleteThose peak production levels though would be dependent on the design of the cell and the ability to created a fixed catalyst (the original version was free in solution). The author of this paper though agreed with me some time ago to collaborate if I could get something together.
As far as the bacterial processes are concerned they have all been proven but never put together. A power source can be generated. Bacteria can use carbon dioxide (and again the group that have done this have offered use of their clones if I could get things started). There are also existing protocols for producing formic acid from bacteria.
The facilities required therefore are really dependent on getting all of these threads together. The investment and returns will also depend on this. Potentially the returns on this would be immense, but the investment would be massive as well. As for the intellectual rights and securing any protection on the ideas, that is another matter. I did a patent search on the powering of the bacteria which was clear, but for this to be truly viable as a business plan it needs to be secure. Perhaps its best chance of happening though requires an open source model?
So where does the energy to make formic acid come from? Are you talking about energy conversion or energy production here?
ReplyDeleteThis is an energy storage method. It would take electricity from a renewable source and store it as chemical energy. In doing this it would take in CO2. The reason for going this route is efficiency. When you produce biofuels you use energy from the sun to store as chemical. This requires huge amounts of land and resources. Using bacteria powered in this way has the same effect but it uses less land and the CO2 is not released after use.
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