Water splitting–biosynthetic system with CO2 reduction efficiencies exceeding photosynthesis
By Chong Liu, Brendan C Colón, Marika Ziesack, Pamela A. Silver, D. Nocera. Science, 2016
864 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Artificial photosynthesis steps up Photosynthesis fixes CO2 from the air by using sunlight. Industrial mimics of photosynthesis seek to convert CO2 directly into biomass, fuels, or other useful products. Improving on a previous artificial photosynthesis design, Liu et al. combined the hydrogen-oxidizing bacterium Raistonia eutropha with a cobalt-phosphorus water-splitting catalyst. This biocompatible self-healing electrode circumvented the toxicity challenges of previous designs and allowed it to operate aerobically. When combined with solar photovoltaic cells, solar-to-chemical conversion rates should become nearly an order of magnitude more efficient than natural photosynthesis. Science, this issue p. 1210 A biocompatible catalyst in an artificial photosynthesis system leads to efficient solar-to-fuel conversion. Artificial photosynthetic systems can store solar energy and chemically reduce CO2. We developed a hybrid water splitting–biosynthetic system based on a biocompatible Earth-abundant inorganic catalyst system to split water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen (H2 and O2) at low driving voltages. When grown in contact with these catalysts, Ralstonia eutropha consumed the produced H2 to synthesize biomass and fuels or chemical products from low CO2 concentration in the presence of O2. This scalable system has a CO2 reduction energy efficiency of ~50% when producing bacterial biomass and liquid fusel alcohols, scrubbing 180 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Coupling this hybrid device to existing photovoltaic systems would yield a CO2 reduction energy efficiency of ~10%, exceeding that of natural photosynthetic systems.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bde3d6344b3bd4c8859ee6fc52e6873cdf0c4ec7
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Citations in the corpus
- What would it take for renewably powered electrosynthesis to displace petrochemical processes? (2019, background): “The current state of the art couples water-splitting electrocatalysts with engineered bacteria to convert CO2 into polymers and alcohols (88,89) or nitrogen into ammonia (90).”
- Metal ion cycling of Cu foil for selective C–C coupling in electrochemical CO2 reduction (2018, methodology): “A 500 eV plane–wave cutoff, 5,000 eV density cutoff, and a (4,4,1) k-point sampling were used for all calculations.”