Artificial photosynthesis converting sunlight into fuel is now possible for the first time thanks to groundbreaking research from Japan. Learn about this groundbreaking work and the evolution of renewable energy sources.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the full article, because it was more detailed than I was expecting and I don’t have much knowledge about energy production.
It sounds like fancy electrolysis of water, but with some extra steps to turn the hydrogen into the more energy dense methane, while only using solar energy, which sounds great since I’ve always heard generating hydrogen by electrolysis always used way more energy than you got out of it.
As someone with very limited knowledge of the subject though, is methane not a very potent greenhouse gas? I thought the goal was to reduce methane, not to produce more of it. And to use it, it gets burned, and methane combustion results in water and CO2. So even if this works, we end up still generating CO2, and if something on production or storage goes wrong, a bunch of potent greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the full article, because it was more detailed than I was expecting and I don’t have much knowledge about energy production.
It sounds like fancy electrolysis of water, but with some extra steps to turn the hydrogen into the more energy dense methane, while only using solar energy, which sounds great since I’ve always heard generating hydrogen by electrolysis always used way more energy than you got out of it.
As someone with very limited knowledge of the subject though, is methane not a very potent greenhouse gas? I thought the goal was to reduce methane, not to produce more of it. And to use it, it gets burned, and methane combustion results in water and CO2. So even if this works, we end up still generating CO2, and if something on production or storage goes wrong, a bunch of potent greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere.
Can someone fill me in on what I’m missing?
All the ingredients are collected from the air, so at worst we’re back where we started