8 ms·

Something I'm curious to know: How does the efficiency of this new process compare to using regular solar panels to generate electricity and then using that ele

Something I'm curious to know: How does the efficiency of this new process compare to using regular solar panels to generate electricity and then using that electrical energy to synthesize the same chemicals?

bognition 1y ago
Efficiency is likely much lower than solar panels, however, solar panels are expensive and complicated (chemically) to manufacture. Teaching plans to make stuff for us is a better long term solution as we can just grow the plants.
- turtlebits 1y ago
  What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is. Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    I roll my eyes at these "artificial leaf" claims for just the reason you've identified.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    Solar panels have a limited lifespan, decrease in efficiency over time, and also get ruined when things like hail happens. This doesn't mean PVs are a bad idea, but it's not accurate to say they have little to no maintenance.
    - dwattttt 1y ago
      Aside from the hail, none of those are maintenance requirements. I've done 0 maintenance on my panels over their lifespan.
    - msy 1y ago
      'Replace every 15-20 years' is not maintenance. Neither is replacement in the case of catastrophic weather events that'll have you replacing all your windows as well. The only 'maintenance' solar panels benefit from (which is still entirely optional) is occasional cleaning.
      - fc417fc802 1y ago
        To be fair your windows are less likely to take the full brunt of an extra large hailstone since they're usually mounted vertically.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      Sure but how do these artificial leaves fare when analyzed with the same criteria? Presumably worse, given that solar panels are (roughly speaking) nothing more than a few sheets of material laminated between glass panels. Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.
      - gus_massa 1y ago
        If you ignore the nice "Artistic depiction of an artificial tree" it looks like this will also be "few sheets of material laminated between glass panels", but I'm worry it will also need plumbing for the water and output gas.
    - xbmcuser 1y ago
      20 year solar panels just loose 5-10% capacity and degradation slows over time the reason most people replace them today is 20 year old panels were 200w where as today panels are 5-600w.
      - Ygg2 1y ago
        Sadly our solar panels don't self heal or come with 100(0) years warranty.
trollbridge 1y ago
[flagged]
- dwattttt 1y ago
  Make sure to include the time and inputs to make the grass, and especially trees; those don't just appear out of nothing. And we already know how it works, it's called logging.
  - lithocarpus 1y ago
    None of the inputs required for plants to grow require toxic pollution or destructive extraction. Of course humans can bring in toxic or destructive inputs to try to favor certain plants over others, or humans can do other non destructive things to favor certain plants over others. Or humans can step aside and let the plants do their thing which will create abundance too. (I like the middle of these three.) Also, trees provide far more value than timber alone.
    - ashoeafoot 1y ago
      Would you give up fertilizer and pest control and stop feeding the 8 billion ? Please dont be a holdomorehippy.. Those back-to-nature loving massmurderers without a cause creep me out beyond repair.. those that openly hate some humans at least give the monstrous game away.
      - trollbridge 1y ago
        Eventually, you won't have a choice when fertiliser produced from oil runs out, becomes cost prohibitive, or is made illegal due to greenhouse gas problems; likewise, "pest control" has already resulted in a 40% decline in insect populations; it won't be good if it gets to 100%. It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash. The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.
photochemsyn 1y ago
After following the literature down several different rabbit holes, I found this argument in some of the supplementary figures on that tree that seems to address your question: > "Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis. "In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27" "On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture." "Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO)." Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you'd want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that's easy to regenerate, that's very important. Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41929-025-01292-y/MediaObjects/41929_2025_1292_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...
japanuspus 1y ago
Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system. Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight. They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1]. [0]: https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
ErigmolCt 1y ago
Direct solar-to-chemical systems like this can be more efficient in theory because they cut out the middleman (electricity storage and conversion), but in practice, they're often less mature and have lower overall efficiency right now compared to established solar-electric-chemical setups
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Modern solar panels are about 20-25% efficient. Putting it in a battery and using it to drive a car is about 80-90% efficient. Both the battery and motor lose some energy. If you multiply that, you get to about 16-22% efficient (starting with sunlight). And solar panels and batteries are still improving. Perovskite and other multi layer panel technologies provide a path to 35-40% panel efficiency. Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It's basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric. BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$/kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons/mile costs 75K$ at 3$/gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn't free but it won't cost you 75K. And honestly, you're going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there's maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren't spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You'd lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car. Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.
- eightysixfour 1y ago
  > 20 gallons/mile I did a double take here, I believe you mean miles per gallon? > We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Disagree, you seem to only be considering cars. All of these things are just different forms of energy storage and they are useful if battery technology doesn’t have multiple orders of magnitude of improvement left in it. There are numerous high impact use cases where you need more density, faster energy transfer, and completely different weight profiles than batteries.

bognition 1y ago

Efficiency is likely much lower than solar panels, however, solar panels are expensive and complicated (chemically) to manufacture. Teaching plans to make stuff for us is a better long term solution as we can just grow the plants.

turtlebits 1y ago
What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is. Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  I roll my eyes at these "artificial leaf" claims for just the reason you've identified.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Solar panels have a limited lifespan, decrease in efficiency over time, and also get ruined when things like hail happens. This doesn't mean PVs are a bad idea, but it's not accurate to say they have little to no maintenance.
  - dwattttt 1y ago
    Aside from the hail, none of those are maintenance requirements. I've done 0 maintenance on my panels over their lifespan.
  - msy 1y ago
    'Replace every 15-20 years' is not maintenance. Neither is replacement in the case of catastrophic weather events that'll have you replacing all your windows as well. The only 'maintenance' solar panels benefit from (which is still entirely optional) is occasional cleaning.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      To be fair your windows are less likely to take the full brunt of an extra large hailstone since they're usually mounted vertically.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    Sure but how do these artificial leaves fare when analyzed with the same criteria? Presumably worse, given that solar panels are (roughly speaking) nothing more than a few sheets of material laminated between glass panels. Artificial leaf is an alternative term for extra complicated solar panel.
    - gus_massa 1y ago
      If you ignore the nice "Artistic depiction of an artificial tree" it looks like this will also be "few sheets of material laminated between glass panels", but I'm worry it will also need plumbing for the water and output gas.
  - xbmcuser 1y ago
    20 year solar panels just loose 5-10% capacity and degradation slows over time the reason most people replace them today is 20 year old panels were 200w where as today panels are 5-600w.
    - Ygg2 1y ago
      Sadly our solar panels don't self heal or come with 100(0) years warranty.

trollbridge 1y ago

[flagged]

dwattttt 1y ago
Make sure to include the time and inputs to make the grass, and especially trees; those don't just appear out of nothing. And we already know how it works, it's called logging.
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  None of the inputs required for plants to grow require toxic pollution or destructive extraction. Of course humans can bring in toxic or destructive inputs to try to favor certain plants over others, or humans can do other non destructive things to favor certain plants over others. Or humans can step aside and let the plants do their thing which will create abundance too. (I like the middle of these three.) Also, trees provide far more value than timber alone.
  - ashoeafoot 1y ago
    Would you give up fertilizer and pest control and stop feeding the 8 billion ? Please dont be a holdomorehippy.. Those back-to-nature loving massmurderers without a cause creep me out beyond repair.. those that openly hate some humans at least give the monstrous game away.
    - trollbridge 1y ago
      Eventually, you won't have a choice when fertiliser produced from oil runs out, becomes cost prohibitive, or is made illegal due to greenhouse gas problems; likewise, "pest control" has already resulted in a 40% decline in insect populations; it won't be good if it gets to 100%. It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash. The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.

photochemsyn 1y ago

After following the literature down several different rabbit holes, I found this argument in some of the supplementary figures on that tree that seems to address your question: > "Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis. "In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27" "On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture." "Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO)." Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you'd want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that's easy to regenerate, that's very important. Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41929-025-01292-y/MediaObjects/41929_2025_1292_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...

japanuspus 1y ago

Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system. Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight. They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1]. [0]: https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/

ErigmolCt 1y ago

Direct solar-to-chemical systems like this can be more efficient in theory because they cut out the middleman (electricity storage and conversion), but in practice, they're often less mature and have lower overall efficiency right now compared to established solar-electric-chemical setups

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Modern solar panels are about 20-25% efficient. Putting it in a battery and using it to drive a car is about 80-90% efficient. Both the battery and motor lose some energy. If you multiply that, you get to about 16-22% efficient (starting with sunlight). And solar panels and batteries are still improving. Perovskite and other multi layer panel technologies provide a path to 35-40% panel efficiency. Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It's basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric. BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$/kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons/mile costs 75K$ at 3$/gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn't free but it won't cost you 75K. And honestly, you're going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there's maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren't spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You'd lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car. Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It's a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.

eightysixfour 1y ago
> 20 gallons/mile I did a double take here, I believe you mean miles per gallon? > We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don't really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Disagree, you seem to only be considering cars. All of these things are just different forms of energy storage and they are useful if battery technology doesn’t have multiple orders of magnitude of improvement left in it. There are numerous high impact use cases where you need more density, faster energy transfer, and completely different weight profiles than batteries.