DavidPBL

7 ms·

1.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
I should have been more specific. I was trying to ask about generating renewable energy and then using that at some other site for heating purposes. What kind of efficiency does electricity to heat get you compared to just burning fossil fu
2.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
Gotcha, I reread what you wrote andit makes more sense to me now. What are your thoughts on using renewable electricity for heating applications as a way to displace burning of fossil fuels?
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I am not an expert in traditional fermentation but I believe presence of contaminants depends on the crop, the strain of yeast present during the process, and conditions. So basically it can vary a lot.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I haven't read the link yet, but did not expect synthetic alcohol to be used for food and beverages.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
We ferment CO2 + H2 rather than syngas (CO / CO + H2 / CO + H2 + CO2) but yes gas fermentation is not new technology. Like traditional chemical processes which use metal catalysts, superior catalyst design improves the performance
6.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
Thank you.
7.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
We are building the frameworks so that we will be able to take advantage of this but haven't yet. Can message me via the webform on our website? I would love to learn more about HPC, my understanding is limited.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
From my understanding, OER occurs when splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen and can happen in biological and electrochemical systems. In the former plants use energy from sunlight to extract the electrons from water whereas in the latte
9.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
Multiple solutions are needed to address climate change and CCU is just one of many levers we can use to decarbonise our industries. Sure CCU isn't as direct as DAC, but coupling CCU with biogenic sources of CO2 can create a carbon neg
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Didn't know that! I assumed it was always captured elsewhere. As we find new profitable uses for CO2 the demand for it will increase, which should help create new carbon value chains.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
They don't live in ethanol and water but it has been tested and they can survive quite high concentrations of ethanol. And yes they could convert CO2 into recreational drinking fluid, and I learned from someone else in this thread that
12.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
I definitely underappreciated how important communication is.
13.
by DavidPBL 5y ago
I would describe hydrogen as an energy carrier rather than an energy source. Hydrogen is always made from something else, and the energy is either provided by that something else, or indirectly from another source, or a combination of both.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
You're absolutely right regarding enthalpy and thanks for fixing the typos. I am still trying to find the best way to communicate what we are doing.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I find it ironic that carbon capture and storage technology was originally (might be wrong here) developed for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). But yes we really need better systems to incentivize the capture and storage or utilisation of CO2.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
The short answer is with great difficulty! If you do some back of napkin math on petrochemicals, which accounts for roughly 20% of oil usage there is a huge opportunity to displace petroleum using recycled carbon. Global oil consumption is
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
My bad! We are engineering our microorganisms which means we are assembling DNA parts into plasmids which are used to deliver the DNA into the host. So there is the design and then the actual build part before the actual testing. Depending
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Very interesting! I did not know that, thank you for sharing. This explains how Air Company is selling their ethanol as vodka.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Short answer is no. The real value in our solution is going from C1 compounds like CO2 to C2 or C3 or longer chain compounds. This is the real difficulty. Methanol is still a C1 compound. Biology could do it, but it's not what it excel
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Absolutely it is hard! No denying that. This is one of the challenges we face against companies that are spinning out research that has been publicly funded for many years or on a more personal note, going up against people who came from mo
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Current regulations (in Europe, and I believe the US is the same) is that only ethanol produced using yeast-based fermentation of crops can be sold for human consumption.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
The day to day in lab really depends on the type of lab you are working in. If you are working in analytics, running assays (tests) on things like blood or urine samples (hospitals or clinical trials) or a more recent example would be a cov
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
100% agree. I think carbon taxes are really important here.
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Lanzatech are an amazing company. They are pioneers/trailblazers in the field and I have a lot of respect for them. They have demonstrated that they gas fermentation works at scale. There are advantages and disadvantages to their appro
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Thank you!
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I may have misused the term 'work' here. I was trying to describe the displacement of an object through the actions of something like a motor. You can achieve that by burning fuels (combustion engine), or steam, or an electric mot
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I am optimistic that with the interest, government policy and both public and private funding, we can achieve the necessary scale required. It will probably take longer than the optimists predict and less time than the pessimists think. edi
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
I am cheering for the hydrogen companies, we need them! Core of the innovation is around the engineering of the microorganism. One way to think of it is that it is similar to chip designs. In the 80s (I think) ARM designed chips that had su
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
Thank you!
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by DavidPBL 5y ago
There are a couple of things at play here. So first, if you need to do 'work', then definitely just use electricity directly to do the job, which is much more efficient. I agree it wouldnt make sense to split natural gas (into CO2

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