Microbial Food Production
Discussions focus on using bacteria, algae, and microorganisms to produce food or carbohydrates from CO2, water, electricity, and nutrients as more efficient alternatives to plant photosynthesis. Topics include efficiency comparisons, companies like Solar Foods, and applications for sustainability or space.
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Plants can do it cheaply, why don't we just let them?
Does it really absorbe co2 at a higher rate once you factor in the co2 used to create the nutrients and chemicals you feed the plants?
They are cultivating bacteria using water (that is cheap in some places), CO2 (that is free but it has a low concentration) and electricity (that is never free).This is equivalent of cultivating plants in a hydroponic system and using leds to illuminate them. Plants make food that appear from thin air.The problem is that unless you can sell the product at a high price, the cost of the electricity is too high. So it is used in very special cases, not for staple food.
Why is it so hard to build an efficient artificial solar powered CO2 + H20 -> O2 + carbohydrate machine?
You'd need something more efficient than photosynthesis. Directly feeding microorganisms with electrical energy could "work" in this sense. Economics, on the other hand...
Aren't phytoplankton the biggest producers of oxygen? They also reproduce a lot faster than land based plants and would be easier to work with and iterate on. Why aren't they mentioned in this article?
well, at the end it's just sunlight, carbon, nitrogen, water, a few minerals and a bunch of chemical reactions. I'm pretty sure you could find a biological process to put anywhere that's also viable for solar farms, including open water. In fact, haven't there been a bunch of papers using algae?
I'm sitting here, half-way through Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", and I keep wondering - why can't we grow chloroplast in vats, force-flow CO₂ through them, and dump the resulting products into a mine shaft?
Photosynthesis is only 0.1% to %2 efficient, while solar cells are over %20. So if you come up with a way to convert electricity into sugar that is at least %10 efficient, you are ahead. Not to mention that farming causes habitat destruction, and fertilizer and pesticides are also harmful.
Yeah conservation of matter, you need minerals other than carbon, oxygen and sunlight to make food therefore if human in the loop is introduced you need to take the human byproducts into the system as well