With this no more nuclear, inneficient windmills, costly hydro dams, coal electricity. Just recycled the co2 from heat power -plants ( coal, natural gas electric plants) with this recycled at infineam co2 to fuel to co2 powering method without fuel costs and no pollution. I know that high-financial folks that control arms, deaseases, hospitals, pills, petrol, police, army, banks, security, laws, regulations, subsidies, depts, medias, schools, nutritions, pension plants, technologies will oppose but at least start a small electric power station near where i live and cut electric bills by 5.

There are some microbes which will turn CO2 into CH4 with the application of electricity. At the end of the day it makes more sense to make use of electricity directly and avoid any energy conversions as they usually involve lots of energy loss. Its the thermodynamics stupid!

The trees produce much more complex molecules (cellulosic) that must then be broken down to get back to simpler hydrocarbons. This skips that process completely (apparently) and starts producing hydrocarbons directly.
I wonder if they can tune it to only produce methane, or only butane, or propane, Or if you get random molecules.
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You still need a carbon source. Yes, captured carbon from coal is better than releasing directly from smoke stack, but it eventually will be released after burning the methane (or whatever) from this process.

ai_vin: Excellent points. But thinking about this some more, I think this is less about efficiency and more about profit potential. If all of your inputs are free or dirt cheap, and your output needs little or no refining and has a marketable value per gallon that is higher than gasoline, this could be big.

@ai vin,
You've made a good point regarding the inefficiency of photosynthesis. But, in the near future, solar PV panel is not restricted to 10% efficiency. Concentrated PV's can routinely obtain 30% efficiency, and yet, is cheaper than regular PV due to less silicon is used. Now then, with net photosynthesis efficiency at 3% max from solar to oil, in comparison to concentrated solar PV at 30% efficiency solar to electricity, or solar to Hydrogen at 25% efficiency, we can see that the amount of land use would be 8x higher solar to oil than solar to hydrogen.

With so much land areas used for photo-bioreactor to collect sun light, just imagine the cost and the logistic nightmare of maintaining this vast area, while piping in the CO2 and draining out the oil! Oil spill, everyone? environmental nightmare!

By contrast, with solar to electricity to hydrogen route, the solar collector can be mounted in existing rooftop or covered parking areas...no new land use...no new electrical powerlines...existing powerlines would be sufficient...The Hydrogen can be produced near the site of retail via electrolysis...much more economical and environmentally sound! And, FCV's give out NO Pollution...No need to comply with different emission standards at different parts of the world that would give nightmares to automakers.

The figures for photosysnthesis seem well thought out and they corrrespond to known values of efficiencies for growing sugar cane. What is not well understood is the costs of the capital for building the operational facilities. With the higher efficiencies available with Sterling and other engines using solar heat, it is likely that electricity can be produced for Plug-In Hybrids at a lower capital cost per mile. Infinia has a small solar generator and others are building large ones.

Even cheap lead acid batteries are capable of being used in plug in hybrids for the average distance travelled. Firefly is eliminating much of the lead to make the weight even smaller. EFFPOWER has also eliminated much of the lead used and made a very high power lead battery to compete with nickle-hydride and perhaps ultracapacitors. Higher energy capacity but low power Sodium-sulphur or ZEBRA batteries might be combined with EFFPOWER units for cheaper vehicles but longer full electric range. In all cases it does not cost much to install one or two range extenders to eliminate the need for large expensive batteries, any mention in the press of limited range and customer range anxiety.

Capstone is modifying its air bearing turbine to use solar heat from a parabolic collector instead of fuel, and the simple turbine may be less expensive than Stirling engines as there can be a balance of costs between efficiency and collector area.

Solar energy is free but so is any other form of energy that humans use. The cost of the energy depends upon the cost of collecting it and converting it to use. The high cost of oil right now is because people must now pay bribes to various companies and governments that have control of the wells. These producers including the US government have instituted controls to keep the price of oil much higher than the cost of getting it out of the ground. These controls include making alternate sources of fuels and other energy difficult to use.

The cost of natural gas or the cost of coal is a small part of the cost of making automobile fuels from these sources. If coal were delivered free to the gates of a power plants, the cost of electricity to the ordinary consumer would be reduced only from 10 cents a KWH to 7.5 cents per KWH. The fact that solar energy is delivered free to many areas in large quantities will not make electricity any cheaper than 7.5 cents per KWH, and in fact it will be much more because more land area and more equipment will have to be built to collect the dilute solar energy. Land is not free; just try to buy any part of sunny California that is suited for solar energy. It would be cheaper in Nevada and Arizona.

A singe fuel element array for CANDU reactors contains about 20 kg of natural uranium. You may have to pay about $2000 dollars for that much uranium because of the present speculation in the price of uranium, but at one time you could have bought it for less than $400. It will produce enough electricity to run an ordinary house for 100 years.

Automatic equipment could be made to take the used fuel rods, now in storage at over one hundred US nuclear power plants, and cut and weld them to use directly in CANDU reactors. Since the power companies are spending a lot of money to temporarly store and to build permanent storage for these fuel rods, the energy value in them is more than free. The US power companies would pay CANDU reactor companies to take the fuel and modify their handling methods to use this fuel.

If the price of natural uranium stays above $100 a kilogram, all of the CANDU reactor operators would consider buying US spent fuel and building a company to convert it to the right shape.

If the material in the old US fuel elements were processed to remove only the about three percent of useless fission products, then it could be blended with as little as one part in three of the vast tons of depleted uranium also in storage and still be used as more active fuel for CANDU reactors than the natural uranium they already use. If the fission products and plutonium were removed, the fuel bundles would still have more energy than natural uranium ones.

The long lived plutonium and other trans-uranic elements that people are worried about would be partially used up, but more would be created. It could be returned year after year to the new CANDU fuel elements and within a few years, the original transuranics and plutonium isotope mix from the used US fuel would be gone by converting to 10,000,000 kilo-watt-hours of heat energy per pound.

The plutonium isotope mix in US used fuel rods cannot be used to make a bomb like the first nuclear bomb made with plutonium or the third that destroyed Nagasaki. It could possibly be used to make a very weak nuclear bomb, but it would be easier and faster to either concentrate uranium isotopes with the new fast and cheap centrifuges or to build a reactor and chemical factory to produce high purity plutonium 239 isotope, as was done for the two plutonium bombs used during WWII.

More people were killed in Dresden with conventional bombs and fires than were killed at Nagasaki. Far more people were killed in Japan with conventional bombs and fires than were killed by both nuclear bombs. Far more Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troups than were killed by the US nuclear Bombs. Far more people are dead in Iraq, Iran and Kuwait because of lust for the riches of petrolium by Iraq and Iran and their religeous differences.

The CANDU operators can also blend two or three parts of their used fuel after only the fission products are removed with one part of US used fuel after only the fission products are removed and still have more energy concentrated fuel than natural uranium. They would then be eliminating their used fuel rods with the plutonium in them as well as eliminating US used fuel rods. The mix of Plutonium isotopes after two or more cycles through the reactor becomes totally worthless as bomb material.

Quotes from Dr. Jeremy Whitlock

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/nukegreen.htm

"The energy density of nuclear fission (energy available per kg of fuel) is the highest of any option today. This reduces both the use of natural resources, and the impact of resource extraction. One CANDU fuel bundle, about the size of a fire log, can power an average home for one hundred years. The same amount of energy would require 400 tonnes of coal, or 60,000 gallons of oil, or 10 million cubic feet of natural gas.

The waste stream from nuclear energy is the most manageable of any option for large-scale electricity production. The waste is entirely contained at each plant, in physical form identical to the fuel that went into the reactors. Each 20 kg spent CANDU fuel bundle is a compact, highly inert package, containing all of the waste products created by over a million kilowatt-hours of electricity. This amount of electricity produced by coal would create 100 tonnes of ash, 1000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and 5 tonnes of acid gases, deposited in the atmosphere or in landfills. Natural gas is cleaner, but would still emit 600 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and 2 tonnes of acid gases [3]. Furthermore, a passive solution exists for the long-term disposal or storage of spent nuclear fuel, reducing its impact on the biosphere to near zero."

If Plutonium and other tran-uranics were removed from used fuel, they could be mixed in the ratio of one or two pounds to a hundred pounds of thorium and put into CANDU 20 kilogramm fuel bundles and used in present CANDU reactors. This would start a perpetual fuel cycle that used only thorium which is three times more abundant than natural uranium. Such a system could also eliminate most plutonium and other transuranics and produce more fuel from them. These systems can get the full 10,000,000 kWh worth of heat energy from not only plutonium from spent fuel but also from military surplus uranium and plutonium that contain energy directly worth $150,000 of market coal per pound of metal.

The most effective way of instantly preventing military plutonium from being used in bombs is to mix it with plutonium recovered from used MOX fuels of French reactors. This mix can be used in new MOX fuels for French reactors or some US reactors. This plutonium that some wanted to be destroyed uselessly is more cheaply and effectively used as fuel in the mentioned thorium cycles.

With great care, the thorium cycle wastes no thorium and continues operation with only thorium added to the fuel cycle along with the uranium 233 produced from the thorium of the previous cycle. The very few trans-uranics made are simply used in the fuel of the next cycle and eliminated.

Any electricity produced by a nuclear power plant can be used to electrolyse hydrogen from water. This hydrogen can be combined with CO2 to make methanol directly. High temperature electrolysis can reduce the elctricity needed. The planned very high temperature nuclear reactors can make hydrogen without electricity. But even with inefficient electricity, reactors can make hydrogen equivalent to more than 7500 gallons of gasoline for each $2000 dollar fuel bundle or for each 20 kg of free US used fuel rods. But it would be eight to ten times more efficient to use the electricity to run plug-in-hybrid cars.

Corn ethanol factories should be built right next to nuclear reactors to use the low carbon, low cost heat. Hyperion Power Generation may make nuclear reactors that can produce heat for ethanol factories.

Hydrogen from nuclear power plants can also be used to make ethanol or any kind of fuel. The mentioned organisms could probably be adapted to the feeding of hydrogen and CO2 with no light. ..HG..

Just because there may be an effective use for atmospheric CO2 in the future, doesn't mean the coal mines and oil companies now have a license to keep extracting. If it is taken out of the atmosphere on the first burn, then converted to diesel, it will enter the atmosphere on the second burn. Problem NOT solved.

@Alessio, a.b et al,
Without supplementing CO2, photosynthetic efficiency will be around 1%. With CO2 supplement, efficiency will incease to ~3%, but it will be an engineering nightmare to collect CO2 from the power plants and to transport it to the photo-bioreactor.
By contrast, solar PV panels require very little maintenance and will last for decades. PV panels can be mounted on existing structures and need no new infrastructure for conducting the electricity to the grid. Investment will be much, much lower for solar PV. Wind energy is already competitive with fossil fuel for electricity production.

Get away from oil, moving on to battery and hydrogen.

@Roger

I'm well aware the the 10% efficiency figure I gave was too low, that was my point. And I'm also well aware of those concentrated PV's which get 30%, that's why I wrote; "Better solar power plant designs can double or triple those last two final numbers." But by quoting the lowest figure for the solar route while giving every advantage to the biofuel route I show that even when an inefficient solar power generator is used it's still much better than the biofuel route.

To Roger Pharm.

Why is it a engineering nightmare to collect co2 from a chimney ? A kid can do it.

To alessio,

Why collect co2 and store it ?? I just said to convert it to fuels at the chimney location. O.K ?

To you..
I just said to collect all co2 at the chimney location and transform it to fuel, is it clear or not. No more coal business, no more natural gas business, no more nuclear business, no more inneficient windmills business, no more hydro-electricity business. Just self-feeded electric generation plants at the usual 60 htz 750 000 volts electric output.

Are you a trader?