Major advance in artificial photosynthesis uses sunshine to create fossil fuel analogs

by Will Parker

A major breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions and convert them into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

Developed by scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley, the system uses a hybrid arrangement of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.

"We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis," says Peidong Yang, a chemist at Berkeley Lab and one of the leaders of this study. "Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground."

Yang is one of three authors of a paper - "Nanowire-bacteria hybrids for unassisted solar carbon dioxide fixation to value-added chemicals" - describing this research in the journal Nano Letters.

"In natural photosynthesis, leaves harvest solar energy and carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of molecular products that form biomass," explained researcher Chris Chang. "In our system, nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria, where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products."

By combining biocompatible light-capturing nanowire arrays with select bacterial populations, the new artificial photosynthesis system offers a win/win situation for the environment: solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide.

The system starts with an "artificial forest" of nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires. "Our artificial forest is similar to the chloroplasts in green plants," Yang explained. "When sunlight is absorbed, photo-excited electron-hole pairs are generated in the silicon and titanium oxide nanowires, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum. The photo-generated electrons in the silicon will be passed onto bacteria for the CO₂ reduction while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide split water molecules to make oxygen."

Once the forest of nanowire arrays is established, it is populated with microbial populations that produce enzymes known to selectively catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide. For this study, the Berkeley team used Sporomusa ovata, an anaerobic bacterium that readily accepts electrons directly from the surrounding environment and uses them to reduce carbon dioxide.

"S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate, a versatile chemical intermediate that can be used to manufacture a diverse array of useful chemicals," says Berkeley researcher Michelle Chang. "We were able to uniformly populate our nanowire array with S. ovata using buffered brackish water with trace vitamins as the only organic component."

Once the carbon dioxide has been reduced by S. ovata to acetate (or some other biosynthetic intermediate), genetically engineered E.coli are used to synthesize targeted chemical products. To improve the yields of targeted chemical products, the S. ovata and E.coli were kept separate for this study. In the future, these two activities - catalyzing and synthesizing - could be combined into a single step process.

A key to the success of their artificial photosynthesis system is the separation of the demanding requirements for light-capture efficiency and catalytic activity that is made possible by the nanowire/bacteria hybrid technology. With this approach, the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0.38 percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight, which is about the same as that of a leaf.

The yields of target chemical molecules produced from the acetate were also encouraging - as high as 26 percent for butanol, a fuel comparable to gasoline, 25 percent for amorphadiene, a precursor to the antimaleria drug artemisinin, and 52 percent for the renewable and biodegradable plastic PHB. Improved performances are anticipated with further refinements of the technology. "We are currently working on our second generation system which has a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of three-percent," Yang says. "Once we can reach a conversion efficiency of 10-percent in a cost effective manner, the technology should be commercially viable."

17 April 2015

Major advance in artificial photosynthesis uses sunshine to create fossil fuel analogs

by Will Parker

Source: Berkeley Lab