That's a terrible paper. More than half of it is a puff piece on how great it would be if this works. Where's the new work?
The process they're writing about seems to be this one: "A hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production" (2022), in "Nature Food"[1]
(I had no idea there was a "Nature Food" journal.) The actual conclusion there was that they could force algae growth with this approach, but when they tried lettuce, "... plant growth was largely inhibited by acetate at concentrations that would have measurably increased plant biomass, although some growth parameters such as roots showed increased growth ... Lettuce plants grown with electrolyser-produced effluent ... added to reach a final media concentration of 1.0 mM acetate did not show additional growth inhibition in plant weight or leaf number from secondary electrolysis products
Plant tolerance and consumption of acetate as a heterotrophic energy source will need to be increased to fully decouple plants from biological photosynthesis."
So, to make this work, it's necessary to bioengineer new food plants that will grow usefully on acetate-enriched water.
That's a big project. It's a whole new food chain.
Or you can grow algae and make various products of fermentation, and ultraprocess those into something edible.
The Impossible Burger's bloody meat "heme" is a product of fermentation of a genetically engineered organism.
That's just a flavoring. The product is mostly made from peas and soy.
Would a heterotrophic adult plant have all the same micro-nutrients that a photoautotrophic adult plant has? I can imagine while one might grow lots of cellulose, maybe there are chemicals that just end up never being made by the plant cells or taken up via the roots in those conditions.
I'm reminded of suggestions to point a fan at hydroponic herbs in order to enhance flavor. Just water, air, light, and dissolved nutrients isn't enough for them to be delicious. The plant needs some degree of stress or variation while growing.
Most likely not, but it is wrong to expect to get all the nutrients from a single food source. Some nutrients are required in much greater quantities than the others, so after obtaining them it becomes much easier to obtain the rest of the nutrients. Food should be cooked by mixing many ingredients, with each providing only some of what is needed.
For example you can satisfy your energy needs with some starchy seeds, e.g. maize or rice and with some fat source, for instance olive oil. This would represent the bulk of the dry mass of food needed daily. Such food ingredients do not have to provide anything else but energy (i.e. mostly glucose and oleic acid). If they also provide other nutrients, that is just a bonus.
The daily needs of protein could be satisfied e.g. with up to 100 grams of high-quality protein (like whey protein or egg-white protein) produced by a culture of a genetically-modified fungus (such genetically-modified strains of the Trichoderma fungus already exist). That fungus culture does not need to produce anything else but protein.
With the previous food ingredients providing the nutrients required in large quantities, the rest of the food ingredients used for cooking (e.g. various vegetables or various animal products, if one prefers those) could be chosen only for improving the taste and for providing the small amounts of essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are needed.
It's technically impressive in a way but it's also a dystopian hellscape enabler technology.
The article even takes the opportunity to mention that It could be useful during "solar geo engineering events and nuclear winter". What kind of insane geo engineering event is envisioned where food crops cannot grow under natural sunlight and all food we eat is from GMO plants and mushrooms only?
Did I mention the health inspiring carbon-monoxide step in the electrolysis process to produce the food for the plants? I did now.
A thousand atomic bombs are a dystopian hellscape enabler technology. Food that can grow without sunshine is a dystopian hellscape survival technology.
You could not have this more backwards.
EDIT: Unless you mean that someone would launch 1000 nukes on the belief that they could survive the impending hellscape only because of electro-ag mushrooms which is a possibility I strain to believe.
Harvesting Monsanto™ Dark-gro™ leafless GMO tomatoes with a cold LED headlamp in an underground bunker to the background hum of the electrolysis system that churns out megawatts worth of carbon monoxide feedstock.
I think he's saying that the nuclear winter is the dystopian scenario. The technology that allows you to survive the dystopia is not, by itself, dystopian. The technology that creates the dystopia (like nuclear weapons) are dystopian.
Worth noting that this same technology could let us reduce US agricultural land use by ~80-90% and rewild those same lands. Is having vast tracts of unspoiled wilderness "dystopian"?
Look at lucky Mr haccount here, with his fancy brand-name produce. You call that dystopian? Here we just slurp our 10% white vinegar straight out of the acetate reactor for 300 kcal per liter.
It is interesting work, but I feel like this is mostly just marketting fluff. Even reducing energy cost by 75% by switching from photosythesis to some hypothetical chemical food, that still comes out to about 400,000 watts per acre for 16 hours a day. Because using high efficiency grow LEDs you need 1.5 million watts minimum per acre for staple crops.
I don't see how we are anywhere even close to the energy requirements needed for vertical farming to be anything but a gimmick for multiple decades.
What the op article suggests is using GMO plants that no longer use photosynthesis but instead drive their metabolism based on products derived from CO2 electrolysis and simple chemical man made compounds.
Plant-made plants, like industrial chemical plant-made.
Hmm, this article is about using electricity and CO2/H2O to make chemical feedstocks that would grow plants. The plants would "eat" the chemical feedstocks, instead of "eating" light.
It's not about using electric fields to direct plant growth; that's a different thing
I'm not completely sold on it, but one of my friends is adamant that this approach powered by hydrogen deposits make all of our climate change issues (and other societal issues) into non-issues. I just wouldn't want it if it isn't done equitably.
At a global industrial scale, we're pulling lots of carbon out of the ground for energy and its ending up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with big consequences. We should also consider the implications of pulling hydrogen out of the ground at global industrial scales and it ending up as water vapor, trapping atmospheric oxygen in it. Generated hydrogen at least has a closed loop on water and oxygen from the atmosphere.
I don’t think this would be such an issue. There’s about 500x as much oxygen in the air as carbon dioxide.
Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide by 140ppm is a 50% increase in carbon dioxide levels since pre industrial times.
Reducing the about of oxygen, currently at 209,000ppm, by 140ppm seems like it would have a negligible effect.
The far greater likely issue with natural hydrogen is that we simply don’t find any deposits of it that are both significant and economically extractable. And in the mean time we use it as an excuse to not do anything about carbon emissions.
That's a good point. I'm a little hesitant about it being so easy for us to just switch to a different fuel (without a lot of deep reflection and cultural change), and ending up with a different set of unforeseen (or foreseen but ignored) catastrophic consequences.
Long term, all the digging we're doing is pulling down atmospheric O2, by exposing ferrous iron and reduced sulfides, manganese, etc. to oxidation. The amount of crust that would have to be fully oxidized to deplete all atmospheric O2 is surprisingly small, I think just a few hundred meters. Atmospheric O2 is on quite a small scale compared to the reducing power of Earth as a whole.
Electricity to food via synthetic chemistry feels inevitable. Casey Handmer has discussed in detail. Probably starts out with electricity + air to ammonia first.
I can't imagine that building facilities and capturing resources to funnel them into underground farms is more efficient than using the sun, rain, and soil that's already there. With modern farming techniques, you can capture more carbon dioxide in the ground than you produce, and you can create habitats for biodiversity that help dealing with the more unstable climate. But that means more effort in food production, and thus more expensive food. Also you can't sell that idea to VCs or billionaires building doomsday bunkers.
The lengths some people will go to to avoid dealing with nature …
It is pretty preposterous to claim something is “sustainable” that will use man made energy when the alternative is a natural process powered by the sun, for free. There are plenty of agricultural systems out there that use a fraction of the energy required by conventional industrialized agriculture while still being sufficiently productive.
> The demand for food production is intensifying with a rapidly growing population, yet farmers around the world face unprecedented challenges owing to shifting climatic conditions.
How about we stop creating so many people? We don't have to eat vat grown slop if we just realize that there is a limited capacity for this planet to provide us with real, nutritious food.
That's a terrible paper. More than half of it is a puff piece on how great it would be if this works. Where's the new work?
The process they're writing about seems to be this one: "A hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production" (2022), in "Nature Food"[1] (I had no idea there was a "Nature Food" journal.) The actual conclusion there was that they could force algae growth with this approach, but when they tried lettuce, "... plant growth was largely inhibited by acetate at concentrations that would have measurably increased plant biomass, although some growth parameters such as roots showed increased growth ... Lettuce plants grown with electrolyser-produced effluent ... added to reach a final media concentration of 1.0 mM acetate did not show additional growth inhibition in plant weight or leaf number from secondary electrolysis products Plant tolerance and consumption of acetate as a heterotrophic energy source will need to be increased to fully decouple plants from biological photosynthesis."
So, to make this work, it's necessary to bioengineer new food plants that will grow usefully on acetate-enriched water. That's a big project. It's a whole new food chain.
Or you can grow algae and make various products of fermentation, and ultraprocess those into something edible. The Impossible Burger's bloody meat "heme" is a product of fermentation of a genetically engineered organism. That's just a flavoring. The product is mostly made from peas and soy.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x
Would a heterotrophic adult plant have all the same micro-nutrients that a photoautotrophic adult plant has? I can imagine while one might grow lots of cellulose, maybe there are chemicals that just end up never being made by the plant cells or taken up via the roots in those conditions.
I'm reminded of suggestions to point a fan at hydroponic herbs in order to enhance flavor. Just water, air, light, and dissolved nutrients isn't enough for them to be delicious. The plant needs some degree of stress or variation while growing.
Most likely not, but it is wrong to expect to get all the nutrients from a single food source. Some nutrients are required in much greater quantities than the others, so after obtaining them it becomes much easier to obtain the rest of the nutrients. Food should be cooked by mixing many ingredients, with each providing only some of what is needed.
For example you can satisfy your energy needs with some starchy seeds, e.g. maize or rice and with some fat source, for instance olive oil. This would represent the bulk of the dry mass of food needed daily. Such food ingredients do not have to provide anything else but energy (i.e. mostly glucose and oleic acid). If they also provide other nutrients, that is just a bonus.
The daily needs of protein could be satisfied e.g. with up to 100 grams of high-quality protein (like whey protein or egg-white protein) produced by a culture of a genetically-modified fungus (such genetically-modified strains of the Trichoderma fungus already exist). That fungus culture does not need to produce anything else but protein.
With the previous food ingredients providing the nutrients required in large quantities, the rest of the food ingredients used for cooking (e.g. various vegetables or various animal products, if one prefers those) could be chosen only for improving the taste and for providing the small amounts of essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are needed.
This is known among wine growers as well - you need to stress the plant to get interesting grapes, otherwise you just get sugar water.
It's technically impressive in a way but it's also a dystopian hellscape enabler technology.
The article even takes the opportunity to mention that It could be useful during "solar geo engineering events and nuclear winter". What kind of insane geo engineering event is envisioned where food crops cannot grow under natural sunlight and all food we eat is from GMO plants and mushrooms only?
Did I mention the health inspiring carbon-monoxide step in the electrolysis process to produce the food for the plants? I did now.
A thousand atomic bombs are a dystopian hellscape enabler technology. Food that can grow without sunshine is a dystopian hellscape survival technology.
You could not have this more backwards.
EDIT: Unless you mean that someone would launch 1000 nukes on the belief that they could survive the impending hellscape only because of electro-ag mushrooms which is a possibility I strain to believe.
Harvesting Monsanto™ Dark-gro™ leafless GMO tomatoes with a cold LED headlamp in an underground bunker to the background hum of the electrolysis system that churns out megawatts worth of carbon monoxide feedstock.
Not dystopian?
I think he's saying that the nuclear winter is the dystopian scenario. The technology that allows you to survive the dystopia is not, by itself, dystopian. The technology that creates the dystopia (like nuclear weapons) are dystopian.
Worth noting that this same technology could let us reduce US agricultural land use by ~80-90% and rewild those same lands. Is having vast tracts of unspoiled wilderness "dystopian"?
Look at lucky Mr haccount here, with his fancy brand-name produce. You call that dystopian? Here we just slurp our 10% white vinegar straight out of the acetate reactor for 300 kcal per liter.
If the tomatoes are a dystopian enabling technology there, then so is the cold LED headlamp.
> What kind of insane geo engineering event is envisioned where food crops cannot grow under natural sunlight
For off-world, being able to dig a big hole, plug the leaks for atmosphere, and grow plants in it seems like it could be useful.
It is interesting work, but I feel like this is mostly just marketting fluff. Even reducing energy cost by 75% by switching from photosythesis to some hypothetical chemical food, that still comes out to about 400,000 watts per acre for 16 hours a day. Because using high efficiency grow LEDs you need 1.5 million watts minimum per acre for staple crops.
I don't see how we are anywhere even close to the energy requirements needed for vertical farming to be anything but a gimmick for multiple decades.
For those wondering what electro-ag is: convert CO2 into acetate—a carbon-rich compound that can fuel crop growth without sunlight.
"Electro-ag"
"Electronic soil boosts crop growth" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38767561#38768499 :
> Electroculture
> "Electrical currents associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal interactions" (1995) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3517382204909176031...
Electrotropism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotropism
What the op article suggests is using GMO plants that no longer use photosynthesis but instead drive their metabolism based on products derived from CO2 electrolysis and simple chemical man made compounds.
Plant-made plants, like industrial chemical plant-made.
> Plant-made plants, like industrial chemical plant-made.
And what's wrong with that?
Is that more efficient than [solar-powered] industrial production processes that synthesize directly from CO2? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914350#40959068
What about topsoil depletion and compost production?
It's 4x more efficient at solar to food production than regular plants with the potential to get a 10x improvement.
What are the downsides?
I read that it was [Vitamin E] acetate in carts that was causing EVALI lung conditions?
What nutrients does it require synthetic or natural production of, and how sustainable are those processes?
Have the given organisms co-evolved with earth ecology for millions of billions of years?
Acetate > Biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate
PV modules don't grow themselves. Also, the CO2 has to be captured somehow. Plants double as CO2 collectors.
An upside is vastly lower water requirements, since no transpiration.
Hmm, this article is about using electricity and CO2/H2O to make chemical feedstocks that would grow plants. The plants would "eat" the chemical feedstocks, instead of "eating" light.
It's not about using electric fields to direct plant growth; that's a different thing
Perhaps electro-agriculture is an all-encompassing term, or a new usage in this context
I'm not completely sold on it, but one of my friends is adamant that this approach powered by hydrogen deposits make all of our climate change issues (and other societal issues) into non-issues. I just wouldn't want it if it isn't done equitably.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-...
At a global industrial scale, we're pulling lots of carbon out of the ground for energy and its ending up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with big consequences. We should also consider the implications of pulling hydrogen out of the ground at global industrial scales and it ending up as water vapor, trapping atmospheric oxygen in it. Generated hydrogen at least has a closed loop on water and oxygen from the atmosphere.
I don’t think this would be such an issue. There’s about 500x as much oxygen in the air as carbon dioxide.
Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide by 140ppm is a 50% increase in carbon dioxide levels since pre industrial times.
Reducing the about of oxygen, currently at 209,000ppm, by 140ppm seems like it would have a negligible effect.
The far greater likely issue with natural hydrogen is that we simply don’t find any deposits of it that are both significant and economically extractable. And in the mean time we use it as an excuse to not do anything about carbon emissions.
That's a good point. I'm a little hesitant about it being so easy for us to just switch to a different fuel (without a lot of deep reflection and cultural change), and ending up with a different set of unforeseen (or foreseen but ignored) catastrophic consequences.
We pull massive amounts of oxides out of the ground and dump the oxygen too. Iron ore is mostly oxides, for instance.
Long term, all the digging we're doing is pulling down atmospheric O2, by exposing ferrous iron and reduced sulfides, manganese, etc. to oxidation. The amount of crust that would have to be fully oxidized to deplete all atmospheric O2 is surprisingly small, I think just a few hundred meters. Atmospheric O2 is on quite a small scale compared to the reducing power of Earth as a whole.
There are no significant hydrogen deposits. Otherwise, we would have long discovered at least some of them.
Another possibility worth investigating is direct electricity-driven synthesis: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electr...
Electricity to food via synthetic chemistry feels inevitable. Casey Handmer has discussed in detail. Probably starts out with electricity + air to ammonia first.
Mammals can safely get a pretty large fraction of their carbon and energy from acetic acid directly.
It's a shame it needs GM; I initially thought they were targeting producing an intermediate that they could just add to standard plants.
I can't imagine that building facilities and capturing resources to funnel them into underground farms is more efficient than using the sun, rain, and soil that's already there. With modern farming techniques, you can capture more carbon dioxide in the ground than you produce, and you can create habitats for biodiversity that help dealing with the more unstable climate. But that means more effort in food production, and thus more expensive food. Also you can't sell that idea to VCs or billionaires building doomsday bunkers.
The lengths some people will go to to avoid dealing with nature …
It is pretty preposterous to claim something is “sustainable” that will use man made energy when the alternative is a natural process powered by the sun, for free. There are plenty of agricultural systems out there that use a fraction of the energy required by conventional industrialized agriculture while still being sufficiently productive.
No light? What are they expecting to grow, rhubarb and mushrooms?
Truyen22
[flagged]
> The demand for food production is intensifying with a rapidly growing population, yet farmers around the world face unprecedented challenges owing to shifting climatic conditions.
How about we stop creating so many people? We don't have to eat vat grown slop if we just realize that there is a limited capacity for this planet to provide us with real, nutritious food.
That's a solved problem, the population is projected to peak before the end of the century.