From the article:Researchers built a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel.

One thing that cheap solar panels can&#x27;t do is produce feedstock for a 3d printer. The effective wattage of something that prevents the need to ship something from the other side of the planet could be quite high even if it&#x27;s actual wattage is low.That&#x27;s not to say that we&#x27;re there yet. Specialists in other countries still make a much better widget than the robot in my closet and they will for a while. But it&#x27;s a step.

In what way? Energy production? I believe there are quite some breakthrougs required for this to compete with cheap solar panels.

Perovskite is not durable though, and that&#x27;s the main reason it is still not used in solar cells.

Mimicking photosynthesis at this level, using durable inorganic materials like copper and perovskite, feels like one of those &quot;quiet breakthroughs&quot; that could end up being a game-changer if scaled up

Direct solar-to-chemical systems like this can be more efficient in theory because they cut out the middleman (electricity storage and conversion), but in practice, they&#x27;re often less mature and have lower overall efficiency right now compared to established solar-electric-chemical setups

Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terraformindustries.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terraformindustries.com&#x2F;</a>
[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terraformindustries.wordpress.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terraformindustries.wordpress.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;</a>

After following the literature down several different rabbit holes, I found this argument in some of the supplementary figures on that tree that seems to address your question:&gt; &quot;Supplementary Note 1 | Advantages of PEC hydrocarbon synthesis.&quot;In general, PEC systems have the potential to combine the performance of wired PV-electrolysis (PV-E) systems with the simplicity of photocatalytic (PC) systems. PV-E is an established technology, which can take advantage of commercial solar cell modules with light harvesting efficiencies above 20% 24 and state-of-the-art gas diffusion electrolysers operating at high current densities above 1 A cm-2.25 However, PV-E assemblies require additional components including reactors, membranes, pumps, corrosive electrolytes, external cables and control electronics, increasing the overall system complexity and associated cost.26,27&quot;&quot;On the other hand, PC powders provide an inexpensive alternative to PV-E, since light absorber particles and any necessary catalysts are dispersed in solution, which greatly minimises the overall system complexity. However, wide band gaps and charge recombination often limits solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiencies to below 1%.28 While a homogeneous dispersion of the light absorber and catalyst can increase reactivity, this also poses challenges for the subsequent separation of all components and products from the reaction mixture.&quot;&quot;Accordingly, PEC artificial leaves provide a balance between PV-E and PC approaches in terms of complexity, cost and performance, by integrating state-of-the-art semiconductors and catalysts into a single compact panel. These PEC devices can perform reactions beyond water splitting (e.g., CO2 reduction to C1 products, or the light-driven C2 hydrocarbon and organic synthesis introduced here), while allowing product separation between the anodic and cathodic sides. This intrinsic design advantage is demonstrated by lightweight PEC systems using 15-fold less material than conventional solar panels, which combine the high performance of wired systems with the high activity per gram of photocatalyst nanoparticles.29 This applicability and potential of PEC-based fuel production also translates to hydrocarbon synthesis. In addition, direct light-driven hydrocarbon synthesis is carbon neutral, avoiding the energy-intensive Fischer-Tropsch process for indirect hydrocarbon synthesis from syngas (H2 + CO).&quot;Practically speaking the catalysts in these processes have relatively short lifetimes, so you&#x27;d want to incorporate an efficient catalyst regeneration process into the production pipeline, i.e. you might only get 16-128 hours of efficient production before catalyst regeneration is required so that needs to be built into any commercial process. So if you can design a catalyst that&#x27;s easy to regenerate, that&#x27;s very important.Source material with nice pictures of the copper nanoflowers:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static-content.springer.com&#x2F;esm&#x2F;art%3A10.1038%2Fs41929-025-01292-y&#x2F;MediaObjects&#x2F;41929_2025_1292_MOESM1_ESM.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static-content.springer.com&#x2F;esm&#x2F;art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...</a>

&gt; 20 gallons&#x2F;mileI did a double take here, I believe you mean miles per gallon?&gt; We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don&#x27;t really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter.Disagree, you seem to only be considering cars. All of these things are just different forms of energy storage and they are useful if battery technology doesn’t have multiple orders of magnitude of improvement left in it.There are numerous high impact use cases where you need more density, faster energy transfer, and completely different weight profiles than batteries.

Modern solar panels are about 20-25% efficient. Putting it in a battery and using it to drive a car is about 80-90% efficient. Both the battery and motor lose some energy. If you multiply that, you get to about 16-22% efficient (starting with sunlight). And solar panels and batteries are still improving. Perovskite and other multi layer panel technologies provide a path to 35-40% panel efficiency.Getting a similar efficiency generating some fuel that you then burn at 20% efficiency in a combustion engine results in a net efficiency of about 5%. That might improve on the fuel generation side but electricity generation would improve in a similar way and it would not be as efficient as that (thermodynamic laws and all that). It&#x27;s basically not going to get much better than being between 4-8x less efficient than battery electric.BEVs are winning on price and cost for that reason. Batteries are getting dirt cheap (50-60$&#x2F;kwh). Solar and wind energy basically have no marginal cost. Driving 500K miles at 20 gallons&#x2F;mile costs 75K$ at 3$&#x2F;gallon for 25K gallons of fuel. 500K miles is a realistic life expectancy for modern battery electric drive trains. Good luck with that with an ICE car. Grid electricity isn&#x27;t free but it won&#x27;t cost you 75K. And honestly, you&#x27;re going to be spending more than that on fuel in most parts of the world. And there&#x27;s maintenance, parts, oil (engines use a lot of that too), etc. Bottom line: you could buy a new EV for 30-40K, and use the remaining savings for maintenance, tires, etc. All on the money that you aren&#x27;t spending on fuel. Even a free ICE car would be a bad deal compared to that. You&#x27;d lose more money on just the fuel than you save on the car.Now are efuels going to be cheaper or more expensive than regular fuel? It&#x27;s a rhetorical question. We all know the answer (no way in hell). Hydrogen, bio fuels, efuels, etc. don&#x27;t really stand any chance economically. None whatsoever. This is just greenwashing noise. None of that stuff is going to scale or matter. Some of the technology might matter for other purposes though. Hydrogen is super useful for lots of things and providing chemicals that we currently produce from oils synthetically could be valuable too.

&quot;Don&#x27;t be snarky.&quot;&quot;Please don&#x27;t post shallow dismissals, especially of other people&#x27;s work. A good critical comment teaches us something.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Imagine you have 100 acres growing corn for biofuels, would it be nice to replace these by 99 acres of wilderness and 1 acre of photovoltaics producing the same amount of biofuels?If your photovoltaics are 100x more efficient to produce your chemicals, agriculture is the dirty way of doing it.

I&#x27;m just picturing whole new swathes of rainforest being clearcut and bulldozed to make way for &quot;artificial leaf farms.&quot;

Photosynthesis in nature is 1% efficient so it doesn’t need to be greatly better to beat it

Grass and trees are pretty bad at converting sun into glucose. Main enzyme in photosynthesis Rubisco is both slow (few molecules per min vs several hundred per second) and lowly selective (confusing O2 for CO2 regularly).Which makes sense, for most of Earth&#x27;s geological history CO2 was more abudant. So chance of mistaking O2 and CO2 was nil.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vYVSH2RpHcQ?feature=shared" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vYVSH2RpHcQ?feature=shared</a>

Make sure to include the time and inputs to make the grass, and especially trees; those don&#x27;t just appear out of nothing. And we already know how it works, it&#x27;s called logging.

I wouldn&#x27;t replace grass or trees with this, but there&#x27;s places where not much of anything is growing.

What? Solar panels are cheap and little to no maintenance. Even though wildly inefficient, I opted to heat water using PV instead of a solar hot water because of how low complexity it is.Also, nowhere in the article does it mention growing these artificial leaves, they probably need to be manufactured.

Efficiency is likely much lower than solar panels, however, solar panels are expensive and complicated (chemically) to manufacture. Teaching plans to make stuff for us is a better long term solution as we can just grow the plants.

Something I&#x27;m curious to know: How does the efficiency of this new process compare to using regular solar panels to generate electricity and then using that electrical energy to synthesize the same chemicals?

Clearly that&#x27;s what they meant when they said fusion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fusionjs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fusionjs.com&#x2F;</a>

Maybe we should make a javascript UI framework generator. Let an LLM build your next hype UI framework in a matter of seconds.Could be fun with a highscore that is measured by most amount of dependencies and lines of code, the more the better. The prompt is limited in length. Task for the user is to generate the most amount of code with a single prompt.

&gt; Is it actually slowing down?All I want for Christmas…

You don&#x27;t want another new JavaScript framework instead?Speaking of which, it feels like we are overdue for the next big one. Is it actually slowing down?Everybody just went head first into AI?

Stuff like this(and fusion) is where we should be putting our research energies.

Late comment on this: saw a short talk by Dr. Eisele at a regional APS conference a few weeks ago on some research aimed at a future non-silicon based solar panels that are easy and cheap to manufacture but also do not lose efficiency at higher temps (as is common with current panels)* Her group apparently is at patent stage on some newer, follow-on research.ref: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41557-020-00563-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41557-020-00563-4</a>*that&#x27;s all from memory, hopefully didn&#x27;t misrepresent anything

Removal of carbon from the atmosphere is exactly what they want, because it gives them justification to sell more oil and gas.

Many politicians are more interested in protecting the coal, oil, and gas industries. Renewable energy and methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere are the last things they want.

A lot of the tech research and investment is done by governments, though.

Yeah, because it worked flawlessly the last time we tried (crypto)

The pragmatic answer is that it is probably a better spend of time to innovate tech that circumvents politics than to spend time winning politics.

&gt;I&#x27;m in my early thirties and I feel like i&#x27;ve heard about an &quot;artificial leaf&quot; every five years for the last fifteen.You have a good memory. Most people don&#x27;t, so the ruse of living in a world with amazing breakthroughs works really well with most people.

Early seventies here, can extend and confirm your observation. Also flying cars, artificial intelligence, fusion power, equitable wealth distribution, ...

Decarbonizing is the biggest political project in the world. Enormous resources are applied to it.

The system of economics that we use is quite new on the historical scale, using it in your argument to say that saving earth based life (which we are apart of) is not financially viable is the most absurd thing in modern society. Without the ecosphere, the economic system ceases to exist... So by the very definition, it is the utmost important and therefore not only viable but absolutely necessary.

I think the reality is there is no saving anything. Only surviving as long as we can. Why dump billions into an impossible goal of saving when we could invest in survival? I hope I’m wrong but anyone that knows anything about investments knows that there’s a point where you need to cut your losses

I&#x27;m in my early thirties and I feel like i&#x27;ve heard about an &quot;artificial leaf&quot; every five years for the last fifteen.We have leaves. Can scientists invent something to help us convince politicians to actually give a shit about saving the planet we depend on.

It is quite fascinating to think that leaves are not just a static end product but make further leaves that can again spin off more leaves via many trees in parallel.Like the algorithm that began billions of years is nowhere done and is expanding. What we build on the other hand crumbles every few years.

It&#x27;s great that we can finally turn over a new leaf.I&#x27;ll see myself out.

So can I make a realistic plant mech mobile suit now?

As always: there is nothing inherently wrong about either plastics or carbon fuels. The problem is in using it in incorrect situations. Plastics are perfect for transporting an preserving foodstuffs in. Cheeses, meats, etc all have significantly longer shelf-lives because they are placed in plastics in a protective atmosphere. It is things like plastic bottle-caps, plastic straws, and other (generally small) disposable plastic tools that find their way into nature and wreak havoc.Similarly for carbon fuels: these can have extremely high energy density coefficients, and are usable on a global scale. I would still prefer a move away from them and into Nuclear, but for some situations, having a small canister of fuel and a tool to convert that into mechanical action is extremely useful. Chainsaws for instance.Also: I don&#x27;t know what the tolerances for this material are, but they might be interesting for use in space?

Should we really be making more plastic and carbon fuels?

I thought we were supposed to be going no lead.

Solar panels are ten times more efficient than photosynthesis.

isn&#x27;t the self replicating property of life a huge benefit though?

Biology is stunningly efficient, but it&#x27;s hard to optimize further. To get really high yields you usually need industrial processes.

In the next couple years we&#x27;ll be modifying and creating biological structures that perform these functions.Building it by mechanically manipulating inert materials feels so 1950s.

One has a hard time making a ton of money with them.

They transpire enormous amounts of water.

Don’t forget the classic “let’s hyperfixate on any negatives for the new thing instead of comparing them to the negatives of the current solution”

Wow the level of typical HN &quot;if it isn&#x27;t practical then it&#x27;s bullshit and not worth doing&quot; sentiment is unusually high today.

Natural habitats has been destroyed by agriculture.In the US 10-20% of agricultural land is used to produce chemicals like starch, sugar or biofuels, if we could use less land to produce these it would be great.Photovoltaics could be up 100x more efficient in producing these chemicals.This technology could free agricultural land back to natural habitats.

I&#x27;m pretty glad that when we&#x27;ve chopped down all our forests, we&#x27;ll have mechanical leaves as a backup plan. Having the means to generate enough electricity to take oxygen out of the atmosphere could be useful.

The device makes ethane and ethylene, oversimplify it&#x27;s just natural gas. You must put it inside a huge petrochemical refinery to join some of them to make plastic or fuel.

&gt; a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuelStar Trek Replicator?

Scientists Develop Artificial Leaf, Uses Sunlight to Produce Valuable Chemicals