Will Plants Ever Fertilize Themselves? Biologists aim to engineer crops that can eat nitrogen straight from the air. Matthew Hutson February 6, 2024.Here’s the thing about nitrogen. It’s essential for life—a key ingredient in both DNA and proteins. It also makes up seventy-eight per cent of the air we breathe. It would be useful for us if we could pull nitrogen out of the air and make use of it inside our bodies. But nitrogen atoms typically come in pairs—N2 molecules—that our cells can’t easily pry apart. Instead, we get our nitrogen by eating plants, or by eating animals that eat plants (or animals that eat animals that eat plants). Unfortunately, plants are in the same boat. They can’t make direct use of atmospheric nitrogen, either. In fact, the only cells on Earth that can render nitrogen palatable for plants and animals are certain kinds of microbes. These microbes, known as diazotrophs, “fix” nitrogen, by using N2 to make NH3, also known as ammonia. The nitrogen in this ammonia is ready to eat. The survival of every plant and animal on Earth depends on the work of diazotrophs, which must fix enough nitrogen to keep the biosphere’s machinery running.For most of human history, the world’s diazotrophs fixed enough nitrogen to keep up with the human appetite. But that started to change about a hundred and twenty years ago. In 1898, William Crookes, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, gave an alarming inaugural address. “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” he said. “Our wheat-producing soil is totally unequal to the strain put upon it.”Ordinarily, agricultural soil is bolstered with fertilizer, which supplies nitrogen and other nutrients to crops. But Crookes noted that sodium-nitrate deposits in Chile—a major source of usable nitrogen for plants—would soon dwindle. He ran through several untapped sources of ammonia, including coal distillation and sewage, but none were up to the task.                                                       “There is a gleam of light amid this darkness of despondency,” Crookes told his audience. “In its free state nitrogen is one of the most abundant and pervading bodies on the face of the earth.” Scientists had tried for years to fix atmospheric nitrogen, he said, including by passing current through the air. Lightning fixes millions of tons of nitrogen each year. But putting lightning in a bottle had turned out to be expensive and difficult. “The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, therefore, is one of the great discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists,” he said. Crookes didn’t need to wait long. In 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber demonstrated a nascent but scalable method for turning N2 into ammonia. Carl Bosch, at the chemical-and-dye company B.A.S.F., industrialized Haber’s method, and they each earned a Nobel Prize. Today, the Haber-Bosch process produces roughly two hundred million tons of ammonia a year, and has allowed the human population to reach eight billion. Without it, crops would require four times the area that they do now, covering half of Earth’s ice-free landmass. About half of the nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber-Bosch process. But its costs are enormous. The reaction happens at approximately a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and three hundred times atmospheric pressure, using between one and two per cent of the world’s energy.                                                                                                                                                Meanwhile, fertilizer runoff pollutes the environment. And yet, all the while, humble bacteria in the dirt are fixing nitrogen all day long. Recent developments in biotechnology, unimaginable in Crookes’s time, suggest a new possibility: we might be able to extract these bacteria’s mechanisms and place them inside plants. Some crops, like legumes, act as hosts for diazotrophs, which fix nitrogen from within the plant. But cereals—including wheat and rice, staple crops for many people around the world—are dependent on eating nitrogen in the surrounding soil that has already been broken down by diazotrophs or by the Haber-Bosch process. Researchers are hoping to transfer genes from diazotrophs into cereals, giving them the power to fix nitrogen. We may someday have plants that can fertilize themselves. Diazotrophs fix nitrogen using an enzyme complex called nitrogenase, which is made up of several proteins and helper molecules. The system is like a little assembly line. Essentially, one component uses ATP, an energy-carrying molecule, to funnel electrons into a second component. This component splits N2 in half, binding each atom to hydrogen taken from water and forming two molecules of ammonia. Other proteins supply these two components with metal clusters, containing iron and sometimes molybdenum. Two clusters collect and feed electrons to the third cluster, which splits the N2. The whole system, which has been likened to an anvil for splitting N2, requires at least ten to twenty genes (no one is quite sure of the minimum), though some bacteria use fifty or more.The largest hurdle is assembling and inserting the metal clusters. N2 is floating around in the air, but metal is harder to come by. “That has to come from other pathways that we’re basically begging and borrowing from,” Craig Wood, a plant synthetic biologist at C.S.I.R.O., Australia’s science agency, told me. The cluster molecules “are being made and dissolved and used all the time. It’s like an economy, and it’s tightly regulated.” Once you obtain the metal clusters, you need to find the right holes to slip them into. “This is the trickiest metalloenzyme known in nature,” Wood said.....fascinating story-read on        https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/will-plants-ever-fertilize-themselves?_sp=56fe9058-397c-4122-8d87-8cc48884e765.1707620265245  

Graphene is a disruptive technology; one that could open up new markets and even replace existing technologies or materials. It is when graphene is used both to improve an existing material and in a transformational capacity that its true potential can be realised. Combining all of graphene's amazing properties could create an impact of the scale last seen with the Industrial Revolution The vast number of products, processes and industries for which graphene could create a significant impact all stems from its amazing properties.No other material has the breadth of superlatives that graphene boasts, making it ideal for countless applications. It is many times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. It is the world's first 2D material and is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.         https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/learn/applications/                                           Who are the key players in the graphene battery market? The key players are Samsung SDI (South Korea), Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (China), Log 9 Materials Scientific Private Limited (India), Cabot Corporation (US), Grabat Graphenano Energy (Spain), Nanotech Energy (US), Nanotek Instruments, Inc. NEW GRAPHENE EV BATTERIES HAILED AS ‘WONDER MATERIAL’ THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE TRANSPORTATION: ‘SCIENCE IS THE EASY PART’......It’s very light and extremely strong. “Science is the easy part. To develop a technology, you should know what products you are aiming at, and this should be coming from the industry,” graphene co-discoverer and Nobel Prize laureate Konstantin Novoselov said on the EP’s website, which notedbendable smartphones and extremely light planes as other products that could be made with graphene.   https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/graphene-batteries-ev-electric-cars-battery/   

CANADA  B.C. researcher looks to bury carbon pollution under Metro Vancouver. A feasibility study will investigate whether industrial carbon emissions can be captured and injected one to two kilometres under Metro Vancouver, the Strait of Georgia or Vancouver Island. Stefan Labbé Dec 12, 2023 A B.C. researcher is investigating how to bury millions of tonnes of carbon pollution under Metro Vancouver using a technology that could help reduce the region’s industrial footprint.  By capturing carbon and injecting it underground, carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology has long been used in the oil and gas industry to extract more fossil fuels. But in recent years, some have hailed it as a solution to fight climate change.Proponents of the technology say it offers a realistic path to wean Canada — and indeed the rest of the world — off fossil fuels without sinking the economy. In Canada, oil sands companies have banded together to propose a $16.5-billion carbon capture and storage project in northern Alberta that they say will help them reach net-zero emissions from production by 2050. But critics say the expensive technology only captures 0.5 per cent of Canada’s emissionsdespite having received an estimated $9.1 billion public funds as of early 2023. Worse, say opponents, pursuing the technology funnels money away from investments in technologies like wind or solar energy, and is being used as a tool to ‘greenwash’ the oil and gas industryand let it carry on as usual. But according to Simon Fraser University geologist Shahin Dashtgard, the technology could fill a vital gap in drawing down emissions from hard-to-decarbonize industries. “Everywhere across the country, we're looking for ways to get rid of our carbon and to meet net- zero goals,” said Dashtgard. “Disposing it underground is our most economic way of going about this.” But first, said the researcher, you have to figure out if it’s feasible. Dashtgard received more than $900,000 from the B.C. and federal government to explore how B.C.’s largest urban area might reduce some of the 15 million tonnes of emissions emitted by Metro Vancouver every year......read on           https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/highlights/bc-researcher-looks-to-bury-carbon-pollution-under-metro-vancouver-7961189    

Carbon dioxide is transformed into carbon nanotubes which serve as high performance anodes in lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries, offering a new route to attribute economic value to carbon dioxide.A key challenge for atmospheric carbon capture and conversion technologies is the cost of operation or materials versus the perceived economic benefit to modern society. Issues such as stable carbon storage ultimately establish a cost and practicality bottleneck for many carbon capture processes. (1) Such issues can be resolved with the development of techniques that synergistically capture and convert atmospheric emissions into materials that can be developed into high-value products. (2) This produces a secondary market for greenhouse gas emissions and provides an economic value to pollutants that otherwise challenge the promise of long-term human sustainability on Earth. In this manner, the elemental constituents of carbon dioxide, the most notable greenhouse gas, involve carbon and oxygen, which are foundational elemental building blocks for technological systems. Specifically, carbon-based materials are widely used in applications. One of the most notable applications of carbon is for anodes in lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are the principal rechargeable battery for electric vehicles (EVs) and consumer electronics. (3-5) Commercial Li-ion batteries most commonly rely on anodes produced with graphite that exhibit a theoretical Li-anode capacity of 1 Li: 6 C, or 372 mAh g–1, (5) and an observed capacity of 280–320 mAh g–1. (6) Because of the greater Earth abundance of Na compared to Li (2.3% vs lithium’s 0.0017% in the Earth’s crust), recent efforts have also focused on carbon-based anodes for Na-ion battery systems. (7-9) A key challenge has been the low capacity of Na in crystalline carbons (32–35 mAh g–1) which can be improved by introducing defects into the lattice or engineering the electrode–electrolyte interface to facilitate solvent-assisted intercalation. (10-12) Whereas other materials besides carbon can form low-potential compounds practical for Na-ion and Li-ion anodes, such as Si and Sn, (9, 13) issues of rapid capacity fade, solid-electrolyte interphase vulnerability, (14) and existing commercial manufacturing infrastructure relevant to carbon-based anodes all present numerous technological challenges in transitioning battery systems away from carbon-based electrodes. Most recently, efforts to combine carbon-based Earth-abundant electrode materials, such as  banana peels and peat moss, with sodium-ion batteries has made forward progress in this research area. (15, 16)  In this report, we build upon the solar thermal electrochemical process (STEP), (17-21) which is designed to convert greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful carbon commodity. This technique uses inexpensive electrode materials (galvanized steel cathode and a nickel anode) and molten carbonate electrolytes that are heated and powered using concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) cells that convert sunlight into electricity at 39% efficiency. STEP has been shown to function effectively with or without solar powered operation to electrolytically split water, carbon dioxide, or metal oxides, (22-24) produce STEP carbon, (18) produce STEP ammonia and STEP organic, (25-27) and produce STEP iron or cement. (28-30) Here we show that this process can be used as a sustainable synthetic pathway for defect-controlled CNT and CNF materials, which exhibit excellent performance in the context of lithium-ion and sodium-ion battery anode materials. This presents a sustainable route to convert carbon dioxide into materials relevant to both grid-scale and portable storage systems.     https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5b00400#   ....and.....        New catalyst transforms carbon dioxide into sustainable byproduct. Carbon capture method works by using carbon to make acetic acid.  Northwestern University researchers have worked with an international team of collaborators to create acetic acid out of carbon monoxide derived from captured carbon. The innovation, which uses a novel catalyst created in the lab of professor Ted Sargent, could spur new interest in carbon capture and storage.       https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/05/catalyst-transforms-carbon-dioxide/