Petroleum plantations and synthetic chloroplasts

Abstract

In considering the subject of this conference it seemed proper to examine the idea of how best to use the knowledge acquired through basic research to help solve the worldwide problem of diminishing energy supply and increasing energy needs. The green plants are presently one of the most effective means available to restore a positive balance to the energy and materials account. Sunshine and its conversion into chemical energy and material through the pathways of carbon reduction and quantum conversion in the green plant is the ultimate energy source, universally available on an annually renewable basis and environmentally clean. Learning how to use the green plant in the most efficient way possible is necessary, both for itself and for the model it provides for synthetic devices. Through the mechanism of the photosynthetic carbon cycle, the green plant captures the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, with the aid of sunshine, separates hydrogen from the water to reduce the carbon dioxide first to carbohydrate. Some plant species can take the carbohydrate and reduce it all the way to hydrocarbon. The plant that comes most immediately to mind is the Hevea rubber tree which produces latex by reducing the carbon all the way to hydrocarbon. The idea that plants containing hydrocarbon-like materials, such as the latex from Hevea, could be used as a source of hydrocarbons gave rise to the work currently underway in the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics, University of California. With the natural green plant as a model, it seemed feasible to try to construct a purely synthetic system capable of capturing solar quanta and storing them in some stable form. This synthetic system, called “synthetic chloroplasts”, would not resemble the natural entity in detailed construction but would be capable of a similar function, that is, it would mimic the way the green plant captures solar quanta to generate oxygen on one side and to reduce power on the other side of a membrane. The potential reactants could be separated and stored and brought together later in a suitably constructed physical system for energy recovery. These synthetic systems could thus capture the quanta and convert them to some other energy form and store that energy for indefinitely long periods with the possibility of future recovery at will in some convenient form. These artificial systems could be used to generate hydrogen, for example, which could be used in chemical processing. or as an energy source, and thus release some of the petroleum products now used in this way for other purposes.