mdsolar's Journal: Explanatory Note for "Better Home Through Chemistry"

Songs, like jokes, probably suffer fatalities from explanation. However, the song "Better Home Through Chemistry" has some references to the chemistry literature and some abbreviations of synthesis steps, so it will be explained regardless.

The aim of the song is to return much of the Great Plains of North America to wilderness, restoring buffalo habitat. This is accomplished by eliminating most agriculture in support of animal husbandry by synthesizing sugar directly from the atmosphere using renewable energy inputs. Each American has about 500 lbs of animals eating on our behalf to supply milk, meat and eggs, so most of our grain production is used to feed those animals. If they can be fed using synthetic feed, much less agricultural land would be needed and wild habitat can be restored.

While the synthesis chain described in the song is probably not optimal, it demonstrates a path to glucose synthesis. The main insight, however, is that plants are not nearly as efficient at harvesting solar energy (for our subsequent use) as we are when we use solar panels. For corn, we get about a quarter watt per square meter compared to about 40 with a solar panel.

The challenge, then, is to convert that electrical energy into chemical energy in a digestible form. If we do so, then land area that is desert may be substituted for cropland at a very favorable ratio and cropland can be released to a carbon negative native grassland, and a habitat for buffalo.

It has been noted that obtaining carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere is not all that costly energetically, so we'll assume that. We then split water into hydrogen and oxygen and use the Sabatier reaction to produce methane as mentioned in the song. This is exothermic and can supply process heat as needed for further steps. So, we have now converted electrical energy into chemical energy.

The song skips the steps of converting methane to acetylene, acetylene to acetaldehyde, and acetaldehyde to acetic acid, all standard industrial processes. It then describes converting acetic acid (vinegar) into ethanol (wine) using the Zhang et al. process.

Ethanol is then converted to propylyne using another recent process described by Iwamoto et al.

Those steps are mentioned in the song which then skips propylyne to epichlorohydrin and handwaves epichlorohydrin to d-glyceraldhyde which passes through glycerol. This provides the input for Kiliani-Fischer synthesis which produces a range of sugars, including d-glucose, our target. Those which are not edible can be reprocessed for another try since they represent substantial chemical energy, or they may be good for use in fuel cells.

Addendum: The Gulf of Mexico suffers from a dead zone brought on by too much nitrogen and phosphorous draining from cropland into the Mississippi River. Restoring buffalo habitat would eliminate this problem.

It may be objected that ruminants need fiber as well as sugar. That problem seems to be solved .

Making this a national priority would also honor the buffalo as our new National mammal. (Slashdot )

This also allows survival of nuclear winter/super volcano/asteriod impact induced dimming in style .

Doing exactly what plants do but better is discussed here, but it has been suggested that deriving foods from fossil fuels could reduce cancer risk owing to reduced carbon-14 burden. Instead of getting carbon dioxide straight from the air as suggested here, we might initially get it from fossil fuel power plants, and later from cement factories and make our milk, meat and eggs safer to eat. This would make the project for using greenhouses for crops suggested in the link five times easier since they would only need be grown for human consumption. Note that the oxygen stream produced when splitting water would make carbon dioxide capture very easy if used in combustion.