Afterglow: Fusion Economy

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Single cell factories

So far we’ve discussed a model where we first generating carbohydrates (from water and captured CO2) and then do various chemical processes to produce feedstocks and finally more complex like polymers, medicine etc. These can then be made into final products in variety of ways - for example with 3D printers or injection moulding.

There is a quite a lot of loss of energy in the whole process. This is due to the length of the process. There is loss at every step.

In the long-term production of goods goes towards a direction where going through such long hoops is omitted. But instead we go directly from energy (sun rays or electricity) to the end-product or at least jump quite a bit to more complex feedstocks.

This will happen with the help of engineered microbes.

As examples of early progress in this direction, let’s review a few recent developments.

Carbon nanotubes have been successfully put inside cyanobacteria that produces electricity to improve the production capacity. These nanotubes also continue working after cell division meaning that the capacity is inherited to new cells.

This can be used to create “living” photovoltaics.

As one additional feature, these solar cells remove carbon dioxide from the air. The long-term goal of this research is to change the cyanobacteria in a way where carbon nanotubes are no longer needed.

This article describes bacteria that can grow nano-solar cells out of cadmium sulfide on its surface. The nano-cells produce electrons that the bacteria “eats” to produce acetic acid. Acetic acid can then be used as a feedstock to further genetically engineered bacteria to produce different fuels, polymers (plastics), pharmaceuticals and commodity chemicals.

These nanocrystals are more efficient that chlorophyll (chlorophyll being relatively inefficient) and growing them is much cheaper than manufacturing solar panels.

These nanocrystals can be grown at a fraction of the cost of manufactured solar panels. The whole production “factory” is inside a single cell. This could be called System on a Cell - SoC.

Third one that we’ve already covered, is solarfoods.

They have a solution where hydrogen from electrolysis and CO₂ with direct air capture is fed to microbes that produces a mixture with more than 50 per cent protein and 25 percent carbohydrates. The rest is fats and nucleic acids.

All of these examples are part of a trend where previously separate fields of science, engineering, economy - chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, software, machine learning, business models - mix and merge together. At the same time barriers of entry are lower than ever before.

Finally all contract to the size of a single cell. And the business part - the DNA that produces the useful outcome be it biosimilar medicine, proteins of some sort, fuel or chemical industry feedstocks - are digitalised and can be sent over the Internet as an email attachment (or downloaded from a repo somewhere). This allows setting up production anywhere without expensive factory constructions.

Other examples of merging

Somewhat unrelated but the examples above are not the only example of blending between previously separate domains. Let’s take a short look.

One of the sources is biomimicry. Looking at nature and how it has solved the same problems of access to energy and structural constructions. This look can be take either at the species level or how interactions between species happen in ecosystems.

We briefly mentioned zeri.org earlier when discussing biomimicry. They are looking at ways where wastes of one or several production steps are used as feedstock for further processes, ideally producing closed loops.

As repetition consider one loop from zeri.org starting at bier breweries: used grains from beer making are used to grow mushrooms. Mushrooms are sellable products as such and the they also make grains more digestible for animals, also increasing protein contents. Livestock eat the gains and produce manure that is fed into a digester together with water from beer brewing. Digester produces methane that is both a fuel and feedstock to chemical industries. Digester also produces nutrient solution that can be fed to algae. Algae digests these nutrients through photosynthesis and can finally be fed to fish. Fish is then sold. This is how waste from one step turns into an important feedstock for the next.

Event traditional corporations are trying to stay relevant, typically by capturing bigger part of the cake and this leads to baby steps towards skill fusion.

For example in manufacturing industries the trend is towards digital twins. This allows manufacturers to also offer services for their products. This requires a number of changes - selling their product as a service. This means integrated sensors and communications technologies on products for data collection and big data systems on cloud for analytics and machine learning with issues like authentication, security, data protection and legal constrains in each country. General remote device management system is needed to monitor and alert.  Digital twin needs to integrate with the actual design documents (CAD files), and other design calculations and material to gain meaningful results. For the first time the company sees errors in service design as live data feed from customers and can use data to design next gen products. Add 3D printing and ability to locally make spare parts, once this new method has been by authorities. Lastly public opinion and legislation is driving companies towards recycling. This means that when customer no longer needs a product, companies help resale, repair and resell, re-use parts or reuse materials. 

Companies that used to make products become Internet software houses and need to hire for a lot of new skills: software development, AI, service design, communications technologies, additive manufacturing, legal frameworks across many legislations etc. while changing business models and potentially building or acquiring service capabilities.

Summary

Out of the example above, bioengineering takes domain fusion and thus productivity to completely different spheres. Let’s compare for example food production.

During growing season most of the energy goes into supporting the vital functions of plants and growing non-edible parts like stem, roots etc. Same with animals where the majority if input goes into daily living of the animal and growing parts that are not used for food.

Bioengineered microbes produce final product from day one forwards. This is a massive win in efficiency bringing several decades of improvement. And bioengineered microbes can move beyond photosynthesis. Photosynthesis has an efficiency of a few percentages but solar cells today are above 20 percent. And microbes do not need necessarily to use light at all but could “eat” electricity directly. This would allow tapping into a multitude of energy sources like geothermal or SMR.

This approach also allows “upgrading” production facilities to an improved flow with relative ease. You just change the production gene to one that is better in some aspect (better utilisation of inputs, requires less energy, produces more complex feedstocks or the final product etc.)

This trend leads to a future whereall domains are merging together to the size of a single cell. The results look simple but require skills of numerous fields to setup.

This is fusion economy.

What will be the right organisational model and incentive structures in this environment? My money is on decentralisation, crowdsourcing, web3 and token-based incentive models in general. If for nothing else, as a resilience architecture in a world where global logistics chains are breaking and production capacity and access to vital raw materials is being weaponised.