The Unfactory

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Introduction and Reasons for the Unfactory

In this set of post we discuss the concept of the Unfactory . It is a decentralised model for moving production near users using energy and materials harvested locally and based on open-sourced production blueprints.

The reason for local production is to make the world less vulnerable to external shocks. Current reliance of fossil fuels carries hidden political costs such as threats of supply shocks, price fixing, extortion by threats of cutting supply and occasional wars to keep trade routes open.

Petrochemical companies are also big enterprises that by their nature focus on economics of scale. This means focus is on mass production and all emerging needs and technological capabilities are too small to attract attention from their internal decision makers.

Local production is more agile being able to cater all types of needs, especially when essential designs are open-sourced empowering further development and local adaptations.

We mainly focusing on a particular way of implementing the concept, one based on carbon capture directly from air and followed by further processing steps.

There are other paths to the same goal such as using biorefineries (using plants’ hard parts as feedstock), using genetically modified micro-organisms to directly produce needed compounds or even using nature as a source of designs (called biomimicry). These are only briefly discussed at the end of this post series.

A number of technical capabilities are used to complete the concept: local energy generation, carbon capture from air, electrolysis and synthetic hydrocarbons generation with Fischer-Tropsch process followed flow chemistry creating more complex molecules.

With carbon capture technology it is possible to capture CO₂ from air or from exhaust gases of existing factories. Good facilities for capture are coal and gas power plants or cement manufacturing. All of them release significant amounts of CO₂. The captured CO₂ can be turned into synthetic fuel by Fisher- Tropsch process. The result is a mixture of carbo-hydrates that is similar to natural oil. Most of our chemical industries are based on oil and pretty much anything can be synthesised from oil as seen in later in this series.

That’s also on high level what plants do – turn sun light, water and CO₂ from the atmosphere into a multitude of compounds. Only difference being that organic compounds are complex compared to the chemically simple products of the chemical industries.

The last bit of developments is flow-chemistry which miniaturises chemical processes. Flow chemistry is based on modular units that can be connected together to form the needed processing flow for synthesising different compounds like plastics, medicine, colorants, adhesives etc. When target volume is reached, the modular assembly can be dismantled and rearranged anew for a different end product. This decentralises chemical manufacturing.

All of this can be powered with decentralised energy generation technologies like solar, wind, geothermal and small modular reactors (SMR) in post on Energy Industry Structure very briefly and will cover later in more detail.

Another way to build the Unfactory is through use of fermentation in bioreactors. There the idea is to use the currently unused hard parts of plants like stem., lignin in trees etc. and break the complicated compounds with the use of microbes to desired end result. The end result can be for example ethanol used as fuel. Ethanol and other simple sugars can then be used as a feed stock to all types of chemical processes in the future. At the end of this series we take a brief look at them as an alternate. It’s good to note that these different avenues are in no way mutually exclusive but can well co-exists.

The third approach is to use genetically modified microbes to produce medicines, proteins or even fuel directly. Again, lightly mentioned at the end.

Fourth and last approach is based biomimicry and the core idea is to find pathways where the waste of one production step can be used as valuable input something else.

For maximal resilience production localisation should be possible on many levels of scale – buildings, borough, city or larger local region.

So welcome to the journey.

We’ll start with generating fuels with solar power. There are two options – generating methane (a gas) and using it as fuel and raw material for chemicals or generating fuels (longer chain carbohydrates in liquid form).

But more on that in the next post.

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