One of the better explanations I've heard for this one, well done! I suppose some folks might feel they've heard this story before, but still it's WELL stated, and that counts for a lot! That cape is very stylish, by the way, hehe!
Don’t think you are the only one who writes elaborate botany fan fictions, I do too. I’ve made an entire world known as snorin, when plants are purple instead of green. There are a lot more similarities between snorin and Mars than snorin in earth, but it’s still very wet there.
At 8:27, you label the processes "anaerobic respiration", while the diagram calls them fermentation. The diagram is right! Anaerobic respiration is very different & requires the electron transport chain. Fermentation starts with sugars like glucose and is definitely what plants do!
11:19 Problem with the "magic" of biofuels is that mass-producing them is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. So we are still, though indirectly, burning fossil fuels and increasing CO2 levels…
Another - possibly bigger - problem is that they tend to get grown on the world´s limited farmland. Which we kind of already need to feed billions of people so it´s going to be hard to also use it to grow a significant part of our fuel. (Unless it comes from waste products but the kind of stuff you use to produce fuel is also the kind of stuff you don´t throw away in bulk.)
There's a lot of research being done in using solid waste (which has downstream versions of plant fuel) as a biofuel source material. Also, industrial byproducts of plant material like sugarcane fiber and wood pulp are examples of ways to take waste product on existing farmed land (or working forest land) and turning it into a biofuel input. As for the combustible, that is a more complicated problem but not an unsolvable one I think!
Plants must produce less CO2 than oxygen or they wouldn't be considered a carbon sink. Does anyone know what's a typical ratio of CO2:oxygen outputted?
