Abiotic approaches are typically high efficiency, high rate, but high cost; while biological approaches are self-assembling, self-repairing, but show low efficiency. Hybrid photosynthetic schemes like electrosynthesis aim to combine features from completely abiotic and biological photosynthesis in order to produce a solar energy capture and storage system that has all of the advantages of both systems, and as few of the drawbacks as possible.
The inefficiency of natural photosynthesis arises from an architectural mismatch between the light absorption capability and the carbon fixation ability of a photosynthetic cell \cite{Barstow:2015iv}\cite{Adesina:2017cu}. Simply put, a photosynthetic cell can absorb far more light than it can productively use to fix carbon. Many naturally occurring organisms take advantage of this to dissipate incoming light as heat, denying it to competing organisms \cite{Melis:2009fs}. This has the effect of reducing the carbon fixation, and hence energy storage potential of a culture or plot of land to far below its potential. Truncating the antenna complex of a photosynthetic organism is able to significantly improve photosynthetic efficiency \cite{Melis:2009fs} (Figure \ref{345033}).
The rapidly decreasing cost of solar electricity, and autotrophic metabolisms not dependent upon light offer the possibility of improving the distribution of solar energy, dramatically improving the parallelization of carbon fixation, while at the same time offering the potential to use biology to store many types of renewable energy, not just solar. This type of scheme is called electrosynthesis. Two schemes for electrosynthesis have received significant attention.