Daniel Nocera, 48, is working to achieve an old, elusive dream: using the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery. Or the energy created from the reaction itself, as atomic bonds are severed and re-formed, might be harnessed and stored.
Nocera’s reaction got the photons in light to free up hydrogen atoms, but that’s only half the equation. The harder part will be to also capture the oxygen that emerges when water molecules are split. That way, both elements can be fed into a fuel cell, making the process as efficient as possible.
Nocera and scientists not affiliated with his work say those steps are achievable. But first, major advances in basic chemistry will be necessary for the reactions to be well understood.
As a result, Nocera believes it might be 20 years before engineers might design systems based on his work. And he frets that too few scientists are exploring the problem, with many top minds instead focused on biomedical research.
The usual case: with little or no federal support for alternative energy research, science waits, hat in hand, for venture capital. VC’s, appropriately, mostly want short-term research and long-term profits.
“Is it right? Maybe not. But it will be something. And it might be something I can’t see right now,” he says. “That’s OK. But you don’t stop doing something because you can’t see it. It’s antiscientific. It’s anti-intellectual.”
One of the best things about this article is the author. It’s rare to find an article distributed by the Associated Press with much content. Brian Bergstein has been onboard AP as a sci-tech writer for about five years — absent a spell as an MIT Knight Fellow. An honor he shares with Jeff Tollefson, science writer for one of the newspapers where this article was featured, today — the Santa Fe NEW MEXICAN.
You can read samples of Bergstein’s writing here and here and here.
I wonder how long he’ll last with AP?
Back in the eary 80s I worked on a solar energy project at Texas Intruments led by Jack Kilbey. Yes That jack Kilbey! It was funded by the DOE and had it continued, we would be much less dependant on fossil fuels. The project used solar energy to break down an electrolyte (not water). The hydrogen was stored in a Nickle Metal hydride storage system. The electrolytes were recombined in a fuel cell when power was required. So it sounds very much like the above system. The government was so short sighted that as soon as oil prices dropped, so was our funding. We never learn.. Oil over 63$ a barrel today!
All this is, of course, is a method for storing solar power; it would seem that regular solar panels would be more efficient (which isn’t saying much).
We’ll see, but it seems like this kind of thing is always ’20 years’ away.