Titled 'Artificial Leaf Promises New Form of Sustainable Energy' my curiosity obligated me to read.
After, I felt like I had just sat through a slightly different version of the same lecture I heard Tuesday. In class Dr. Bertman emphasized that the sun is ultimately the source of all our energy; past, present, and future. As in the past, since the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, presently we harness the sun's energy through the use of fossil fuels. One way I like to refer to these fossil fuels are as ancient pockets of 'trapped sun'. Ten-million years worth of accumulated, stored energy that humans burn in a blink of an eye. It has become apparent these fossil fuel reserves are on their way to extinction.
So the next logical question is how else can we harness the sun's energy? Most people would answer with an already emerging market sector in solar panels. However true, why not bring it back to the basics. Long before any animal crawled this Earth life still flourished with plant life. All species of plants posses the very common and very unique process of photosynthesis, their harnessing of the sun as energy.
" Sunlight + water = fuel. So what does that mean ? "
This is exactly what Dr. Daniel Nocera has done at MIT and Sun Catalytix. The first artificial leaf was created a decade prior by John Turner of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. However, it was made of very rare/expensive metals and only lasted one day. Dr. Nocera's leaf is made of widely available materials (nickel and cobalt) which makes it relatively inexpensive. It runs 10 times more efficient then natural photosynthesis, with a fourty-five hour lifespan.
It works by splitting water molecules into their separate elemental foundations of oxygen and hydrogen. This takes place when the artificial leaf is placed in a gallon of water under bringht sunlight. Hydrogen is then stored in fuel cells for later use.
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