With Artificial Photosynthesis, A Bottle of Water Could Produce Enough Energy To Power A House



One of the interesting side effects of last year's stimulus bill was $400 million in funding for ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. And in this week's first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he put that stimulus money to use by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.

Like organic photosynthesis, Nocera's reaction uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and energy. However, whereas plants create energy in the form of sugars, this process creates energy in the form of free hydrogen. That hydrogen can either be recombined with the oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity, or converted into a liquid fuel.

In about four hours, water treated with Nocera's catalyst can produce 30 kilowatt-hours of energy. Moreover, the process is cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Nocera has no problem envisioning a day when each house generates its own fuel and electricity from photosynthesis.

Very cool....but....this seems to good to be true. Where is the MSM on this? Somehow I think this is bogus.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

It's pretty interesting. Storage of hydrogen isn't necessarily something I'd want next to every house, but this is attractive for many reasons.

Embarassing. On so many levels, including the latter scene with the tanks of gas, you could see "rogen" on their labels...those would be NITROGEN!

Oh, and we already know we can split water using sunlight and photovoltaics. That's nothing new. What's so special about this? This video was sorely lacking in anything of value, like the relative efficiency and cost of his method versus existing ones.

When we consider DOE's budget is about $25B this year, including over $300M for NREL, why is this just getting on the gov't radar? It's not actually. The previous work was funded under NSF money, w/ some assistance from DoD. So why do we need "ARPA-E"? Why did we need "stimulus" money for this?

Furthermore, this guy got private funding as well. So why was public money needed? And when will that get paid back, anyway?

More propaganda from the gov't to convince people they'll solve all of our problems. I've spent many years looking at photocatalysts, I hope this guy succeeds in making something great, but it's not new. And nothing in this little production convinced me that we need ARPA-E or increased gov't spending.

The relevant words,

"If the process can scale up"

There are only about a million different alternatives right now that are all waiting on that same "if."
Scale, infrastructure, price--the big three hurdles for virtually all alternatives.
We do have alternatives for "energy"; what we don't really have is alternatives for OIL. It's more versatile, more flexible, easier to use, and more powerful than just about anything else. And nothing in the current energy "plan" is really addressing this.

I felt the same thing, just more propaganda, but the MSM has really stayed away from this, so I questioned the "stimulus" value. If people could get independent of the grid, it would be transformative, it could spark a whole new era of innovation. The grid could concentrate on commercial and we could sell the TECH to the world. It could buy down the debt if we could get gov't to tack a royalty fee for R&D. Glad to see you guys finally picked up on this thread. LOL

Thanks for the post Sum. Neat.